רבי יוחנן בן החורני

Rabbi Yochanan ben HaChoroni (רבי יוחנן בן החורני), also written ben HaChoronit and at times simply Rabbi Yochanan HaChoroni, was a tanna of the generation between the Zugot and the tannaim. His name most likely points to Choran in Syria as his own home or that of one of his parents. He was a talmid of Shammai HaZaken, yet in practice he followed Beit Hillel all his life. He was the teacher of Rabbi Elazar b’Rabbi Tzadok.

He is best known from the dispute in masechet Sukkah about a person whose head and most of his body are inside the sukkah while his table stands inside the house. Beit Hillel bring proof that eating this way is permitted from what happened with Rabbi Yochanan HaChoroni: the elders of Beit Shammai and the elders of Beit Hillel came to visit him in his sukkah, found him sitting with his head and most of his body in the sukkah and his table in the house, and said nothing to him. Beit Shammai answer that the elders did speak, telling him that if this was his practice, he had never fulfilled the mitzvah of sukkah in his life.

The Tosefta on Sukkah shows how careful he was in the laws of taharah. Rabbi Elazar b’Rabbi Tzadok tells that while he was learning by him in a year of drought, Rabbi Yochanan ate dry bread. Rabbi Elazar told his father, Rabbi Tzadok, who sent him back with olives. When Rabbi Yochanan saw that the olives were moist, he understood that they had been taken from a barrel full of the liquid that runs out of olives, which according to Beit Hillel counts as oil and makes the olives able to receive tumah. He would not eat them, out of concern that an am haaretz (an unlearned person) had touched the barrel and made the olives tamei.

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