930 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), shown in source order. Page 13 of 20.
Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, the one we call Resh Lakish, had once been a highway robber. He ran with two companions, robbing travelers on the roads outside Tiberias, and their names a...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 255, remembers a forgotten act of judicial courage. King Yannai, the Hasmonean monarch, had a servant who had committed murder. Jewish law is uncomprom...
A group of pagan astrologers, men who read the stars and claimed to know the future, once came before a Jewish court. They had traveled from distant lands, driven by a question the...
Rabbi Akiba once invited his students to a meal. The first course arrived half-cooked, the lentils were hard, the bread was doughy, and the vegetables were barely warm. Most of the...
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...
Two astrologers were sent on a delegation to Rabbi Gamliel in the town of Usha. Their mission was to study Jewish law from its source, to examine it in detail, and to report back t...
Gaster's exemplum No. 258 preserves a story that has startled every generation of Talmud students, because it involves Rabbi Akiva following his teacher Rabbi Yehoshua into the bei...
Hillel the Elder was famous for his patience. The Talmud records that no one ever saw him angry, no one ever heard him raise his voice, and no situation, however absurd or provocat...
A man should not be hasty, and above all he should not be angry. The sages held up Hillel the Elder as the standard against which every temper was measured. And his wife's behavior...
Hillel the Elder had eighty students. This number is repeated across multiple sources. Baba Batra (134a), Sukkah (28a), and Avot de Rabbi Nathan (chapters 14 and 29), with a consis...
Hillel the Elder, the Babylonian immigrant who rose to lead the Jewish people in the first century BCE, had eighty students by the end of his life. The Talmud in Sukkah 28a divides...
The philosophers of Alexandria were famous throughout the ancient world for their cleverness, their logical traps, and their determination to humiliate any thinker who could not ma...
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 s...
Rabbi Akiba was once traveling by ship when a terrible storm struck. The waves rose like mountains, the wind tore at the sails, and the vessel broke apart beneath the passengers' f...
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 Talmud (Shabbat 33b) records a conversation that nearly got three sages killed. And did send two of them into hiding for thirteen years. Rabbi Yehuda, Rabbi Yose, and Rabbi Shi...
Four men sat together one afternoon in the Galilee: Rabbi Yehudah ben Ilai, Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and a certain Yehudah ben Gerim. They fell into conversation about ...
The Talmud in tractate Baba Batra (8a) records a teaching about almsgiving that medieval Jewish communities took very seriously. So seriously that it became the foundation for how ...
A terrible famine had descended on the land. Grain was scarce. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, the Prince, the compiler of the Mishnah, the richest and most influential sage of his generation...
The rabbis of the Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) debated endlessly over the mystery of how God created the world. And what existed before creation began. In Bereshit Ra...
Abdimos the Gardite once approached Rabbi Meir with one of the largest possible questions. "Tell me," he said, "how was the earth created?" Rabbi Meir did not open a book or begin ...
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...
The Leviathan, the great sea creature that God created on the fifth day, was so enormous that the sages struggled to find words adequate to describe it. The Talmud (Bava Batra 74a-...
Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Yehoshua, two of the sages who witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and helped to rebuild Jewish life in the generation that followed, wer...
The Talmud in Sanhedrin (f. 97a) tells of a place called the City of Truth, a settlement where no one had ever spoken a lie. Every word uttered within its walls was honest. Every p...
Rabbi Rabina, a fifth-century Babylonian Sage, once learned from Rabbi Tabut (also called Tabyome) that there was a place on earth where truth was not an ethical preference but a l...
Rabbi Judah bar Ilai was known for many fine qualities, but one of them became a teaching in itself. Whenever a bridal procession passed through the streets, Rabbi Judah would stop...
The Roman emperor Antoninus had a private and unusual friendship with Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, the compiler of the Mishnah (the earliest code of rabbinic law). They met in secret and d...
Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the editor of the Mishnah, conducted long conversations with the Roman emperor Antoninus. Their friendship is one of the warmest cross-cultural exchanges in ra...
After Abraham sent Ishmael away into the wilderness with his mother Hagar, the patriarch did not forget his firstborn son. According to Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer and the Midrash Haga...
After Abraham had sent his son Ishmael away to live with his mother Hagar, Ishmael settled in the wilderness and married a Moabite wife. Years passed. Abraham wanted to see how his...
The sage known for his extraordinary carefulness was Rav, and his caution extended even to the smallest details of daily life. The Talmud in Hullin (95b) preserves a teaching about...
Gaster's exemplum No. 273 preserves two short Talmudic stories about how seriously the sages took small signs. In the first, Rav, the third-century Babylonian sage who founded the ...
Rabbi Judah the Prince, redactor of the Mishnah around 200 CE. And his colleague Rabbi Chiya once found themselves stuck on a point of halakhah. They had forgotten a teaching, or p...
In the days when the Israelites brought their first fruits to the Temple in Jerusalem, a remarkable custom prevailed. The wealthy arrived with their offerings displayed in baskets ...
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...
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...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was once asked a question that sounds strange to modern ears. Why does Jewish law punish a thief, who works by stealth, more severely than a robber, who t...
Behind this dense column of references stands one of the most celebrated encounters in the Jewish memory of the Second Temple: the meeting of Simeon the Just, the High Priest, with...
When Alexander of Macedon marched east, the Samaritans, called in the Talmud the Kutim, saw a political opening. They sent word to Alexander asking him to destroy the Temple in Jer...
David and his son Solomon agreed on most things. But not on this one. David, in the Psalms, cried out: "The dead do not praise the Lord, nor any who go down into silence" (Psalms 1...
The sages taught that wealth spent on Torah study is the only wealth that endures. The Midrash (Pesikta 28, Leviticus Rabbah 30) tells of a man who possessed great fortune and face...
The book of Kings rarely spares a good word for King Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel (reigned c. 874 to 853 BCE). He built a temple to Baal in Samaria, married Jezebel, and ...
Simeon the Temanite, a Sage from Teman, a region in ancient Arabia where Jews had lived for centuries, was a regular fixture of the study hall. He could be counted on to attend the...
Onkelos, known in some traditions as Aquila, was a Roman nobleman, a nephew of the Emperor himself, who converted to Judaism. His conversion scandalized the imperial court and beca...
Onkelos son of Kalonikos was the nephew of the Roman emperor, by some accounts Hadrian, by others Titus. And one of the great converts to Judaism in the Talmudic age. When Onkelos ...
Rabbi Hoshaya ben Levi discovered a numerical poem in an old Aggadah book. Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 285, preserves it in four lines. The Torah contains one hundred seventy-five...
A Roman noblewoman, a matrona, came to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta with a question. She had been reading the book of Genesis, and she was curious about the birth of Rebecca's twins. "Wh...
