Rabbi Shimon and the Cave

Yesterday I talked about the story of Rabbi Shimon and the cave. I wanted to talk about that a little.

When he first came out of the cave and he saw some Jews hard at work in the field, and they were so shocked that someone could waste their life on anything other than Torah study. "How could anyone forsake eternal life by indulging in mundane, worldly pursuits?" he said. Rabbi Shimon then cast his gaze upon the farmers -- and they were immediately vaporized, due to the power of Rabbi Shimon's spiritual stature.

At that point, a voice from heaven proclaimed: "My world is not to be destroyed! Return to your cave!"

The question is why did G-d send him back into the cave? Rabbi Shimon’s problem seemed to be that he had studied so much that he was on to high a spiritual level. So why send him back to study more? It would seem that the better solution would have been to send him down to Eilat to “chill” on the beach for a while.

To understand this, let’s look at an unrelated story in the Talmud. The story is told of Rabbi Hillel who had 80 students. The lowest of which was Yochanan ben Zachi (who we know became the leading Rabbi of his time) who was said to have known the entire Torah, Mishna and every bit of Jewish thinking ever taught. The greatest of the students was said to have known all of that, and when he studied, he did it with such intensity that if a bird would fly overhead, it would be consumed by fire.

About 150 years ago, a Chasidic story is told of a student asking his master about this passage about Rabbi Hillel’s students. The student asked his master a simple question. If the student studied with such intensity that a bird would be consumed by fire, how great was Rabbi Hillel?

The answer was that Rabbi Hillel was so great that if a bird would fly overhead while he was studying, absolutely nothing would happen. (I could say that I’m on that level, but that would be missing the point). The lesson here is simple. To be good, you need to know the information, to be great you need intensity, to me a master you need to be able to control that intensity.

So that’s why Rabbi Shimon was send back into the cave, to learn to master his intensity.