930 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), shown in source order. Page 18 of 20.
A pious man was digging in his field one afternoon when his spade struck something hard. He uncovered a marble statue, finely carved, half buried in the soil of generations. As he ...
A wicked man lay on his deathbed. He had lived selfishly, hoarded his wealth, and never once given charity. The Angel of Death was approaching, and the man's ledger in heaven was c...
A wicked man lay on his deathbed. He had lived a long life of greed. He had never given charity. He had never sent food to a poor neighbor. His door had remained closed against eve...
This is the story of Ben Sabar, a man known for his great charity, who traveled to a distant place to perform the mitzvah of bringing joy to a young couple at their wedding. The ta...
Ben Sabar was a man famous for his tzedakah. When word came that a poor couple in a distant town needed money for their wedding, he packed a sack of coin and set out without hesita...
A wealthy merchant was traveling far from home when he fell gravely ill. He knew he was dying. His only son was back in his homeland, too far away to reach in time. But the merchan...
A wealthy man lay dying, and he knew his three sons well enough to worry. They were good boys, but reckless with money, the kind who would burn through an inheritance before the fi...
Gaster's exemplum No. 399, drawn from the Ben Attar collection of medieval Jewish exempla, preserves a courtroom puzzle about a cunning father's last will. A wealthy Jewish merchan...
A young lad set out on a journey by sea, and a storm rose up against the ship. The wealthy passengers reached for the idols they carried, took them out, and prayed before them, yet...
The sages taught that God is nearer to His people than any earthly king is to his subjects. The Midrash (Jerusalem Talmud Berakhot 9:1, Mekhilta to Jethro) develops this idea throu...
A young boy was traveling by ship when a terrible storm overtook them. The other passengers were wealthy merchants. Each one reached into his bag and took out a small idol, some ca...
II. A young man travelling from Tiberias to Betar saw a young woman who fell in love with him and married him. After a year she asked him to return home on a visit. On the way they...
A married woman betrayed her husband with a robber. And the story that unfolds from this betrayal became a cautionary tale about the entanglement of sin and its consequences. The s...
A young man rode from Tiberias to Betar and met a young woman who fell in love with him on sight. They married within days. A year later she asked him to bring her to visit her par...
IV. Three young men served King Solomon. After three years' apprenticeship, believing they had learned nothing, they asked leave of departure from Solomon. He offered them each 100...
This entry preserves the bibliographic trail behind one of the most widely traveled Jewish wisdom tales, gathered by Moses Gaster among the Exempla of the Rabbis as story No. 402 a...
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...
V. A beautiful woman, persecuted by the governor, put her gold in jars and covered it on the top with honey. She left them with a friend and went away. After the death of the goxer...
A man hid his gold in a set of clay jars, the ancient equivalent of a safe deposit box. And the story of what happened to those jars became a parable about the fragility of earthly...
Before he was king, Solomon was a young boy with a gift for untangling impossible lawsuits. The tradition collected in the Parables of Solomon preserves one such case. A wealthy an...
VIII. God decreed that Solomon should be punished for transgressing three laws. Ashmedai, after the building of the temple, told Solomon that he would show him some wonderful thing...
King Solomon, builder of the Temple and the wisest of men, appears in a cycle of legends preserved in the Babylonian Talmud (Gittin 68b) in which his very wisdom and power become a...
The Rabbis teach that King Solomon, for all his wisdom, committed three transgressions of kingship that the Torah had warned against. He multiplied horses. He multiplied wives. He ...
The Talmud (Taanit 22a) tells of Elijah the prophet revealing to Rabbi Beroka which people in the marketplace were destined for the World to Come. Rabbi Beroka expected Elijah to p...
Rabbi Beroka of Be Chozae had a gift. The prophet Elijah, the undying messenger, would sometimes appear to him in ordinary places, in a marketplace, among vendors and travelers. An...
B) Two men again are pointed out to R. Beroka as worthy of Paradise. On enquiring he learned that wherever people were in grief and sorrow, those two used to go and cheer them and ...
Rabbi Beroka was walking through the marketplace with the prophet Elijah, who appeared to him in disguise, as he often did to the great sages, when Beroka asked a question that bur...
Rabbi Beroka of Be Hozai used to go walking through the crowds of the marketplace in the company of the prophet Elijah, who would point out to him those among the ordinary people w...
A heretic challenged the sages with a question about God's justice toward the disabled. "If your God is good, why does He create people who are maimed, the blind, the deaf, the lam...
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...
Rabbi Zakkai, according to a tradition preserved in Rabbi Nissim of Kairouan's tenth-century work Chibbur Yafeh meha-Yeshuah, was granted an unusually long life. His students, puzz...
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa lived in grinding poverty, but the treasures of Paradise were within his reach, literally. The Talmud (Taanit 24b-25a) records a series of miracles that occur...
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa was a first-century Galilean Sage so famously poor that his family sometimes went without bread. His wife, enduring yet another week of hunger, finally said t...
Immaculate Shirt. Farhi, O. P. Ill, f. 62. Sef. Hamaasiyot, ed.Araki Cohen, ch.59. Yalk. Sip. Ill, p. 106. Zunz, G. V. p. 140, note c. Tendlau, Fellmeier, No. 18. Ben Gorion I, p. ...
Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua ben Ilem were walking toward Jerusalem on pilgrimage when they saw something few human eyes ever see: an angel, flying low over the road, carrying a ...
Rav, one of the founding figures of the Babylonian Talmud, third century CE, had a difficult wife. Whenever he asked her to cook a particular dish, she would prepare its opposite. ...
In a certain town, a young woman had been married for years but could not conceive. Her husband loved her, and they prayed together for a child, but month after month passed with n...
A woman in a certain town had a reputation for extraordinary piety. She visited every household in which a woman had gone into labor. She prayed by the bedside. She comforted the m...
Rabbi Beroka of Be Hozai once stood in the market of Be Lapat beside the prophet Elijah, and he asked whether anyone in that crowded place was destined for the World to Come. This ...
Abaye, one of the greatest sages of the Babylonian Talmud, had a vision of the world to come. He learned who his neighbor in Gan Eden would be, and the neighbor turned out to be a ...
A wealthy man grew so weary of his riches that he decided to give them away. But not to the poor. He wandered outside the city and found a beggar sitting in the dust, dressed in ra...
Gaster's exemplum No. 414, drawn from Rabbenu Nissim Gaon's 11th-century Chibbur Yafeh Me-HaYeshuah, tells the story of a rich man who decided to conduct an experiment on despair. ...
Elijah, Slave & Builder. Yalk. Reubeni, Gen. f. 9b. Eliah Cohen, Meil Se- daka, ยง 568. Farhi, O. P. I, f. 28. Sef. Hamaasiyot, ed. Araki Cohen, ch. 104. Eisenstein, Oser, p. 325. Y...
A poor man, driven by his weeping wife and starving children, went to the marketplace in despair. He had nothing to sell and no trade to offer. He prayed to God for help, and the p...
The sages told a parable about a man who had three friends. The first friend he loved above all others and showered with gifts. The second friend he respected but kept at a distanc...
A rich man once swore an oath before his sons that when he died he would leave each of them one hundred dinars. He had ten sons, so the promise totaled one thousand dinars. Then hi...
Charity rewarded, the phrase appears throughout rabbinic literature because the sages considered it not a pious hope but a cosmic law. The Talmud (Taanit 24a, Jerusalem Talmud Hora...
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...
