בית שערים - קסריה

...^{Rabbi Yehuda son of Rabbi Yochanan said: the “Shechina” traveled ten journeyes and in accord so did the “Sanhedrin”; from the “Gazit” chamber, to Hanut, to Jerusalem, to Yavneh, and from Yavneh to Uhsa, and from Usha to Shfaram, from Shfaram to Beit Shearim, to Tzipori and from Tzipori to Tiberius.}

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It once happened that R. Eleazar the son of R. Simeon was coming from Migdal Gedor, from the house of his teacher, and he was riding his donkey by the river and he felt a great happiness and full of himself because he had studied a lot of Torah

A particularly ugly man happened upon him and said to him, Peace be upon you, Rebbi, and he [R. Eleazar) did not respond. He said to him, Good for nothing! How ugly this man is! Are all the people of your city as ugly as you are? The man said: I do not know, but go and tell the artisan who made me, how ugly is the vessel which you have made. When he [R. Eleazar] acknowledged, in his gut, that he had done wrong he got down from his donkey and prostrated himself before the man and said to him, I submit myself to you; forgive me. He said to him: I will not forgive you until you go to the artisan that created me and tell him: how ugly is the vessel that you created. He [R. Eleazar] walked behind him until he reached his city. When his fellow citizens came out to meet him greeting him with the words, ‘Peace be upon you rabbi and teacher,’ the man asked them, ‘Who are you calling rebbi, rebbi’? They replied, ... ‘The man who is walking behind you.’ He said to them: ‘If this man is a rabbi, may there not be any more like him in Israel’! They asked him: ‘Why’? He replied: ‘He did such and such to me.' They said to him: ‘Nevertheless, forgive him, for he is a man of great Torah learning.’ The man replied: ‘For your sakes I will forgive him, but only if he does not make a habit of acting this way.’ Immediately, R. Eleazar son of R. Simeon entered [the Beit Midrash] and expounded, A man should always be soft like a reed and not hard like a cedar. And for this reason the reed merited that of it should be made a quill for the writing of the Torah scroll, phylacteries and mezuzot.

(8) A gentile asked Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, "These rituals you do, they seem like witchcraft! You bring a heifer, burn it, crush it up, and take its ashes. [If] one of you is impure by the dead [the highest type impurity], 2 or 3 drops are sprinkled on him, and you declare him pure?!" He said to him, "Has a restless spirit ever entered you?" He said to him, "No!" "Have you ever seen a man where a restless spirit entered him?" He said to him, "Yes!" [Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai] said to him, "And what did you do for him?" He sad to him, "We brought roots and made them smoke beneath him, and pour water and it flees." He said to him, "Your ears should hear what leaves from your mouth! The same thing is true for this spirit, the spirit of impurity, as it is written, (Zachariah 13:2) "Even the prophets and the spirit of impurity will I remove from the land." They sprinkle upon him purifying waters, and it [the spirit of impurity] flees." After he left, our rabbi's students said, "You pushed him off with a reed. What will you say to us?" He said to them, "By your lives, a dead person doesn't make things impure, and the water doesn't make things pure. Rather, God said, 'I have engraved a rule, I have decreed a decree (chukah chakakti, gezeira gazarti), and you have no permission to transgress what I decreed, as it says "This is a chok (rule) of the Torah."