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You're listening to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe of TORCH in Houston, Texas. This is the Thinking Talmudist Podcast.
Welcome back. Good afternoon, everybody, to the Thinking Talmudist Podcast. It is so wonderful to be here this Friday afternoon. Thank you, Chef Ed, for the delicious pizza. We are on 23B in Tractate, Tannis. And the Talmud here is continuing. If you remember, the past two weeks we spoke about Choni HaMe'agel, Choni and the Circle Maker, and how he brought rain down to the world when the world needed it.
Now the Talmud is going to talk about his grandson. The Talmud says as follows. Chonon HaNechba, he was called Hanan the Hidden. Bar Berate Dechoni HaMe'agel Hava, he was the son of the daughter of Choni the Circle Maker. Ki Mitzrach Avalon Mitra, when the world needed the rain, Havo Mishadrei Rabonon Yenuka Debei Rav Legabei. They would send the schoolchildren to him and ask him to pray for the rain. And they would grasp him by the hem of his garments.
They would say to him, Father, Father, give us rain. Umar Elfenai HaKadosh Baruch Hu, he would turn to the Almighty and say, God, Rabonon Shalom, Master of the Universe, Asei Bishol Eilu, bring us rain, send rain for the sake of these children. She'in Ma'kiren Ubein Abba Dei Yohev Mitra, El Abba Dei Eloi Yohev Mitra, because they don't know the difference between a father who gives rain and the father who doesn't give rain. They think I'm the father who gives rain.
I'm not the father who gives rain. It's you. You give rain. So please bring rain on their behalf. The Gemara explains the origin of his name. Why was his name called Hanan the Hidden? Because he used to conceal himself in the privy, in the restroom. He was careful not to expose himself unnecessarily. Okay, now the Gemara continues. The Gemara now contrasts the very different ways in which the righteous men of Israel, of Eretz Yisrael, and those of Babylonia, prayed for rain.
What is the difference between those righteous ones of the land of Israel and the pious ones of Babylonia? When the world needed rain, what would they do? They would say, let us gather together and pray for mercy. What do you do when you're in need? Pray. Perhaps we will have the Almighty accept our prayers. And the rains should come. And what would happen? It would rain. That's the beauty of prayer. God listens. God listens.
There's the advertisements for some Christian radio thing, right? They have the God listens. It's true, not only on the radio. It's everywhere. God listens. Okay, you don't need to listen to Christian radio for that. On the other hand, Tz'kifi de'ar de'israel, the sages of the land of Israel, who were they? Reb Yonah, the father of Reb Mani. When the world needed rain, what would he do? He would go to his house and he would say to his family, Give me a sack.
And let me go and bring some grain for Azuz. Azuz was a lot of money to spend on some grain. And the inflated price was the result of the drought. And Reb Yonah used this pretext to going out and buying food to hide, even from his family, that he was going out to pray for rain. He would use this as like, I'm going out to buy food. Look how expensive it is. But really, he was going out into the fields to pray.
Kihav anofik libra, when he would go outside, he would go and stand in a very deep place to pray. D'chisiv, because the verse states in Psalms, from the depths, I will call you Hashem. So he would go into like a pit or into like a low place. And he would stand in a secluded place. And he would cover himself with sackcloth and he would pray for mercy. And the rains would come. When he would come back home, Amrile, his family members would say,
Did the master bring any grain? Did you bring grain? You went out to go buy grain. You took some money with you. But did you actually secure the grain? He said, I would say to them, to the family, I said to myself that since the rain has come, the world is now relieved. And therefore, I don't need to buy it now. I can just wait. And the prices are going to go down soon. So why should I buy it when it's high?
Buy it when it's on sale. Because now the rain has come. So let's understand a little bit of what's going on here in this story. Firstly, what's he hiding? What's he hiding? Why does he need to hide when you're praying? You're praying for the people. So there is, I think, a sense of humility that we can learn from this. That perhaps what he's doing here is showing a humility where he doesn't want people to know
that it was his prayers that brought about the rain. Because imagine, oh, you need me? Let me get this straight. So you need, the world needs rain, huh? Okay. Let me get my prayers going. Exactly. You know, let me get my prayers going. No, no, no. He wanted it to be also, humility is a very, very important function of prayer. It's very, very important for a person. What do we do when we pray? Essentially, what is prayer? A prayer is me recognizing my limitations
and realizing God's unlimited powers. What I'm doing is, I'm saying, God, I'm turning to you because I've got no answers. I don't know what to do here. You do. I don't have a way for me to be wiser, but you do. I don't have a way to heal, but you do. I don't know how to provide livelihood, but you do. God, I don't know how to restore judgment. God, I don't know how to build Jerusalem. I don't know how to bring about redemption.
God, I don't know how to get my prayers answered, but listen to our prayers. This is what prayer is about. Prayer is about recognizing our limitations, where we stop and God begins, so to speak. Whereas God, this is out of my hands. I have no power, no ability. What is the first thing we do in the Amidah? We bend our knees, we bow down, and we say, Hashem, we have no power. The greatest strength one has physically is when you're standing upright,
you're all strong, you're in the UFC ring, and you're ready to fight. You're standing uptight, right? You don't bow down. He'll knock you right over. That's the position of weakness. We're showing Hashem we're weak. Hashem, we don't have strength. We don't have ability. We don't have power. We don't have the answers. You do, and we're turning to you for the answers. We're turning to you for this success. We're turning to you. We need water. We need rain. We need
sustenance. Hashem, you're the one who can provide it, not me. So by Him going out with such humility was appropriate. That's what prayer is. Prayer means I don't have the answers, but He's afraid that the family's going to start saying, oh, you know, He's a famous... But just by the way, how did the sages know the story if He kept it private? You ever wonder that? How did they know the story to write it down here in the Talmud? The answer is, when Hashem wants the story to
get out, Hashem gets it out because we need to learn something from it. We need to learn. It's important for us to learn from these stories. The Talmud is not just saying a tale. There's something for us to take out of this, for us to learn what it means to really pray, where we have no answers. I don't know where the rain is going to come from. I don't have the power to make it rain, but you know what? I do have the power
to humble myself and allow God to run His world the way He runs His world, with such miracles, with such incredible gifts, with incredible bounty. The Gemara now relates a story about Reb Mani, the son of Reb Yonah, and this too demonstrates the great power of prayer possessed by the righteous men of Eretz Yisrael, of the land of Israel. And moreover, Reb Mani, his son, he was being harassed by members of the court of the Nasi, of the leader of the Jewish people.
So what did he do? He prostrated himself on the grave of his father. He says, father, father, these people are harassing me. One day, some of them were passing over the place, meaning where his father's grave was, where his father was buried. And the legs of their horses became rooted to their place. They got locked in. They became paralyzed. Until they accepted upon themselves not to harass Reb Mani anymore. All right, this is a friend of mine. I don't know why I'm remembering this story,
but I think it's a great story. He's today the chief rabbi of Belarus, but he's a very, very powerful personality, great, great person, dear friend. Dear friend. And when he was in school, someone played a prank. And for some reason, they blamed him for it and they suspended him. So they called him back the next day and they said, we want you to stand up in front of the class and we want you to apologize. And he didn't do it. So he stood up and he said,
the principal's there, the teacher's there, you know, everyone, the head of school is there. He said, I didn't do it. And I am, if the child who did do it doesn't admit that he did it here, I'm going to curse him that he breaks his leg. And the next day, a kid came to school with a broken leg in a cast and they asked the kid, did you do it? He says, yes, I did. So don't mess.
Okay. But, but I think it's, it's an important, it's an important tale for us to, to understand the power of not harming someone else. This whole world of bullying is a terrible thing. And one of my children, I once was informed that he had on email with the class chat, they were bullying one of the kids. And I sat with my son. I explained to him why this is a terrible thing. This is not the way the Torah wants us to act.
And you're never going to do this again, ever. He says, but it wasn't really me. I said, I don't care. Did you stand up for him? No. So you're part of it. And we did some research on bullying. I called back the principal and I said, tomorrow, my son wants to make a presentation in front of the class about the dangers and the harms of bullying. And he did. I was there. And my son spoke in front of the entire class about,
because he was right at the early days of, you know, all of this stuff. I wanted to stop it right away. This is not the way we act. This is not the way we treat somebody. Someone's a little bit different. So what? You're also a little bit different. We're all a little bit different. Just because someone's not like us doesn't mean they're less, doesn't mean they don't have feelings. They don't have emotions. They sure do. So it's important for us to care for somebody
else's wellbeing. The Gemara relates another story about Rav Mani. And moreover, Rav Mani used to attend the lectures of Rav Yitzchak, the son of Rav Yashiv. Once Rav Mani said to him, the rich members of my father-in-law's household, they harassed me. Rav Yitzchak said, let them become poor. And indeed they became poor. After a while, Rav Mani came back to him and said, they now pressed me to support them. They're pushing me to give them money. Rav Yitzchak said, let them become rich again. And they became wealthy again.
On a different occasion, Rav Mani came to Rav Yitzchak for help with another problem. With another problem, Rav Mani said, the people of my household, my wife is not satisfied with me. Rav Yitzchak said to him, what's her name? Chano. He said, her name is Chano. He said, so Rav Yitzchak decreed that she should become beautiful. Let Chano become beautiful. And she became beautiful. Later Rav Mani returned and said, she's become overbearing for me. He said,
if so, let Chano revert back to her plainness. And she returned to her plainness. The Gemara relates, so what's the idea? What's really going on here? What's the point of the story? Prayers work. Prayers work. I had a woman in the class here who told me there was another person in the class who insulted her very, very harshly. This is many years back, at least a decade ago. So I said to her, so what do you want? She's like, I can't come back. He embarrassed me
so badly. He was so harsh and so cruel to me. In front of other people, I'm embarrassed to come back to the class. What should I do? I said, pray for him. Pray for him. Pray that he should understand the mistake he made. Pray that you should have the ability to have mercy on such a person. But she did. Came back to me the next week. She said, I can't wait to see him. Can't wait.
I've grown a love for the person. We can change the reality in our world with prayer. There's the Talmud now continues in the Gemara. The Talmud says that there was a subsequent request that was made of Rabbi Yitzchak ben El Yashiv. Hanu, Tre, Talmud, there were two students, the Havokamei of Rabbi Yitzchak ben El Yashiv, who studied with Rabbi Yitzchak, the son of El Yashiv. Amorlei, they said to him, Can you pray for mercy that we become very, very wise?
The power to decree was once with me, but it has already departed. All right, my prayers are not answered as much as they used to be, says Rashi. However, others explain that I have banished it. He let go of it. Not that it was taken away, but that he get. Rabbi Yitzchak ben El Yashiv regretted having troubled G-d to change the nature of things so as to make a rich person poor and then reverse it and an ugly person
beautiful and reverse it. He thus accepted upon himself not to do this anymore. Accordingly, the story that follows of how Rabi Yosef ben Eucharist was disturbed when his son prayed for the laws of nature to be altered is a proper sequel to the story. And that's the story we're going to see now. Amorlei, it's an interesting incident between Rabi Yosef ben Eucharist. Rabi Yosef was attending the lectures of Rabi Yosef from Eucharist. He left him and went to go study Torah by Rav Ashi. Anybody know who Rav Ashi was?
So the Talmud was written by two people, Ravina and Rav Ashi. Both of them wrote the Talmud together. The Rambam brings only Ravina down when he talks about the Talmud being compiled, but we know from tradition that it was Ravina and Rav Ashi. So now it continues, Yom HaChadosh HaMikah. One day Rav Yosef ben Eucharist heard Rav Ashi reciting the following teaching, Amor Shmuel said, One who fishes a fish from the sea on Shabbos, one who takes a fish from
the sea on Shabbos, as soon as there is a dry spot on it as large as a cellar, which is probably about this size, Chayav, the fisherman, is then liable for desecrating the Shabbos. Amor Ley, because we know we're not allowed to fish on Shabbos, what does it mean to fish on Shabbos? There's two prohibitions. Number one is you can't kill on Shabbos, and number two is you can't trap on Shabbos. Two different prohibitions. Now what's the Senate, what's the, what was needed in the Temple in order to trap?
In order, what were these tasks in the Temple that are forbidden on Shabbos? So they needed hides from an animal for the different drapes that they were using, and anything that was part of the construction of the tabernacle was prohibited to do on Shabbos. So what did they need to do? They needed to trap an animal, they needed to slaughter it, they needed to cut it up and then skin it and do whatever else was necessary to get the hides.
All of that process, trapping it. So if you find a spider, I hate spiders, but if you find a spider or a bug on Shabbos and you take a cup and you put the cup upside down on it because you don't want to kill it, you want to take it outside, you just trapped it. That's a biblical prohibition on Shabbos, right? It's a biblical prohibition on Shabbos. So now you grabbed a fish, you trapped it, that's a biblical prohibition. You killed it, biblical prohibition, okay.
Chayof, so he's liable, the fisherman is liable for desecrating the Shabbos. Amalureb Yosefer Ovin said to him, Let the master add to this ruling and between its fins, that the dry spot must be between the fins of the fish to make him liable. Why? Okay, so over here, the notes on the bottom here brings from the commentaries, killing a living animal on Shabbos is a prohibition, a forbidden malacha, under the category of slaughtering. One who does so inadvertently, not realizing
that it is forbidden and that it was the day, or that it was the day of Shabbos, must bring a sin offering, offering of atonement. The ruling quoted by Rav Ashi teaches that if a person took a fish out of the water and left it out until the spot of the size of a cell had dried on its skin, he is liable of the karbon chatos, even if we do not see the fish, if we do not see the fish die,
even if it throws itself back in the water while it is still alive. Once this much of the fish has dried, the fish will die. Okay, so Amr Ali Rav Ashi said to him, He says, and the master is not, and is the master not of the opinion that Rav Yossi Bar-Avin was the one who stated this? He says, I am he, it's me, I'm the one who said it. Right, Amr Ali Rav Ashi said to him,
But did the master not regularly attend the sessions of Rav Yossi of Yukras? Wasn't that your rabbi? Yes, indeed. Amr Ali Rav Ashi said to him, Why did you leave him and come here to learn here? A man who takes no pity of his own son and daughter, how can I expect for him to have pity on me? So Rav Ashi here is employing criticism on Rav Yossi Bar-Avin for not crediting this comment to the one who originally made it. The
sages teach that one who repeats a comment in the name of its author brings redemption to the world. Rav Ashi was obviously not aware of the identity of the questioner. So what happened to his son and daughter? Their Rav Yossi Bar-Yukras wasn't showing proper care for, no pity. So bere maihi, what was the story that happened to his son? Hired workers to work for him in the field. The evening came upon them and he didn't bring them bread to eat for the workers. He said to his son,
We are hungry. They were sitting at that time under the fig tree that was not in season. The son said, Bring forth your fruit. The workers of my father will have something to eat. It brought forth its fruit and the workers ate. In the meantime, the father arrived with the food. And he said to them, Do not harbor doubts against me for not bringing food sooner. Because the reason I was delayed until evening, I was busy with the mitzvah.
And it took until now to come. The worker said to him, May God satisfy you the way your son satisfied us. He gave you food. They said, the story of what happened with the son that he prayed that the fig tree bring out its fruit. The father said to his son, He said, my son, you troubled the creator to make the fig tree bring forth its fruit. Not in its time.
Let that person, referring to his son, be taken from the world when it is not yet his time. The Gemara now relates what happened to the daughter of Ebi Yosef ben Yukras. What happened to her? She was a very beautiful girl. One day he observed a certain man, Making a hole in the fence. And he was looking at her. What are you doing? Right? What are you doing? If I don't merit to marry her, Should I at least not merit to glimpse at her?
At least let me look at her. Omar law, Rabi Yosef said to her, You're causing anguish to people. Return to the state of dust. And mankind not sin on account of you. Okay, it's a crazy story, right? So clearly, I don't have any ability. We don't have any ability to speak about one of the Tanaic sages, Amoreic sages of yore. Right? They were very, very, very incredibly holy, righteous people. But there's something to learn here. What's it to learn here?
Never talk like that. Because God might just listen to you. Right? You've heard people say, Oh, God, kill me. You've heard someone say that before, right? Heaven forbid. Talmud says, Never open up your mouth to the Satan. Don't give him an opening. Don't give him an opening to say, God, you heard what they requested. Let's just do it. Why not? Never. Don't give an opening.
My father used to tell us a story of someone who lived in his little town, his village where he grew up in Beryakov. There weren't many people living. Today, it's a big city. It's a booming city. But there was a man who'd go. He had one of those government jobs. He'd leave every morning at a certain time and come back, take the train at a specific time, come back. He was like clockwork. One day he ran out. He ran back home.
He needed the bathroom. He ran back out, ran back home. And then like this happened a couple of times. He had a really bad stomach ache. His wife says, What's going on? He says, Don't worry. This time I'm going. I'm not coming back. He never came back. Had an accident and died. My father was always like, Got to be so careful about the words we use. We have to be so careful. Make sure that they're always positive.
Make sure that they're always uplifting. Make sure that they're always good. Because the same power for the good to happen will happen. We mentioned so many times. Just previously we talked about how important it is for us to be cautious to speak positive because then everything around you will be positive. If we speak negative, it becomes negative. Here the Talmud is telling us stories of unbelievable things. I mean, terrible things that happen as well. Great things with regard to the rain.
But terrible things regarding Rabi Yosef Ben-Yuchras' children. Really, really catastrophic things. Because of words that were used. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable power. So now the Gemara is going to say one more story about from Rabi Yosef Ben-Yuchras. So Rabi Yosef had a donkey. When people would rent it each day. People would rent the donkey per day. It's like renting a car, renting a truck. The first moving like, you know, rent a U-Haul. Right? This was rent a Yosef's donkey.
In the evening they would send back the payment on its back. And it would come back to its master's home. So it knew exactly where to go back home and it would come back home. However, if they overpaid the rental or underpaid it, it wouldn't come. It wouldn't move. The donkey wouldn't move. Excuse me. One day the pair of sandals were forgotten on the donkey. And it did not move until they were removed from it. And then it went back home. So what's the meaning?
What do we learn from this? And why is the Talmud telling us this story? So this can give a lot of explanation to the whole world of Rabi Yosef Ben-Yuchras. See, he was probably a very exacting person. Very exact. And he trained his animal exact. And he trained his children to be exact. There are some people who have like everything needs to be organized and everything. Some people think it's okay. Raham and mercy, it's okay. It's whatever. It's fine. Like Avram Avino.
He's like, okay, I have a Yitzhak and I have a Yishmael. Right? Sarah was like, no, no, get him out of here. He's a bad influence. Avram didn't. Why didn't Avram say that? Because he was a different type of personality. Okay. I'll teach my son to have a better, to not be influenced by them. There's different ways to approach this. Clearly, we see from this story that Rabi Yosef Ben-Yuchras was a much more exacting person. Whereas even his animal learned from it.
Our animals learn from us, by the way. They say that if you look at a person, you'll understand their animals, their dogs or their cats. And you look at their animals, you'll be able to understand the person. Because they learn from that. His donkey acted the way he acted. In a very exacting way. A measure for measure type. And perhaps that's why he spoke like that about his children. My dear friends, this concludes today's Thinking Talmudist episode. And I look forward to continuing our studies.
God willing, Sunday morning, bright and early. Have a magnificent Shabbos.
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