Why was Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai sent back into the cave?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau explains that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was sent back because, after twelve years of pure Torah in the cave, he could not see the holiness in ordinary life. When he came out and saw people farming and working, his eyes burned the world, and a voice from heaven told him to go back, because he was going to destroy the world.
His mistake, Rabbi Landau teaches, was thinking that holiness lived only in the cave. He asked how people could be busy with plowing and planting when there was holiness to chase. But “Hashem didn’t ask for the cave. He asked for the field, the marketplace, the kitchen, the struggle, the daily life.”
He returned for twelve more months. When he came out the second time, he no longer burned; he could free the whole world from judgment. The difference was that “now he understood that to Hashem, the regular life was never less holy than the cave.”
Related concepts: Spirituality · Growth
In A Soul at Peace: Go Back to Your Cave
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was sent back because his holiness could not yet see value in ordinary life.
What may be behind it
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that the twelve more months were not a punishment but a lesson, teaching his eyes to see what they had not seen before.
Deepest human truth
The cave gave him the power to see holiness in the field, but the purpose was always the field.
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Faith, Providence, and the Jewish Destiny · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz