930 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), shown in source order. Page 10 of 20.
Rabbi Tarfon was one of the great sages of the Mishnaic period, a man of wealth, learning, and considerable stature. But his most famous act had nothing to do with scholarship or l...
The commandment to honor one's father and mother stands among the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:12), equal in weight to the commandments governing humanity's relationship with God. T...
Rabbi Tarfon, a first-century Sage of the generation after the destruction of the Second Temple, one of the voices in Pirkei Avot, was famous among his colleagues for the extremes ...
Rabbi Tarfon loved his mother with a devotion that became legendary among the sages. The Talmud preserves the story of how he honored her, and it is one of the most striking illust...
Rabbi Tarfon lived at the edge of the first century, one of the great teachers of the Mishnah. He is remembered for sharp legal rulings and for a single small act of tenderness tha...
Rabbi Ishmael's mother loved him with a love so fierce that it made her do extraordinary things. The Talmud records that when her son, the great sage, the High Priest's descendant,...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 191, preserves one of the strangest stories of filial piety in rabbinic tradition. Rabbi Ishmael's mother came to him with a request. She wanted to was...
Rabbi Hananya made a statement that puzzled his students: "Some people feed their parents badly and yet inherit Paradise. Others feed their parents well and yet inherit Gehinnom (t...
Rabbi Hananyah taught a puzzle that his students were expected to unravel. "Some children feed their parents badly," he said, "and still go to Paradise. Others feed their parents w...
Two men stand before the heavenly court. Both honored their fathers. Both are judged. One goes to Paradise. The other to Gehinnom (the place of spiritual purification after death)....
The Talmud (Jerusalem Talmud, Peah 1:1) presents two contrasting stories that illustrate a paradox: a person who treats their parents well can still end up in Gehinnom (the place o...
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 mother had several sons, and the older brothers murdered the youngest. It was a killing born of jealousy, the kind of fratricidal violence that echoes the very first murder in th...
When the Babylonians breached the walls of Jerusalem and stormed the Temple, they found something in the courtyard that stopped them cold. A pool of blood. Bubbling. Boiling. Churn...
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 af...
This short narrative comes from the Exempla of the Rabbis, a medieval collection of rabbinic tales gathered and edited by Moses Gaster, which preserves brief teaching stories in co...
A potter in the city of Tiberias used to carry fresh water every day to the home of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, the great sage known as Reish Lakish, whose learning was matched only b...
A wife's devotion is tested when she is granted permission to carry out from a doomed place only what she most values, and she lifts up her own husband and bears him to safety on h...
A woman had been married for ten years and could not conceive. Her husband, following the ruling that a childless marriage of ten years permits divorce, declared his intention to s...
Rabbi Akiba heard that one of his students had fallen gravely ill. The young man was bedridden, burning with fever, and growing weaker by the day. No one expected him to survive. B...
Rabbi Akiba taught that visiting the sick was not merely a kindness, it was a matter of life and death. The Talmud (Nedarim 40a) records his dramatic demonstration of this principl...
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...
After the destruction of the Temple, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah was consumed by grief. "Woe to us," he cried to his teacher Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. "The place where the sins of...
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...
Rabban Gamliel, the head of the Sanhedrin (the supreme rabbinic court), once served food to Rabbi Yehoshua with his own hands. He stood and poured wine for his guest as though he w...
The ancient rabbis taught a striking idea that reversed what most people assumed about the relationship between God and humanity. Most would say that humans wait on God, for blessi...
At a gathering of sages, Rabban Gamliel, the head of the academy, the Nasi of the generation, the most politically powerful rabbinic figure of his age, picked up a pitcher and bega...
Rabbi Yohanan ben Matya instructed his son to hire Jewish laborers and feed them properly. The son went out, hired the workers, and came back with a question that stopped his fathe...
Rabbi Johanan ben Matya gave his son a simple instruction: go and hire laborers, and make sure to feed them properly. The son went out, found workers, and promised them a meal. But...
Rabbi Yohanan ben Matya instructed his son one morning to go out and make sure the Jewish workers hired for the day were fed well. "Feed them adequately," he said. "Do not cut corn...
The prophet Elijah, who never died but ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire, appeared to Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, one of the greatest sages of the third century, and offered him s...
The Prophet Elijah, who never died but was taken up to Heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11), was known to appear to the righteous in moments of great need. One such visit was...
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi had a habit the other sages envied: the prophet Elijah came to him as a companion. The Exempla preserves the memory of one of their walks. Elijah took Rabbi J...
A child was traveling by boat when the prophet Elijah appeared to him, not as the fiery chariot-rider of heaven, but as a fellow passenger, a quiet man with an extraordinary secret...
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...
The Talmud (Bava Batra 75a) records a breathtaking vision of the future Jerusalem: its gates would be made of single pearls, each pearl so enormous that it could be carved into a g...
The Talmud (Bava Batra 75a) records a breathtaking vision of the future Jerusalem: its gates would be made of single pearls, each pearl so enormous that it could be carved into a g...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, the sage who rescued Torah study from the ashes of Jerusalem's destruction in 70 CE by founding the academy at Yavneh, once taught that in the future, wh...
A pious man was walking along the sea-shore near Haifa when doubt crept into his mind. He had heard the sages' teaching that the gates of the future Jerusalem would be made from si...
A pious man was walking along the shore of Haifa, the harbor city on the Mediterranean coast of the Galilee. As he walked he was thinking about a rabbinic tradition, a well-known o...
This entry from the Exempla of the Rabbis preserves a cluster of legends about the great mystic and miracle worker Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. So profound were his merits, the traditi...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai was a sage of such extraordinary righteousness that the rainbow, God's sign of the covenant with Noah, never appeared during his lifetime. The Talmud (Ketubo...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was so great that, during his lifetime, no rainbow ever appeared in the sky over the Land of Israel. The rainbow, in rabbinic tradition, is not only a coven...
This tale, preserved in Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis, retells one of the most beloved legends of R. Shimeon ben Yohai, the second-century sage to whom tradition later attributed ...
For thirteen years, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his son Rabbi Elazar hid in a cave, fugitives from the Roman Empire. The Talmud (Shabbat 33b) records how they survived and what happ...
When Rome decreed death for Jews who taught Torah, Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai and his son fled into a cave. They stayed there thirteen years. A carob tree sprang up at the mouth of the...
The Roman Emperor sent word to the Jewish sages: "Send me a luminary, your wisest man." The sages debated and chose Rabbi Meir, whose very name meant "one who illuminates." He was ...
The Roman Emperor wanted to test the wisdom of the Jewish sages, so he sent word that a great luminary should be dispatched to his court. The Jewish leaders chose Rabbi Meir, whose...
