Rav Papa and the Cat: Why the Lion Belongs to the Cat Family
A Hasidic Reflection on Creation, Courage, and Compassion
There is a rabbi in the Talmud who is rarely quoted from the pulpit. His name is Rav Papa. He was not a mystic or miracle-worker but a realist — a sage who saw the Divine not in abstractions but in life itself: in how one builds a home, raises children, or treats a living creature.
In Chullin 127a, Rav Papa teaches: “In a house where there are cats, there are no snakes or scorpions.” His words are simple yet profound. He stated a fact — one that also carries deep Kabbalistic meaning. Cats destroy snakes and scorpions; they hunt whatever threatens the peace of a dwelling. In ancient times, Jews kept cats for this very reason — not as ornaments, but as guardians. Rav Papa taught that when there is a cat in the house, one may enter safely — though with shoes on. Why? Because when the cat kills a snake, its bones remain, and they can still wound. The victory over danger, he implied, always leaves consequences. Evil may be defeated, but its traces remain. Yet the cat, from the time of Adam who drew it close — through ancient Egypt and up to this very day in Israel — has remained humanity’s ally, a living protector in the eternal dialogue between creation and chaos.
A Midrash tells that Adam brought the cat near and sent the mouse away. Since then the cat has stood beside humankind as a quiet guardian of order. This companionship continued in Egypt, where cats were honored for safeguarding homes, and it continues even now in Israel, where cats still watch over courtyards and gardens. Rav Papa was not speaking metaphorically but describing a sacred reality: the cat is part of God’s design, a partner in the harmony of creation.
Centuries later, Judaism found itself in medieval Europe, surrounded by a world haunted by fear. Rabbis who lived among Christian majorities often absorbed that fear without meaning to. During those times, many animals — cats, owls, dogs, even doves — were condemned as symbols of witchcraft. The Inquisition burned women together with their cats. Out of survival, Jews too learned caution; they began to associate certain animals with danger or impurity. But that was never the Torah’s intention. Tahor and tamei — pure and impure — are not categories of sin. They describe spiritual states, not moral failures. In the Torah, every creature that breathes with the breath of life is part of divine creation.
Hasidic teaching explains that each being in the world carries a spark of divine light — nitzotz Elokut. The cat, then, is not an outsider but a vessel of harmony. The Hebrew word chatul comes from the root l’hatil, “to cover” or “to guard.” A cat guards the thresholds of human space; it mediates between wilderness and home. Kabbalah teaches that the lion embodies Gevurah — strength and sacred fire — while the cat reflects that same energy in a gentler form. The lion belongs to the Felidae family, the family of cats, not the other way around. The feline, large or small, represents the majesty of quiet courage.
The very emblem of Jerusalem is the lion — symbol of the Tribe of Judah, from which come King David and the Moshiach. Thus the symbol of Moshiach itself rises from the cat family. Through this we see that the cat is bound to the essence of Judaism — to Jerusalem, to David, to Moshiach. It is not merely a household animal but a spiritual relative of the lion, guardian of Israel, and reflection of the soul’s inner royalty. “The lion, mightiest among beasts, retreats before none” (Proverbs 30:30). The roar of the lion and the purr of the cat share one light.
Christianity, to its credit, has long since left behind those medieval fears. Today, cats live peacefully in countless Christian homes, seen as creatures of grace and warmth. Ironically, some Jewish communities still carry the residue of that old European anxiety, even though it never came from the Torah itself. But perhaps the time has come to return to Rav Papa’s wisdom: to remember that holiness is not found in rejection of the world, but in partnership with it.
Rav Papa was a scholar and also a man of business — a brewer of beer together with Rav Huna bar Yehoshua. He understood that holiness begins not in heaven but in honest labor. In his home, both barley and wisdom were brewed. He taught that to serve God is to infuse every act with intention. He did not wait for miracles; he made them through work done with gratitude.
That vision lives in my own family story. My great-grandfather, Sruel ben Aharon Lekhtman, was a Ruzhiner Hasid who, like Rav Papa, united faith and enterprise. The Ruzhiner Rebbe was called “a king without a crown,” and my ancestor lived by that teaching — serving God through dignity, responsibility, and labor. An educated man, a member of the city council in Podolia, and owner of a brick factory that was part of the cultural and economic life of the Jewish community of Kamianets-Podilskyi, he embodied the Hasidic ideal of sanctifying work.
Today, generations later, I continue his path in another way — through law, through research, through the quest for justice. My doctoral dissertation concerns the restitution of property illegally confiscated in Soviet Ukraine — an attempt to restore light and dignity to the Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish families whose homes and businesses were taken. This, too, is Tikkun Olam — the sacred calling to repair the world through truth, compassion, and fairness. In this work, the legacy of Rav Papa and my Ruzhiner ancestors meets: faith expressed not in escape from the world, but in healing it.
Rabbi Moshe Salita
