930 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), shown in source order. Page 14 of 20.
Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel all went through seasons of barrenness before they bore children, even though each was promised a great nation through her womb. The sages asked why the ...
The martyrdom of Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon is among the most harrowing passages in all of rabbinic literature. The Talmud (Avodah Zarah 17b-18a) describes his execution with the k...
Gaster's exemplum No. 288 preserves a paired story from the Hadrianic persecutions of the second century, the same killing-field that took Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyo...
When the Romans decreed that teaching Torah was punishable by death, Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon did not stop. He gathered his students in the open, placed a Torah scroll in his lap...
Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon was one of the Ten Martyrs executed during the Hadrianic persecutions in the second century CE. Rome had decreed that teaching Torah in public was a capi...
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 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...
Beruria, the brilliant wife of Rabbi Meir, had a sister who was captured by the Romans and sent to a brothel in the city. Beruria turned to her husband and pleaded with him to resc...
Beruriah, the brilliant wife of Rabbi Meir, was the daughter of the martyred sage Hanina ben Teradyon. When her father was burned at the stake by the Romans for teaching Torah, her...
There is a brief, bruising story preserved in Gaster's Exempla (no. 294, 1924) about Rabbi Safra, a well-known legal scholar of the Babylonian tradition. One day he found himself a...
In the generation after the Second Temple was destroyed, some men claimed to be descendants of the priestly lines and demanded the privileges of kohanim, including the right to eat...
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 ...
Of all the questions that have haunted the Jewish people across the centuries, none has burned hotter than this one: when will the Messiah come? The Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin (3...
At a banquet in the academy of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the great redactor of the Mishnah around 200 CE, the wine flowed a little too freely. The sons of Rabbi Chiya, two brothers of s...
Rabbi Akiva was standing on a shore, the Talmud places the scene at the edge of the Mediterranean, when a ship offshore broke apart in a storm. He watched passengers thrown into th...
A ship full of travelers was crossing the sea when the wind died. The vessel drifted into still, silent waters and stopped. Each day the becalmed ship sat motionless on a surface l...
Bar Kappara was walking along the seashore when he encountered the survivors of a shipwreck, strangers, soaked and shivering, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They had ...
Bar Kappara was walking along the seashore when he saw a naked man washed up in the tide. The man was called an Antipatos, a title of rank in the imperial bureaucracy. And he had l...
Elijah the prophet and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi traveled together for a time, and Elijah agreed to be his companion on one condition: the rabbi must ask no questions. Rabbi Yehoshua...
A desperately poor man had nothing, no food, no money, no prospects. He prayed to God for help, but heaven seemed silent. Then the prophet Elijah appeared to him, as Elijah so ofte...
The prophet Elijah once appeared to a pious but struggling man and handed him four gold dinars. The man was astonished. Four dinars was enough to start a modest trade. It was a pro...
Three Clever Tricks. Midr. Lament. I. Lament. R. I § 4. Yalk. Sip. IV, p. 86. Maase Buch No. 187. Helvicus, Historien, I, ch. 21, p. 91. Grunbaum, Jiid. Dtsch. Chrest. p. 428. Tend...
Gaster's exemplum No. 303 preserves a Jewish folktale about a father's last clever gift to his son. A wealthy Jewish merchant lay dying in a distant city far from home. He drew up ...
Joab, the mighty general of King David, figures in rabbinic legend as a warrior of such ferocity that even the angels feared him. The Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) pre...
A later midrashic legend reimagines Joab, the great general of King David, on one of his hardest campaigns. He had been hurled by the Israelites into a city called Kinsari, a forti...
A drunkard wandered into a cemetery, the one place in the ancient world where no sane person would voluntarily spend the night. The dead were there, and so were the spirits, and so...
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 rabbis spoke often of two invisible forces that shape every human encounter: the good eye and the evil eye. The Maase Buch (No. 196) preserves a tale that illustrates the diffe...
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 ...
Demon in Tree. Ben Atar, No. 15. Maase Buch No. 190. Ben Gorion II, p. 203, 353- cf. Aesop, Fab. 21. Babrius, Fables, No. 1 19. Benfey, Pantschat. I, 476 f; II, 321. Finamore, Trad...
There was once a man who lived near an old tree. One morning, cutting branches for firewood, he raised his axe, and a voice came out of the wood. “Stop,” said the voice...
A ma'aseh preserved in the Gaster manuscripts, and recorded as exemplum no. 308 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis, tells of a man who made a single vow early in his ...
Three men were traveling together through a lonely country. As Friday afternoon wore on, one of them stopped. "The sun is setting," he said. "I will not travel on Shabbat. I will s...
A pious but desperately poor man owed more money than he could ever earn, and his creditors had him dragged to the debtor's prison, where he was left to rot until his family could ...
A dying father left his entire estate to one of his sons, but several men came forward each claiming to be the rightful heir. The question reached the courts: which one was the rea...
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 Jew once owned a cow that refused to work on the Sabbath. The story, preserved in the Midrash (Pesikta Rabbati 14) and the Maase Buch, became one of the most beloved animal tales...
There was once a pious Jew in one of the villages of late antique Israel who kept a cow to till his fields. Six days a week the cow worked, and on the seventh day she rested. Her m...
Wicked-Brother-in-Law. Holeh Tamim u. Poel Sedek. • m Eisenstein, Oser, P. 343. Husin, Maasim Tobim, No. 2. Maase Buch No. 204. Levi, R. E. J. XXXIII, p. 234 ff. Ben Gorion I, p. 2...
A woman was left in the care of her brother-in-law while her husband was away on a long journey. The brother-in-law pressed her to commit adultery. She refused. Furiously, he accus...
The sages taught that God created no creature without a purpose, not the serpent, not the spider, not the scorpion. The story preserved under the title "Saved from Serpent" illustr...
Rabbi Meir was walking one day when he overheard something no human being is meant to overhear. A bat kol, a heavenly voice, was giving instructions to a serpent. "Go," the voice s...
Rabbi Meir had a principle: never trust a person whose name contains the word for evil. The Talmud (Yoma 83b) tells the story of how this principle was tested. And proven devastati...
Rabbi Meir was traveling and stopped for Shabbat at an inn. The innkeeper's name was Kidor. Meir did not like the name. It reminded him of a verse in (Deuteronomy 32:20), where God...
The story continues as follows:, 184, The frog, which is none other than a child of the demon Lilith teaches Johanan the knowledge of all the languages and before leaving, calls al...
Frog Princess. Eisenstein, Oser, p. 344. Maase Buch No. 143. Helvicus, Historien I, ch. 14, p. 64. Eisenmenger, I, p. 399. Tendlau, Fellmeier, No. 1. Griinbaum, Jiid. Dtsch. Chrest...
A man named Yochanan sat at the bedside of his dying father. The father made one strange request. "When I am gone, go to the marketplace on a day you choose, and whatever is the fi...
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...
