Avot261

And here Rabbi Yoĥanan adds the teaching which was the subject of the discussion. Rabbi Yoĥanan was born around the year 180 CE so this incident must have taken place around the year 185 CE. Since the Bet Midrash in question is the Bet Midrash in Tiberias that town must have been the hometown of Rabbi Shim'on ben-El'azar.

2:
Another fact which helps us date Rabbi Shim'on ben-El'azar is the fact that he was a star pupil of Rabbi Me'ir. Since he lived with his teacher during his studentship he learned many halakhot taught by the great man but not known inside the Bet Midrash. Rabbi Me'ir lived to a ripe old age, and Rabbi Shim'on ben-El'azar must have studied with Rabbi Me'ir during the latter part of his life. The great sage was old and frail and so Rabbi Shim'on ben-El'azar accompanied him on his travels at that time and was thus able to pass on rulings made by Rabbi Me'ir in sometimes rather extraordinary circumstances.

3:
Like Rabbi Ya'akov of the previous mishnah he is not mentioned very often in the Mishnah: I have found only seven mishnayot in which he is quoted, apart from our present mishnah. But he is mentioned many times in baraitot: almost sixty times in the Tosefta, 280 times in the Babylonian Talmud and 99 times in the Talmud of Eretz-Israel.

4:
He is also an accomplished master of aggadah. His aggadic teachings often show great sagacity combined with a simple, almost childlike, faith:

A kindly understanding of human nature is perhaps reflected in another teaching of his to be found in the Gemara [Sotah 47a]:

To be continued.

In Avot 255 I quoted the second paragraph of the Shema with all its problematica concerning reward and punishment. Yehuda Wiesen poses a very difficult question:

In your opinion, is the Kushnerite view, basically that bad things happen to good people due to the random nature of the world, a legitimate Jewish view?

I respond:

I must assume that Yehuda is referring to the book "When Bad Things Happen To Good People" by Rabbi Harold Kushner. This subject is "longer than the earth and wider than the sea" [Job 11:9] and it is very difficult to give a satisfactory answer in the small space afforded by our discussion section. Certainly the world appears to be random: bad things do happen to good people and good things do happen to bad people. I have tried to deal with the subject at greater length in my essay on "Theodicy" in the Hashkafah series of the Bet Midrash Virtuali. You can access this essay here.

I mention there Rambam's triple categorization of the causes of suffering:

• Suffering we inflict on ourselves (by smoking, over-eating etc)
• Suffering we inflict on others (by war and other acts of violence etc)
• Suffering caused because we are part of nature itself. Please read in particular the paragraph in the essay that begins "When the human race starts to mature into God's universe".

This is a very important topic but unfortunately this is not an appropriate framework for discussing it.