6,276 texts · Page 101 of 131
A man had three daughters, and each carried a flaw. The first was a thief who could not keep her hand from what was not hers. The second was lazy and refused the work a household r...
A man was in the habit of rising from his meals without washing his hands properly. He left the table with crumbs and traces of the food on his fingers, indifferent to the small ri...
The workers of Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak were clearing a small mound on the edge of a field when the earth gave way beneath their spades and a man sat up from the soil. He was fully...
The sages liked to place two sons side by side to show how kibbud av, honor of a father, can be faked and how it can be real. The first son fed his father lavishly. He set out rich...
A Roman governor once made the acquaintance of the prophet Elijah. The meeting changed him. Elijah persuaded him to take the huge wealth he had amassed in office and, instead of sq...
A poor man came before Rabba asking for support. The rabbi inquired about his usual diet, as was the practice when setting the rate of assistance. The man explained that he habitua...
Before Moses was born, Pharaoh had a dream. He saw a giant set of scales. On one side lay the entire weight of Egypt: the pyramids, the armies, the treasuries, the granaries, the p...
Rabbi Akiva wanted to know which of his students had the temperament of a scholar and which did not. He devised a simple test at the dinner table. He first set before them a dish t...
Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel all went through seasons of barrenness before they bore children, even though each was promised a great nation through her womb. The sages asked why the ...
The prophet Elijah once appeared to a pious but struggling man and handed him four gold dinars. The man was astonished. Four dinars was enough to start a modest trade. It was a pro...
The prophet Elijah came to a young man with a simple offer. He could have seven good years of prosperity, either at the beginning of his life or at the end. The choice was his. The...
In the coastal city of Ashkelon, two men died on the same day. One was Baya, the local tax collector, a figure the community despised. The other was a gentle Torah scholar. Both pr...
In the time of King Suleiman, a vizier's wife had borne nine daughters in a row. As her tenth pregnancy advanced, the vizier grew frantic for a son. He warned his wife that if she ...
There was a man called Yosef Mokir Shabbat, "Yosef the Honorer of the Sabbath." Every Friday he spent whatever he had on the best food available for the Shabbat table. Anything the...
Ben Sabar was a man famous for his tzedakah. When word came that a poor couple in a distant town needed money for their wedding, he packed a sack of coin and set out without hesita...
Abaye, one of the greatest sages of the Babylonian Talmud, had a vision of the world to come. He learned who his neighbor in Gan Eden would be, and the neighbor turned out to be a ...
A wealthy man had an only son and trusted him completely. In his later years he signed over the entire estate to the son's name, keeping nothing for himself except the promise of h...
Rabbi Akiva had a pious first wife who fed and housed his five hundred students for years. On her deathbed she asked her daughter to continue the work. The daughter accepted the tr...
There is a strange debate preserved in tractate Berachot (folio 47, column 2) that asks a question most of us are afraid to ask out loud. Who, exactly, counts as an am ha'aretz — a...
Rava once told a story in the name of Rabbi Yochanan that was preserved in tractate Sanhedrin (folio 104, column 2) — and it is really a story about how a Jew is supposed to see. T...
Tractate Rosh Hashanah (folio 16, column 2) teaches that on the Day of Judgment three ledgers are opened and three groups of souls appear before the Holy One, blessed be He. The pe...
The Talmud in tractate Gittin preserves a wild stretch of stories in which Benaiah ben Yehoyada, one of King David's mighty men, captures Ashmedai, king of the demons, and leads hi...
Tractate Gittin (folio 57, column 2) preserves one of the most devastating martyrdom stories in all of rabbinic literature — a Jewish mother and her seven sons dragged before a Rom...
A Tzeduki — a Sadducee, member of the party that rejected the Oral Torah — once came to Rabbi Abhu with a question meant to sting. "Your God is a priest," he said, "for it is writt...
A beggar once came to Rava's door asking for a meal. The story is told in tractate Ketubot (folio 67, column 2), and it is really about the difference between charity as surveillan...
Tractate Bava Batra preserves a strange debate about classroom size that turns, without warning, into a story of life and death. The rabbis were arguing about elementary education....
One of the most formidable women in the Talmud was Beruriah, wife of Rabbi Meir. She appears mostly in fragments — but in one famous passage she corrects her husband's Hebrew, and ...
Tractate Shabbat (folio 66, column 2) preserves something most modern readers will find startling: a rabbinic prescription against fever that is half incantation, half midrash. The...
Tractate Yoma (folio 9, column 1) asks a question no one would think to ask unless they were counting: how many kohanim gedolim, high priests, served during each of the two Temples...
Rabbi Abhu once said, "Were it not for this Scripture text, it would be impossible to repeat what is written." He meant the verse in Isaiah: "On that day the Lord shall shave with ...
The midrash on Abraham's hospitality in Genesis 18 notices something small and opens it into a whole theology. The patriarch had just made a covenant with the peoples of the land. ...
Devarim Rabbah (chapter 4) preserves a comment of Rabbi Yitzchak on the verse, "When the Lord your God shall enlarge your border, as He has promised you" (Deuteronomy 12:20). It is...
The verse in (1 Kings 4:30) tells us that Solomon's wisdom exceeded the wisdom of all the east and all of Egypt. The midrash on Kings, preserved in Yalkut Eliezer, offers a story t...
The Talmud tells of Elisha ben Abuyah, called afterward Acher — "Other" — one of the four sages who entered the mystical Garden and the only one who emerged a heretic. Somewhere in...
The Talmud and early midrashic collections preserve rabbinic mishlei, proverbs, in loose clusters — one-line teachings meant to be memorized and turned over slowly. Here is a sampl...
The midrashic retelling of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE preserves an image that belongs to nightmares. The high priest stood in the burning courts of the Beit HaM...
The children of Israel left Egypt in the Hebrew month of Nisan, in springtime, and immediately the sukkot — the booths of the wilderness — went up. They lived in these booths for f...
The Sefer HaMa'asiyot — the Book of Exempla — compiled by Moses Gaster in 1924 from medieval Jewish manuscripts, preserves a short and sharp story about the daughter of a Roman emp...
A Kuthean — a Samaritan — once came to Rabbi Meir with an accusation against the patriarch Jacob. It is preserved as exemplum No. 32 in Moses Gaster's 1924 collection. "Your ancest...
A min — a sectarian — once argued with Rabbi Ami against the resurrection of the dead. "How can God bring back bodies that have returned to dust?" he demanded. "The dust scatters; ...
This is one of the cruelest and most luminous stories in the Talmud, preserved both in tractate Avodah Zarah and in Moses Gaster's 1924 collection as exemplum No. 67. Rabbi Chanina...
The great martyr Rabbi Akiva, who lived roughly from 50 to 135 CE and was flayed alive by the Romans for teaching Torah in public, was once asked a dangerous question. "How great i...
(Leviticus 19:9-10) and (Deuteronomy 24:19) lay out a peculiar agricultural law. When you harvest your field and forget a sheaf behind you, you are forbidden to go back for it. It ...
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, one of the great first-century sages, lay ill in his bed. Four of his colleagues came to visit him — among them Rabbi Tarfon, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elaz...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the second-century sage to whom tradition attributes the core of the Zohar, once sent his son to the study house so that the scholars might bless him. What...
Gaster's exemplum No. 160 is one sentence long, but it unfolds into a whole theology. "Rabbi Akiva in prison used half of the drinking water to wash his hands." The Talmudic versio...
Gaster preserves, as exemplum No. 194, a tiny, terrible story — almost a folk horror — about a mother whose son was murdered by his own brothers. She gathered the blood of her son ...
A short, bitter parable preserved as Gaster's exemplum No. 210 teaches the kind of lesson a Jew is meant to carry with him into the street. A man was clearing his field of stones. ...
