Biography
Abba Oshaya of Tirya was a chasid who lived in Eretz Yisrael, apparently in the days of the amoraim. No halachot are brought in his name anywhere in the literature of Chazal; what the Talmud Yerushalmi keeps of him are stories of his piety.
He was a launderer by profession, and he made his own clothing out of a single kind of wool rather than of several sorts, so that no one might suspect him c”v of wearing wool belonging to his customers. Once, while he stood at the river at his work, the queen bathed there and lost her jewelry and her vessels of gold; he found them and brought them back to her. She told him he was free to keep them, since she had finer ones of her own, and he answered that he had returned them because the Torah obligates a Jew to restore a lost object. Taken with him, she said: “Baruch Elokei haYehudim” — blessed is the Lord of the Jews.
At his passing his coffin bier was seen to float in the air, and the people read over him the pasuk “Im yiten ish et kol hon beito ba’ahavah, boz yavuzu lo” (Shir HaShirim 8:7), for the love the Ribbono shel Olam bore him. On that same day a son was born to him, called Rabbi Hoshaya, and over the day itself they read “Vezarach hashemesh uva hashamesh” (Kohelet 1:5). His home was Tirya (Upper Galilee), near Peki’in, and the local tradition marks his kever there.
Where traditions differ. Some identify Abba Oshaya of Tirya with the “Yeshaya ish Tira’ah” described in the Tosefta as a pious launderer, but the chronology raises a difficulty, and some therefore hold these were two different chachamim, one a tanna and one an amora; Rav Zev Wolf Rabinowitz notes the editing of the Tosefta continued through the era of the amoraim, so different explanations can be found.
אבא אושעיא איש טיריא היה אדם חסיד שחי בארץ ישראל, כנראה בתקופת האמוראים.
Abba Hoshaya of Turya was a Jewish wool-washer of the third century, of whose scholarly attainments, although unrecorded in outside historical sources, but whose piety and honesty was noted.
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