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A charitable man kept three chests in his house. One filled with gold, one with silver, one with copper. From these he gave to every beggar who came to his door, matching the gift ...
When Moses sent twelve spies into the land of Canaan, the legend of the Rabbis remembers that the land was inhabited by giants — not merely tall men but beings of such scale that a...
King Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre once marched their armies to opposite banks of a river. Tension rose. Solomon, worried his soldiers would collapse in the sun, summoned birds to...
King Solomon warned a skilled builder — the man who had constructed his palace — that the builder's wife was unfaithful. The builder refused to believe it. Solomon did not argue. H...
Two brothers lived in the same town — one rich, one poor. After the festival of Sukkot, the poor brother walked through the neighborhood gathering up the etrogim that families had ...
A merchant on the road was joined by an innkeeper who asked to travel with him. As they walked, they passed a blind man by the roadside. The merchant stopped, opened his purse, and...
Three young men apprenticed themselves to King Solomon for three years. When the term ended they approached the king, disappointed. They had seen wonders at court but believed they...
Rabbi Yudan was famous in his city for two things. He was very rich. And he was so charitable that he had been known to run down the street after the collectors of alms, begging to...
A man walking across a frozen field saw a snake lying stiff in the snow. Touched by pity, he picked up the creature, placed it inside his shirt against his chest, and continued on....
A man named Yochanan once kept a pet frog. The frog, according to the Rabbis, was not a frog at all. It was a child of Lilith, the demon of night. The creature taught Yochanan. Fir...
When Titus sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Talmud tells us, he did not content himself with fire and slaughter. He stripped the Temple of its sacred vessels, wrapped them in the vei...
The rabbis preserved a strange little tradition about how Og, the giant king of Bashan, survived the Flood. The Torah never explains it. Og appears later, towering over the Israeli...
The Talmud in Nedarim asks an uncomfortable question: why did the children of Abraham, the father of faith, endure two hundred and ten years of Egyptian bondage? What did Abraham, ...
The Talmud in Maccoth preserves a remarkable teaching: Moses pronounced four severe judgments over Israel, and four later prophets rose up and softened them. This is not rebellion....
There is a tradition that King Hezekiah hid away a Sefer Refuot, a Book of Remedies, containing cures for nearly every disease. To modern ears this sounds cruel — why withhol...
Every year, in the dark weeks of winter, Jewish homes kindle flames for eight nights — the Chag HaChanukah, the Feast of Dedication. The festival commemorates the purifying o...
The rabbis taught that Jerusalem was not like other cities. Ten laws applied to her alone, each one a small clue to her strange status. A mortgaged house there was never permanentl...
When Israel went up to Jerusalem for one of the three pilgrimage festivals (Exodus 34:23-24), a season came in which the wells ran dry. There was no water for the pilgrims to drink...
There were fifteen steps in the Temple that led down from the Court of Israel to the Court of the Women. The rabbis said they matched the fifteen Shir HaMa’alot, the Songs of...
Rabbi Yochanan was teaching his students on the verse, “I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles” (Isaiah 54:12). He said, “The Holy One, bl...
Rabbi Ishmael ben Yossi had a tenant who tended his vineyard. Every Friday, the man brought a basket of grapes to the Rabbi’s door — the standard portion owed to the la...
The Mishnah in tractate Sotah teaches that four kinds of people tear down the world from within: foolish pietists, crafty villains, sanctimonious women, and self-afflicting Pharise...
Elijah the Tishbite once appeared to Rav Yehudah, brother of Rav Salla the Holy, and the prophet asked him a question that could only come from a man who walked between worlds: &ld...
The rabbis counted the ways a human being can leave this world. They arrived at nine hundred and three, derived from the verse, “Unto God the Lord belong the issues of death&...
Abba Benjamin used to say, “If our eyes were permitted to see the malignant sprites that beset us, we could not rest for a moment on account of them.” The air, the rabb...
Bamidbar Rabbah preserves a tender moment in the imagined inner life of the Holy One. When God decided to bless Abraham, He paused. “What shall I tell him?” the Holy On...
The rabbis read the Torah with a quiet attention to who shows up at whose door. They noticed that wherever a righteous person travels, blessing travels with them, like a shadow tha...
The rabbis noticed a quiet escalation in the promises made to the patriarchs about the land. To Abraham, God said, “Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in th...
The old rabbis were poets of the short sentence. Here is a small anthology of proverbs preserved in the Midrash — each one a stone you can carry in your pocket. On speech: Op...
A merchant died in an inn, far from home, leaving a young son who was yet to reach manhood. When the son finally came of age, he set off to claim his father’s property from t...
The midrash tells of the last days of Jerusalem under Roman siege. One of the wealthiest women of the city, Miriam the daughter of Baythus, sent her servant to buy flour for the ho...
When God commanded Aaron and his sons to kindle the lamps of the menorah in the Tabernacle, Aaron worried. The tribal princes were bringing their own magnificent dedication offerin...
The Emperor Hadrian once asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah a sharp question. “Why is the Name of God mentioned only in the first five of the Ten Commandments, and not in the la...
The Roman governor Turnus Rufus and Rabbi Akiva argued often. Once they argued about tzedakah. “Akiva,” said Turnus Rufus, “if your God decreed that a certain man...
A philosopher named Proklos, son of Filoslos, once pressed Rabban Gamliel with a hard question. “If the idols of the nations are false, why does your God not simply destroy t...
There was once a custom in a Jewish town that newlyweds were greeted with a hen and a rooster, symbols of fruitfulness. One day Roman soldiers marched through the town, saw the bir...
Rabbi Elazar ben Shimon was a mountain of a man. Broad-shouldered, thick-armed, he used to earn a few coins carrying travelers across the river on his back. His strength was legend...
The throne of King Solomon, the legend-weavers said, was a marvel of engineering and meaning. It was made entirely of gold, with thirty-three steps ascending to the seat. On every ...
The tale is told of a certain Abu Golis, a pagan priest in the city of Damascus who later lived in Tiberias. He served an idol and prospered in its shadow, taking what he pleased o...
The emperor Antoninus was a secret friend of Rabbi Judah the Prince, the compiler of the Mishnah. They visited each other, but Rome could not know of it. Antoninus had an undergrou...
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa lived in such fearless piety that the scorpions feared him. The Talmud tells this miniature story like a punchline. A scorpion had taken up residence in a hol...
There was once an innkeeper who ran his business as a trap. Each night, deep in the small hours, he would wake his guests with false alarms — shouts of fire, of thieves, of s...
The Temple had been burned. Rabbi Joshua walked through the ashes of Jerusalem and said aloud, to no one in particular, “Woe to us. The place where Israel atoned for its sins...
Rabbi Ishmael was known as a master of dream-interpretation. Two students with identical dreams could come to him and walk away with opposite readings, because Ishmael understood t...
When Rabbi Judah the Prince — the great redactor of the Mishnah — lay dying at Tzippori, the rabbis gathered around his bed. The people of Israel fasted and prayed. On ...
The old collections preserve a small anecdote about a woman named Justina, daughter of Asverus, who was said to have been married at six years old and to have borne a child at seve...
Rabbi Gamliel and Rabbi Akiva were once sailing together on the Mediterranean when a storm struck. Akiva’s vessel went down in deep water. Gamliel, on a different ship, assum...
The Torah gives one of its most peculiar laws. If a Hebrew slave, after six years of service, chooses to stay with his master rather than go free, his ear is brought to the doorpos...
