שמעיה

Shemaya, nasi of the Sanhedrin in the closing generations of Bayit Sheni, stands together with Avtalyon as the fourth of the zugot — Shemaya at the head as nasi, Avtalyon as av beit din. The chain in Avot has the two of them receiving from Shimon ben Shetach, and Hillel HaZaken, their contemporary, sat regularly at their lectures and called them the two great men of the generation, rebuking the Bnei Beteira for not having served them properly. They were themselves gerim, or the children of gerim, and the Gemara brings a tradition that they descended from Sancheriv king of Ashur. How the people held them may be seen from the incident of the Kohen Gadol who was being escorted home from the Beit HaMikdash at the close of Yom Kippur: as the two chachamim drew near, the crowd left the Kohen Gadol and walked after them. The Midrash HaGadol has the story in another form, in which the Kohen Gadol himself said of the pair that they act as Aharon acted.

One episode of his public life has come down. Herod, called before the Sanhedrin on a capital charge, presented himself in royal purple, and the members of the court lost their nerve. Shemaya alone spoke: a man who comes to trial dressed to threaten his judges, he said, is less to blame than the court that tolerates it — and the king before whom you now tremble will one day hand you over to the executioner.

Almost nothing of his halachah stands by itself; nearly all of it is brought together with Avtalyon. In the machloket of the zugot over semichah on Yom Tov, Shemaya held that one does lean. Testimony was given in the name of the two of them that a wild creature nesting in an orchard must be designated before Yom Tov, and that three lugin of drawn water invalidate a mikveh — this last brought by two weavers from the Dung Gate of Yerushalayim. Rabbi Yehuda ben Durtai, who withdrew with his son to the south, marveled aloud at these two great darshanim who did not teach Israel that the chagigah pushes aside Shabbat.

His best-known words are his mishnah in Avot: love work, hate lordship, and do not make yourself known to the authorities — the last understood by the mefarshim against the background of the house of Herod. The Bartenura writes on it that even a man with means to support himself must busy himself with melachah, since idleness unsettles the mind. Rav Shmuel bar Shimshon, who toured Eretz Yisrael early in the thirteenth century, described the graves of Shemaya and Avtalyon at Gush Chalav in the Galil, and travelers after him — among them Menachem of Chevron and Ishtori HaParchi — wrote of them as well; the small structure with its double sarcophagus stands by the entrance to the village.