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The story takes two breaths. Hillel the Elder was returning from a journey and walking the final miles toward his home in Jerusalem. As he approached the city, he heard loud noise ...
A father drank too much. His children, embarrassed, tried an extreme intervention. They refused to give him wine. They cut off the household supply. And when he kept finding it any...
The halachah is clear: a man must not leave the synagogue before the chazzan finishes the Amidah, and must not pass a synagogue without entering it to pray. Gaster's Exempla (No. 3...
A rich man had one son. When the son turned eighteen, he begged his father for permission to travel to a famous academy. The father let him go, and three times over three years the...
Two brothers lived side by side. One was rich and had a bad wife. The other was poor and had a good one. On the eve of Passover, the poor brother's wife urged him to open his home ...
A merchant left his young wife at the start of a long trading voyage. She was pregnant at his departure, though he did not know it. He was gone many years — so many that the infant...
A scholar traveled on a boat with a group of merchants. They pressed him for information — What merchandise have you brought? Where is your cargo stored? He answered vaguely: my go...
A young man rode from Tiberias to Betar and met a young woman who fell in love with him on sight. They married within days. A year later she asked him to bring her to visit her par...
A rich man once swore an oath before his sons that when he died he would leave each of them one hundred dinars. He had ten sons, so the promise totaled one thousand dinars. Then hi...
A man walked a hot road carrying a jug of milk. He heard a thin, desperate noise near the verge. A snake, dying of thirst. The man knelt, tilted the jug, and gave the snake enough ...
The Talmud returns often to a gentile from Ashkelon named Dama ben Netina, whom the sages held up as the gold standard of the commandment to honor father and mother. They told his ...
Acheer once pressed Rabbi Meir with a hard verse: God also has set the one over against the other (Ecclesiastes 7:14). What did it mean? Rabbi Meir offered the simple answer. The H...
A tradition delivered at Sinai remembers the day Og, king of Bashan, nearly crushed the camp of Israel under a single stone. Og stood above the valley and measured the camp with hi...
When Nero first entered the Holy Land, he did not arrive as a conqueror sure of his victory. He arrived as a diviner uncertain of his fate. He took up his bow and shot an arrow eas...
Kings are remembered in lists, and the sages kept careful accounts. For Hezekiah, they drew up two columns. On one side, the three things they praised him for. First, he dragged th...
The schools of Hillel and Shammai disagreed even about how to kindle a candle. On Chanukah, Shammai said: begin with eight lights on the first night and remove one each evening, so...
The Rabbis gave practical instructions for living in a town visited by plague. When pestilence walks the streets, do not walk down the middle of the road. The middle is where the a...
The Rabbis of Rosh Hashanah 17a sorted the afterlife into categories. Most of the wicked — those guilty of ordinary sins, the ones who grew coarse through sensuous indulgence rathe...
After the flood, Noah broke fresh ground for a vineyard. He had tasted the grape and prized it twice — for its fruit and for its juice. As he worked, Ha-Satan — the heavenly Accuse...
The Rabbis of Bava Metzia 29b worked out what a person owes to what he finds. If you discover a lost scroll in the road, you have duties of preservation, not enjoyment. You may unr...
The Sanhedrin of seventy-one was not a single institution. It was the top of a ladder, and Rabbi Yossi remembered the steps. In each city of Israel sat a provincial court of twenty...
When Adam understood that his own transgression had drawn death into every future generation, he did not try to defend himself. He mourned. He fasted for one hundred and thirty yea...
The last conversation between Moses and Joshua began as a gift and ended as a rebuke. On the day Moses was to enter Paradise, he turned to his closest student and said, "If any dou...
The prophet Isaiah once warned Jerusalem and Judah that the Lord of hosts was about to take away the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water, the mi...
One morning Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai rode out of Jerusalem with his disciples. On the road, he saw a young woman bent over, picking individual barley grains out of the droppings ...
The Midrash preserves a legend that the Tanakh only whispers at. When Isaac died, his two sons came to bury him. "His sons Esau and Jacob buried him" (Genesis 35:29), the written T...
On a lonely road, Rabbi Akiva met an ugly, exhausted man bent double under a massive bundle of firewood. "I adjure you," Akiva said. "Tell me — are you a man, or are you a demon?" ...
The Kabbalists — the sages of truth, as the tradition calls them — noticed something about the Hebrew letters of Adam. The word אדם spells three names. Aleph for Adam. Dalet for Da...
When the Torah laid out the rules for Israel's king, it gave three specific warnings. In Deuteronomy 17, Moses wrote that the king shall not acquire for himself many horses. He sha...
The Talmud keeps a ledger of shorter sayings — proverbs worn smooth by repetition, each one a whole argument compressed into a sentence. "Do not do to others what you would not hav...
The Emperor Hadrian, riding through the streets of Tiberias, spotted a very old man on his knees in the dirt, planting a fig tree. Hadrian dismounted. He could not resist the quest...
A man in Jerusalem held a grand banquet. He had a friend named Kamtza and an enemy named Bar Kamtza. He sent his servant to invite Kamtza. The servant, confused by the similar name...
The Holy One has often worked wonders in the lives of His children at the hour of their greatest need. These miracles are recorded not for spectacle but as a brake against disbelie...
The Roman Emperor had a habit of baiting Rabbi Akiva with the sharpest question he could devise. "Why is it said," he asked once, "that God gives wisdom to the wise, and not to the...
Rabbi Shela once punished a man who had sinned with a non-Jewish woman. The offender, smarting under the beating, reported the Rabbi to the king. Jewish courts were not supposed to...
Rabbi Eleazar ben Shimon was known for his great body and his greater appetite. Once he went to visit Rabbi Yosef ben Laqania. They sat together, and Rabbi Yosef set out a meal tha...
King Solomon wanted to build the Temple from unhewn stone. The Torah forbade iron tools on the altar, and Solomon, meticulous as always, extended the prohibition to the whole sanct...
Rabbi Zeira bought a field one morning in the marketplace. A fair price. A closed deal. He walked home satisfied. Then he learned what he had not known when he made the purchase: R...
Rabbi Akiva began his life illiterate and ended it the greatest Torah teacher of his generation. The bridge between the two was a woman named Rachel. Rachel was the daughter of Kal...
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa lived in such poverty that his family often had nothing for Shabbat. One Friday, his wife stood in the empty kitchen, ashamed. The neighbors would notice the ...
The Samaritans of late antiquity insisted they were descendants of Joseph through the northern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. It was a matter of pride. Rabbi Meir disagreed. Meir ...
One of Rabbi Akiva's students fell gravely ill, and no one in the household thought to care for him. He lay in a corner, forgotten, while the illness ran its course. Akiva heard ab...
A Roman official named Hadrakitilios wrote a troubled letter to the Emperor Hadrian. "Clearly the God of the Jews hates me," he wrote. "I do not circumcise myself as the Saracens d...
When a condemned woman died under Roman sentence, the students of Rabbi Ishmael made an unusual decision. They performed one of the earliest recorded forensic examinations in Jewis...
When King Solomon was stripped of his throne — cast out by Ashmedai, the king of the demons, and forced to wander his own kingdom as a beggar — he discovered that hospitality has t...
The Jewish community of Alexandria was enormous — perhaps the largest outside Judea in the first century CE — and its scholars were known for asking difficult questions. Once, they...
In the study hall, who rises for whom is not a small matter. Standing signals reverence. The Rabbis watched very carefully whom they chose to honor in this way. Rabbi Zeira was onc...
A student was walking behind Rabbi Ishmael ben Yose. Another student was walking behind Rabbi Hamnana. Both students were following their teachers closely, learning by watching. Th...
