Who Was Shimon Bar Yochai?

Word of his anti-Roman sentiments reached the attention of the Roman governor who sentenced Shimon to death.

Shimon fled for his life and, for thirteen years, he and his son, Eleazer, hid in a cave near Gadera, surviving on a diet of dates and carob fruit. Apparently, they were other Jews hiding in this remote spot. Shimon watched a bird escape the net of another Jew and fly away. He looked on this as an omen to leave and, as they left, so tradition says, he heard a voice saying, “You are free!”

He discovered that Hadrian had died. He made his way north to Tiberias by the western waters of the Sea of Galilee where he soaked his body which had become festered with infections and disease from a decade and more of cave living.

In Tiberias, Shimon found the people had turned away from Jewish learning to spend their time totally dedicated to labor and work. He chastised them and undertook the spiritual purification of the people of the Galilee by teaching them the Torah and the words of the Jewish sages. He established schools of learning and study.

In the later stages of his life, he journeyed to Rome to plead with the Roman emperor to lift the abolition of the Jews to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath and their holy festivals.

It is said that the emperor’s daughter was suffering from bad spirits. Some said she was possessed by demons. Shimon Bar Yochai cured the daughter and was rewarded by the emperor for his miracle by taking him to his treasury and invited him to take whatever he wanted. Instead of taking gold and jewelry, Shimon found the scrolls on which the anti-Jewish decree was written and tore them up in front of the emperor.

Shimon Ben Yochai returned to the Galilee and dedicated the rest of his life to biblical study and teaching. He declared that not even prayer should interrupt the study of the holy Torah. He was a voice for the spirit of repentance, saying that, “So great is the power of repentance that a man who has been wicked his whole life if he repented before the end is considered a perfectly righteous man.”

He declared that snobbery or a superior attitude to others is like idolatry of self. He raged against the public shaming of a neighbor. “One should rather throw oneself into a burning furnace than shame a neighbor in public.”