הרב לוי בר סיסי

Rav Levi bar Sisi — in the Gemara most often simply “Levi” — was a chacham of Eretz Yisrael in the generation of passage from the Tannaim to the Amoraim, and is counted among both. A close talmid of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, he sat before Rebbi together with Rebbi’s son Rabbi Shimon, and like other chachamim of that generation he arranged his own collection of baraitot, cited a number of times in both Talmuds. In neither Talmud does he carry the title “Rabbi” — which is how one knows that a plain “Levi” means him and not the later Rabbi Levi — and where the Gemara opens a passage with “it was argued before the chachamim,” the meaning is that Levi argued it before Rebbi.

When the people of Simonias in the lower Galil asked Rebbi for a chacham who could serve them as darshan, dayan, chazan, and teacher and see to all the community’s needs, Rebbi gave them Levi and told them, “A man like myself I have given you.” At first the questions put to him went unanswered and the townspeople complained; Rebbi summoned him, asked the very same questions, and Levi answered every one. Why then had he been silent? His courage had failed him. Another episode: Levi and Rabbi Shimon sat before Rebbi and finished a sefer; Levi asked that Mishlei be brought, Rabbi Shimon asked for Tehillim, and Levi was pressed to yield. When they reached the pasuk “ki im beTorat Hashem cheftzo,” Rebbi closed the sefer and taught: a person learns Torah only from the place his heart desires.

The Gemara tells of his tefillot in times of distress. When raiders came against his city he took a sefer Torah to the rooftop and said: Master of the world, if I have annulled one word of this sefer Torah, let them enter; if not, let them go — and they went. In a drought he decreed a fast, spoke hard words heavenward, and rain fell; yet the Gemara says that, great man though he was, he was punished for those words with lameness. A master of parables, he asked Rebbi before Rebbi’s petirah to describe for him the peoples and the chachamim — and of the talmidei chachamim of Bavel, Rebbi answered that they are like the ministering angels.

After the petirot of Rebbi and of Rabbi Afes, when Rabbi Chanina bar Chama came to head the yeshiva, Levi — left without a chavruta of his level — went down to Bavel, where word came to Rav that a “gavra rabbah” had arrived. There he learned with Abba bar Abba, the father of Shmuel, in the ancient beit knesset Shaf VeYativ in Nehardea. He was niftar in Bavel, and Abba bar Abba was his maspid, saying that Levi’s belovedness before HaKadosh Baruch Hu was weighed against all of mankind.