רבי שמעון בן מנסיא

Rav Shimon ben Menasya was a tanna of the last generations of the Tannaim, a talmid of Rabbi Meir and a member of the chaburah in Yerushalayim called the Kahala Kadisha, the Holy Community. Together with Rabbi Yose ben Meshullam and their fellows he divided the day into three — a third for Torah, a third for tefillah and a third for melachah — and it was for this that the name attached to them. Sayings of the group are brought in both Talmuds: that one who joins geulah to tefillah comes to no harm the whole day; that even ten mattresses one upon another may not be slept on if kilayim lies beneath them; and that in a leap year both months of Adar are of twenty-nine days.

He is mentioned once in the Mishnah, and further rulings of his are preserved elsewhere. He held that a dayan may urge the parties to a compromise, but once he has heard them out and his mind is settled on the din, he must rule by the letter of the law. On Shabbat he ruled that in a bathhouse one may not pour hot water into cold nor cold into hot. He taught that Megillat Kohelet does not render the hands tamei: Shir HaShirim was given through ruach hakodesh, while Kohelet is the wisdom of Shlomo. On chol hamoed he forbade drawing water from a lower field to irrigate an upper one, as excessive labor.

In aggadah he learned from the words ‘and Hashem built’ that Chava’s hair was braided before she was brought to Adam, so that she find favor in his eyes. From the pasuk in Shemot he taught that the Shabbat is given into your hands and you are not given into the hands of the Shabbat, and from the charge that the children of Yisrael keep the Shabbat — desecrate one Shabbat for a man so that he may keep many. On the pasuk in Tehillim he said that a man cannot be killed every day, yet Hashem reckons the life of tzaddikim as though they gave their lives daily. He was older than Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi and differed with him at times in halachah, yet held him in the highest regard: the seven middot that Chazal counted in tzaddikim, he said, were all of them fulfilled in Rabbi and in his sons.