רב חנא בר ביזנא

Rav Chana bar Bizna was an amora of Bavel of the second and third generations, who sat as a dayan in Pumbedita. Two of his rulings were set aside by Rav Nachman: when he ruled that orphaned daughters are supported from their father’s movable property, and when he collected the debt of a man who had been niftar from slaves that the man had left to his sons.

Most of his teachings he brings in the name of Rabbi Shimon Chasida, and all of them belong to aggadah — so much so that after he once bested Rav Sheshet in aggadah, Rav Sheshet remarked that where Chana holds aggadah, what is left for him. Among these teachings: that a man should sooner cast himself into a fiery furnace than whiten the face of his fellow in public; that one who withholds a halacha from a talmid is cursed even by the unborn in their mothers’ wombs; that one who davens must see himself as though the Shechinah stands before him, as it says shiviti Hashem l’negdi tamid; and that the fasts of the fourth, fifth, seventh and tenth months are called both fasts and days of gladness — when there is peace they are for joy, and when there is no peace they are fasts. On the words and I shall remove My hand and you shall see My back, he taught in the name of Rabbi Shimon Chasida that the Hakadosh Baruch Hu (Hashem) showed Moshe the knot of the tefillin. On the four craftsmen shown to the navi he taught: Mashiach ben David, Mashiach ben Yosef, Eliyahu, and the Kohen Tzedek. He taught that had the coals not cooled in passing from the hand of the keruv to the hand of Gavriel, no remnant of Israel would have been left.

He also brings the exchange in which Eliezer asked Shem how the animals of the teivah were fed. Shem answered that it was great trouble to them: a creature whose way is to eat by day they fed by day, and one whose way is to eat by night they fed by night. What the chameleon ate his father did not know, until a worm fell from a pomegranate he was cutting and the creature ate it. And the bird called urshina lay tucked in a corner of the teivah and did not eat; when Noach asked why it had not asked for food, it answered that it had seen how hard-pressed he was and did not wish to trouble him — and Noach blessed it that it should never be niftar. He also describes the kinnor that hung above the bed of David HaMelech: at midnight the north wind would blow through it and it would play of itself, and David would rise and learn Torah until the dawn, when the chachamim of Israel would come to him about the parnasah of Klal Yisrael.