Rabbi Meir רבי מאיר
Tanna, foremost student of Rabbi Akiva, the anonymous voice of the Mishnah
Rabbi Meir studied under Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael, and by tradition also under Elisha ben Avuya, the teacher who left the faith and whom the Talmud calls simply "Acher", the Other. Rabbi Meir did not abandon him: "he found a pomegranate, ate the inside and threw away the peel"—a formula for how to receive wisdom from a flawed source.
He earned his living as a scribe, and his copying was famously exact. His lasting work, though, was the ordered oral tradition of law: when Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi compiled the Mishnah he built on Rabbi Meir's arrangement, which is why an unattributed Mishnah is assumed to be his.
The law is not decided according to him—not because he erred, but because "his colleagues could not reach the bottom of his reasoning". His wife Bruriah is the one woman in the Talmud whose halakhic opinions stand beside those of the sages. After the Bar Kokhba revolt he was among those who restored the Sanhedrin at Usha.
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Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Eruvin 13b — the law does not follow him: his contemporaries could not fathom his depth
- Sanhedrin 86a — “an anonymous mishnah is Rabbi Meir”
- Chagigah 15a–15b — he learned from Acher: “he ate the fruit and threw away the peel”
- Avot deRabbi Natan — his sayings and his character
Basis: accounts differ.