הרב בר קפרא

Bar Kappara — Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Elazar HaKappar, from whose father he took his name — was a chacham of the generation that bridged the tannaim and the amoraim, a talmid of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi and a first-generation amora. He was a gifted poet and teller of parables. At the wedding feast of Shimon, Rebbi’s son, he held the guests spellbound with a great number of fox fables, until the dishes went cold before them untouched — his answer to having at first been left off the invitation.

His sharp, satirical wit set him at odds with Rebbi and cost him semichah: when he belittled the Nasi by a riddle before Rebbi’s son, Rebbi resolved never to grant him ordination. Yet his devotion to his rebbe was real, and it was Bar Kappara who proclaimed Rebbi’s passing to the people of Tzippori, saying that mortals and angels had long wrestled over the holy Tablets and that the angels had prevailed and seized them. His conflicts with the Nasi drew him from the Galil to Caesarea, where the academy he founded became a rival to Rebbi’s own; among those close to it were Hoshaiah Rabbah and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, who carried much of Bar Kappara’s aggadah forward.

He arranged a collection of mishnayot known as the Mishnah of Bar Kappara, a supplement to the Mishnah of Rebbi that explained it and at times differed from it; the work itself has not survived, though many of its passages entered the Talmud. He valued the study of astronomy and the calculation of the seasons, and held that a Jew who reads two portions of Torah each day — one at morning and one at evening, fulfills the mitzvah to meditate in it day and night. His words on the ketoret are said each day — three times by Sephardim, twice among Chasidim, and once by Ashkenazim.