Was Shammai a Hypocrite

 Last sabbath our synagogue had a visiting scholar. It was Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.

One of his talks mentioned Shammai, the Jewish sage who lived from about 60 BCE to about 30 CE.

As, Rabbi Telushkin notes, Shammai is today remembered as something of a grouch. The first two images are near Shammai's grave in Meron (they are both from the site http://www.zissil.com/topics/Shammai-the-Elder. 


The third is a painting of Shammai and Hillel (Hillel was born decades before Shammai and so the painting is a bit unrealistic).

This comes from a famous story from the Babylonian Talmud in tractate Shabbat, folio page 31a. In this story,

"... it happened that a certain heathen came before Shammai and said to him, 'Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.' Thereupon he repulsed him with the builder's cubit which was in his hand.<sup>.."

However chapter one of the Pirkei Avot, a.k.a., "Sayings of the Fathers",  contains the following, " ...</sup> Shammai said...  receive every man with a pleasant expression of countenance."

The advice of pleasant expression and his actions with the heathen seem in conflict but we do not know when these two events took place, it may have been many years apart. Or, it could be that in Avot, Shammai is regretting what he did with the heathen. Alternatively, Shammai may have even received the heathen with a pleasant expression but then got angry.

Anyway, the situation is complicated by the fact that Shammai is quoted many times in both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud.  In most cases, Shammai rules that both positive and negative commandments are to be followed strictly, e.g., he ruled that young children should fast on Yom Kippur on page 77a of the tractate yoma  "They said about Shammai the Elder [HaZaken] that he did not want to feed his children with one hand, to avoid having to wash it. This prevented the children from eating during all of Yom Kippur. Due to concerns about the health and the suffering of his children, they decreed that he must feed them with two hands, forcing him to wash both hands. " ( in this translation, the bold words are those actually in the text, the unbold words are implied). 

Actually, Shammai was not always stricter than Hillel. There were times when he was more lenient and some of these are covered in the Mishna Eduyot   

Anyway, it got me thinking.