רבי אלעזר ברבי שמעון

Rabbi Elazar ben Rabbi Shimon was a tanna of the fifth generation, the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and a friend and contemporary of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, with whom he learned in his youth before Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Karcha. Already as a young man he was held a great talmid chacham — Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel called him “a lion the son of a lion” — and in the Zohar, where he appears throughout, he stands at his father’s right hand among the chevraya. He married the daughter of Rabbi Shimon ben Yosi.

The defining chapter of his youth was the cave. When the Roman decrees hung a death sentence over his father, the two hid together for some thirteen years — at Pekiin according to some sources, in the region of Lod according to the hakdamah to Tikkunei Zohar — learning Torah the whole time. The Gemara in Shabbat tells that when they first came out, every place they set their eyes upon was burned, and only after a further year in the cave did Rabbi Elazar make peace with the sight of Jews at their ordinary labors — for not all the world can sit in Torah alone.

Years later Rabbi Elazar was appointed by the Roman authorities to catch thieves and bring them to judgment. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Karcha rebuked him bitterly — “vinegar son of wine, how long will you hand the people of Hashem over to the executioner?” — and he answered, “I clear thorns from the vineyard.” In time he came to regret an execution he had caused and accepted painful yissurim upon himself as a kaparah. His wife, worn down by the cost of his illnesses, returned to her father’s house for a time, until a gift borne by seafarers restored his means and he returned to the beit midrash; she stood at his side again at the end.

Before his petirah he feared that chachamim who bore him a grudge over his years in Roman service would not tend properly to his burial, and he charged his wife to keep his body under her roof. For some twenty years it lay in the attic of his house — at Achbara according to the Talmud, at Gush Chalav according to the midrash — and people would bring their disputes to the house and hear the din given from above; the townsmen, crediting the body with guarding them from wild beasts, refused to let it be moved. At last, at the chachamim’s request, men of nearby Birya carried it off on erev Yom Kippur and laid him to rest beside his father. His colleagues applied to him the verse “Who is this coming up from the wilderness like columns of smoke” — master of Mikra and halachah, paytan, baal tefillah, and darshan in one man. Since the end of the twelfth century his kever has been identified beside Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s on Har Meron.