רבי יונתן

Rabbi Yonatan was a tanna of the fourth generation, a kohen, and the lifelong study partner and bar-plugta of Rabbi Yoshiyah. The two grew up together in the beit midrash of Rabbi Yishmael, whose derech in learning — that the Torah speaks in the language of men — they made their own, against the method of Rabbi Akiva, who expounded every seemingly extra letter. It is told that Rabbi Yonatan all but won over Ben Azzai, of Rabbi Akiva’s circle, to Rabbi Yishmael’s system, leaving him crying, “Woe is me that I did not serve Yishmael”; in later years, though, Rabbi Yonatan himself took up some of Rabbi Akiva’s principles.

He appears only once in the Mishnah and once in the Tosefta; his real home is the midrashei halachah of Rabbi Yishmael’s school, with some thirty teachings in the Mechilta and more than forty in the Sifrei on Bamidbar. There he and Rabbi Yoshiyah differ again and again — nearly always over the derash of the pesukim, and only a single time in halachah itself, on the number of inhabitants that make an ir hanidachat. In the days after the Hadrianic gezeirot he set out to leave Eretz Yisrael together with Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira and Rabbi Matya ben Charash; but when they reached the port, his love for the Land overcame him, and they turned back and settled again in Eretz Yisrael.

Among his teachings: eclipses may frighten the nations, he said, citing Yirmiyahu, but they carry no message for Yisrael. Asked whether one may profane Shabbat to save a life, he answered — profane one Shabbat for him, so that he may keep many Shabbatot. An am haaretz, in his definition, is a man who has children and does not raise them to Torah. And against the accepted view that a ben sorer umoreh was never executed and an ir hanidachat never came to be, he testified that he had himself sat on the grave of the one and seen the ruins of the other. He taught also: whoever fulfills the Torah in poverty will in the end fulfill it in wealth, and whoever neglects it in wealth will in the end neglect it in poverty.