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King Hezekiah of Judah lay dying. The prophet Isaiah came to his bedside with what should have been the last message: set your house in order, for you shall die (2 Kings 20:1). Hez...
A man had publicly dishevelled the hair of a Jewish woman in the street, a humiliating act in the ancient world, where a married woman's covered hair was a point of dignity. Rabbi ...
A man had entrusted a sum of money to a neighbor, Bar Temalian, for safekeeping. When he came back to collect it, Bar Temalian lied to his face and said, I never received any money...
Nakdimon ben Gurion, one of the three wealthiest men of Jerusalem before the Roman siege, had been so rich that, according to tradition, his daughter's dowry alone was twelve thous...
Rabbi Shimon ben Chalafta was famously poor. One Friday afternoon, as the Sabbath was closing in, his wife came to him with the familiar announcement: there was no food in the hous...
Rabbi Joshua came to the academy one afternoon and asked the students what Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah had taught that morning. The young man had been appointed head of the Sanhedrin...
The great sage Rabbi (Yehudah ha-Nasi, the editor of the Mishnah, who lived circa 135-217 CE) sent one of his disciples, Levi ben Sisi, to the town of Simonias in the Galilee to se...
A small boy was traveling in a boat along the coast when the prophet Elijah appeared to him. Elijah was famous for wandering the world in disguise, testing Jews, delivering message...
Rabbi Gidel was a sage of the third century CE, a disciple of Rav in Babylonia, known for his rigor in halakhah. He also had a peculiar habit. He used to sit at the door of the wom...
Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania, one of the greatest sages of the first and second century CE, used to say: In my whole life, no one has ever bested me in argument, except a widow, a chi...
Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh and Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania were once traveling together by ship on a long voyage. Gamliel was the head of the Sanhedrin, the recognized leader of Palest...
A min, a sectarian or heretic, came to Rabbi Kahana with a pointed question. Jewish law permits a husband and wife to lie in the same bed even when she is niddah, in her menstrual ...
A man lay dying. He had ten sons. His wife, in a bitter moment late in the marriage, had once told him that only one of the ten was biologically his. The other nine were fathered b...
A rich man, old and childless, prayed for years for a son. In his advanced age God granted him one. He named the boy Saul, after the first king of Israel, and lavished everything o...
The daughter of Rabbi Meir, one of the greatest sages of the second century CE, had a vision in a dream that her fate was sealed. Twenty-one years of suffering lay ahead. Seven yea...
There were once three poor men, each with a different longing. The first wanted only to be rich. The second wanted to become a great scholar. The third wanted a good wife. The prop...
A poor fisherman cast his net and pulled up a great fish. As he lifted it from the water, the fish spoke. Cut me open, it said. Gather my blood in three bottles. Keep them safely. ...
Ashmedai, king of the demons, wanted to humiliate Solomon, whose wisdom was famous in every kingdom. So Ashmedai brought up from the netherworld a man with two heads, a living curi...
A king summoned Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania and pressed him with a hard question. Is your God really just? He creates some people blind, others lame, others deformed, through no faul...
Abraham the Carpenter lived in Jerusalem in the early medieval period. He worked wood, lived plainly, and over many years saved a small bag of gold. A neighbor coveted the gold, br...
The Emperor Antoninus once pressed Rabbi Judah the Prince with a sharp question. At the day of judgment, he said, neither body nor soul could be justly punished. The body would ple...
Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Yossi the son of Zimra, asked about a verse that the eye passes over too quickly. What shall be given unto thee, or what shall be added unto...
A difficult case came before the elders. A young man was suspected of illegitimate birth, and the Rabbis disagreed about his status. Rabbi Yehoshua ruled that he was a ben niddah, ...
When Abraham came to the cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah, he did not find the cave empty. According to the Yalkut Chadash, the first couple was already there, and they were not ple...
When Achan took the banned spoil from Jericho, the book of Joshua describes his crime with a strange fivefold repetition. They have transgressed my covenant which I commanded them;...
A strange statistic is buried in tractate Yoma. During the 410 years of the First Temple, only eighteen high priests served in succession. During the 420 years of the Second Temple...
As Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi drew near the end of his earthly career, the angel of death was sent to fetch him. Because of the Rabbi's merit, the angel was instructed to show him eve...
The prophet Isaiah puts a complaint into the mouth of Zion. The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me (Isaiah 49:14). The community of Israel, in the Talmud's reading, spe...
There was once a man named Joseph who was famous in his city for one thing above all others: he honored the Shabbat. Every Friday his table groaned under fish and wine, whatever th...
A band of robbers once stopped a group of travelers and demanded to know who they were. Disciples of Rabbi Akiva, the travelers answered. The robbers lowered their weapons and said...
Of the four sages who entered Pardes, the mystical orchard of divine secrets, one emerged and lost his belief. His name was Elisha ben Abuyah, and the tradition eventually renamed ...
Two men died on the same day in the same city. One was a great and righteous sage. The other was a tax collector, a known sinner. Both funeral processions met in the same narrow st...
A fox once persuaded a wolf to slip into a Jewish household to help prepare the Shabbat meal. No sooner did the wolf step through the door than the whole household rose up and beat...
A man once wagered his friend four hundred zuzim that he could make Hillel the Elder lose his temper. Win and keep the money, lose and pay it out. The bet made him inventive. It wa...
Near the end of his life, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus lay on his sickbed and pressed his disciples with a strange complaint. Had you come to study with me during these last years, h...
Rabbi Yochanan once taught that the royal mount of King Yannai (the Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus, who reigned 103 to 76 BCE) contained sixty myriads of cities. Each city held a pop...
When Noah released a bird to test whether the floodwaters had receded, the Torah tells us he sent out a raven (Genesis 8:7). The midrash on this verse imagines an argument breaking...
Isaiah writes, For My own sake, for My own sake will I do it (Isaiah 48:11). Why the repetition? Why does God say for My own sake twice? The midrash on this verse, preserved in Mid...
A kabbalistic manual preserved in Kitzur Shalah (an abridgment of the early seventeenth century ethical-mystical work Shenei Luchot HaBrit by Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz) describes the p...
Rabbi Meir, the great fourth-generation Tanna and student of Rabbi Akiva, taught that when a father teaches his son a trade, he should pair the lessons of the craft with the prayer...
The Talmud and midrashim collected thousands of pithy sayings, the pitgamim that teachers would fire off at students to make a point stick. Here is a short bouquet, preserved in Ha...
In the Temple of Jerusalem, the most fragrant service of the day was the burning of the ketoret, the compound incense of eleven spices that rose in a thin column from the golden al...
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known by Jews as the Rambam and by the wider world as Maimonides (1138 to 1204), did something no one had done before him. He took the vast, tangled ocean o...
There is an old rabbinic legend about Alexander the Great that the Ma'aseh Book and other medieval collections loved to retell. The sources are summarized in the 1924 anthology The...
The emperor's daughter was found murdered in Rome, and the Romans blamed the Jews. An edict was prepared. The city's Jewish community stood under the shadow of a general massacre i...
A heathen once pressed Rabban Gamliel with a question he thought would trip up the Rabbi. Why, he asked, did the God of Israel reveal Himself to Moses out of a bush? There are ceda...
Twice in the Hellenistic era the Torah crossed the language barrier into Greek, and the Rabbis remembered the two events very differently. Both are recorded in exemplum 61 of Moses...
A laborer once worked a long season for his master and came to receive his wages. The master met him at the door with bad news. I have no money to give you. Nor cattle, nor land, n...
