May 5 163 – 14 Iyar 3923
According to traditional Jewish sources, Rabbi Meir, author of many of the laws formulated in the Mishna, died on this day, which is also Pesach Sheni (the date assigned in the bible as a second chance for those who were impure on Pesach to bring a paschal lamb to the Temple). The Jerusalem Talmud (Kelaim 9:4) relates that Rabbi Meir specifically asked to be buried next to the Sea of Galilee, though he died in exile.
Many stories are related about Rabbi Meir and his learned wife, Bruriah. He was Rabbi Akiva’s most brilliant student, one of the five replacing the sage’s many thousand disciples who died of plague – or more likely, in the Bar Kokhva uprising against the Romans. He lived through a period of intense persecution in Judea under the Roman Emperor Hadrian, when much of the Jewish population was sold into captivity and the price of a Jewish slave was the equivalent of a day’s horse-feed of straw.
The reason crowds still flock to his grave is the tale of how he saved his sister-in-law from slavery in a brothel in Rome. Told in the Babylonian Talmud (Avoda Zara 18a), it recounts how Rabbi Meir went to Rome disguised as a horseman, interviewed Bruriah’s sister to ensure she was still virtuous, and bribed the guard of the institution to let him escape with her. To the guard’s query as to how, when the gold he’d been paid ran out, he was to make a living with the reputation of a negligent jailer, Rabbi Meir answered that he should pray. “Say “God of Meir, answer me!” and you’ll be answered,” he told the skeptical Roman, then demonstrated the formula’s effectivity by stepping in the way of aggressive dogs. The end of the story is tragic, but the guard is saved from hanging by Rabbi Meir’s formula, and people can still be found at his grave-site, trying it today.