רבי מתיא בן חרש

Rabbi Masya ben Charash was a tanna whose teachings appear across the Mishnah and Gemara. He is closely linked with the city of Rome, where the Gemara records him posing questions to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai — in Meilah he asks how we know that the blood of creeping creatures is impure, and Rabbi Shimon answers from the verse in Vayikra; in Yoma a similar exchange touches on the exiles of the Aron. The beraita in Sanhedrin, expounding “tzedek tzedek tirdof” as a charge to seek out the sages in their places of study, names “Rabbi Masya in Rome” alongside the great academies of the Land of Israel, marking him as the address for Torah in that distant place.

Much of his recorded teaching concerns the saving of life and its precedence over Shabbat. In Yoma he holds that one suffering in his mouth may have medicine placed there on Shabbat, that one bitten by a mad dog may be fed from the lobe of the dog’s liver, and that blood may be let for a throat ailment on Shabbat — rulings the Gemara weighs against the view of the Sages. In Yevamot he appears among the tannaim defining the term “zonah,” stating a stringent view on what renders a woman so.

His best-known words are in Pirkei Avot, where he teaches: be first to greet every person, and be a tail to lions rather than a head to foxes — counsel valued for its humility and its emphasis on derech eretz toward all.