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Yosé ben-Yo'ezer from Tzeredah and Yosé ben-Yoĥanan from Jerusalem received [the tradition] from them. Yosé ben-Yo'ezer from Tzeredah says: Let your house be a meeting place for the sages, get yourself dusty from the dust of their feet, and thirstily drink in their words.
7:
As previously mentioned, Yosé ben-Yo'ezer lived during the period of persecution which preceded the Maccabean uprising, during the first half of the second century BCE. Our mishnah describes him as hailing from the village of Tzeredah, which was in southern Samaria. During his tenure of office he – together with his colleague – made valiant attempts through legislation to preserve the religious and ethnic identity of the Jewish people in the face of encroaching Hellenism. He "decreed uncleanness upon gentile countries and upon glassware" [ Shabbat 14b–15b]. The idea was that declaring all foreign countries to be "unclean" would deter emigration; the uncleanness of glassware seems to have had a possible economic origin. The Mishnah [ Sotah 9:9] looks back on Yosé ben-Yo'ezer as being the last of a golden age of peerless sages.
8:
Yosé ben-Yo'ezer met a martyr's death during the persecution of the Jewish people by Antiochus Epiphanes – a persecution which ultimately caused Mattityahu the Hasmonean to revolt. The story is recounted in a midrash [Bereshit Rabbah 65:22]. Yosé, together with 59 other sages, was sentenced to death by crucifixion (which cruel punishment was not invented by the Romans: they merely inherited it). On the way to his execution his nephew, Yakum [Josephus hellenizes his name into Alcimus] met Yosé. Yakum had persuaded Antiochus to appoint him High Priest so that he could thus further the cause of hellenism among the Jews, and the murder of the sages was an idea that he had proposed to the Syrian general Bacchides. (The fact that Yosé and Yakum were uncle and nephew indicates, of course, that Yosé also was of priestly stock.) Yakum, seated regally upon a horse even though it was Shabbat, jeered at Yosé that he, Yakum, was riding one kind of horse while Yosé was riding a very different kind of horse (a cross).
Yosé retorted that if Yakum was thus rewarded by God imagine what a reward awaits those that do His will. Yakum replied, "Has any man done God's will more than you?" Yosé responded, "If this is how He reacts towards those who do His will, imagine how he will react to those who don't!"
The Midrash concludes by relating that Yakum was filled with remorse at these words and went off to commit suicide. However, the First Book of Maccabees [9:55-56] gives a different account of Yakum's end:
Even at that time was Alcimus plagued, and his enterprises hindered: for his mouth was stopped, and he was taken with a palsy, so that he could no more speak anything, nor give order concerning his house. So Alcimus died at that time with great torment.
As a Victorian moralist might have said: serve him right!
Michael Lewyn asks:
Do we have historical backing for these concepts (dual leadership for the Pharisees, a defection from Sadducees) other than Avot itself?
I respond:
Many of our sources relate that Simon the Righteous was a High Priest – one of the longest-serving high priests at that. It is axiomatic that until his time all high priests were Sadducees; and even after his time almost all of those yet to come in the next 200 or more years were Sadducees too. A quick and not very thorough search yields the following sources which treat of Simon the Righteous as both High Priest and sage. In the Babylonian Talmud: Yoma 9a, 39a-b, 69a; Megillah 11a; Nedarim 9b-10a; Nazir 4b; Menachot 109b. In the Talmud of Eretz-Israel: Shekalim 16b, Yoma 4b, 27a, 33b; Ta'anit 21a; Megillah 26a; Nedarim 3a; Nazir 5a; Sotah 45b. There are, of course, very many more references.
Some of the references I have given above are "doublets"; that is to say that the same material is repeated in different tractates. The two main stories about his tenure are that he was one of the nine high priests throughout Jewish history who performed the ceremony of the Red Heifer. (This ceremony is described in the Torah [Numbers 19] and we covered the topic in some detail when we studied Tractate Yadayyim.) The other story which our sources often repeat is that he predicted his own death because of an experience he had when entering the Holy of Holies in the Bet Mikdash during the last Day of Atonement of his life.
As far as the "zugot" are concerned: the very term itself for this period comes from our classical sources! These five generations of dual leadership are called "the zugot" in many places. One of them [Mishnah Pe'ah 2:6] we met ourselves when we studied Tractate Pe'ah ; other sources include Tosefta Ĥagigah 2:4 and Yadayyim 2:7; Babylonian Talmud Ĥagigah 16b – and so many more that there is no real point in bringing all the sources.
That these "zugot" – Pairs – were a dual leadership is made explicit in the mishnah [Ĥagigah 2:2] which I quoted in part in a previous shiur. Here is the whole mishnah, since it brings the names of all the "zugot" as well as their function. (We shall meet all these personalities later in this chapter of Avot).
Yose ben-Yo'ezer says not to lay hands, Yose ben-Yoĥanan says to do so; Yehoshu'a ben-Peraĥyah says not to lay hands, Nittai the Arbelite says to do so; Yehudah ben-Tabbai says not to lay hands, Shim'on ben-Shataĥ says to do so; Shemayah says to lay hands, Avtalyon says not to; Hillel and Menaĥem did not disagree [on this matter], but Menaĥem left [office] and was replaced by Shammai: Shammai says not to lay hands, Hillel says to do so. The former [in each pair] were the Presidents [of the Sanhedrin] and the latter were Presidents of the Court [- Av Bet Din].
Of course, all those in this list who hold that on a festival hands should not be laid on the head of an animal destined for sacrifice belong to the more aristocratic and conservative branch of the Pharisaic movement while those that hold that this ceremony is permitted are the more "plebeian" and liberal personalities.
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