335 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Hebraic Literature (1901), shown in source order. Page 3 of 7.
Rabbi Simlai delivered one of the most famous homilies in the Talmud (Makkot 23b). Moses, he said, was given 613 commandments at Sinai. And the number is not arbitrary. Three hundr...
A student once stood before Rabbi Chanina in prayer and reached for every adjective he could find. O God, who art great, mighty, formidable, magnificent, strong, terrible, valiant,...
The moment when Joseph's brothers recognized him in the palace at Memphis was, according to the midrash, more violent than the Torah lets on. Some of the brothers, the sages said, ...
When Solomon completed the First Temple and prepared to carry the Ark of the Covenant through the main gates, he opened his mouth to sing the words of Psalm 24: Lift up your heads,...
The kabbalists posed a problem that sounds simple until you sit with it: no one is truly perfect unless he has observed all 613 mitzvot. And yet, who has ever done so? Not even Mos...
The sages said of Rabbi Tarfon that though he was a very wealthy man, he was not generous according to his means. There is a gentle reproach in that line. A man who could give thou...
Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin taught in the name of Rabbi Levi that when the Holy One, Blessed be He, prepared to fashion the first woman, He held a quiet council with Himself about an...
Four small teachings, stitched together like beads on a string, preserve what the sages thought mattered most in daily life. Rava said the man who pursues wisdom will receive the b...
When Nebuchadnezzar carried Judah into exile, his officers wanted the captives dead. These men are men of death, they said. They refuse to obey the king's order. Execute them. One ...
The Second Temple had a section called the Ezrat Nashim, the Court of Women, a gallery where women could gather for the great ceremonies while men stood on the lower floor. During ...
After the flood, Noah broke fresh ground for a vineyard. He had tasted the grape and prized it twice, for its fruit and for its juice. As he worked, Ha-Satan, the heavenly Accuser,...
The Sanhedrin of seventy-one was not a single institution. It was the top of a ladder, and Rabbi Yossi remembered the steps. In each city of Israel sat a provincial court of twenty...
The Midrash preserves a legend that the Tanakh only whispers at. When Isaac died, his two sons came to bury him. "His sons Esau and Jacob buried him" (Genesis 35:29), the written T...
On a lonely road, Rabbi Akiva met an ugly, exhausted man bent double under a massive bundle of firewood. "I adjure you," Akiva said. "Tell me, are you a man, or are you a demon?" "...
When the Torah laid out the rules for Israel's king, it gave three specific warnings. In Deuteronomy 17, Moses wrote that the king shall not acquire for himself many horses. He sha...
The Talmud keeps a ledger of shorter sayings, proverbs worn smooth by repetition, each one a whole argument compressed into a sentence. "Do not do to others what you would not have...
The Emperor Hadrian, riding through the streets of Tiberias, spotted a very old man on his knees in the dirt, planting a fig tree. Hadrian dismounted. He could not resist the quest...
The Holy One has often worked wonders in the lives of His children at the hour of their greatest need. These miracles are recorded not for spectacle but as a brake against disbelie...
When Titus sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Talmud tells us, he did not content himself with fire and slaughter. He stripped the Temple of its sacred vessels, wrapped them in the vei...
The rabbis preserved a strange little tradition about how Og, the giant king of Bashan, survived the Flood. The Torah never explains it. Og appears later, towering over the Israeli...
The Talmud in Nedarim asks an uncomfortable question: why did the children of Abraham, the father of faith, endure two hundred and ten years of Egyptian bondage? What did Abraham, ...
The Talmud in Maccoth preserves a remarkable teaching: Moses pronounced four severe judgments over Israel, and four later prophets rose up and softened them. This is not rebellion....
There is a tradition that King Hezekiah hid away a Sefer Refuot, a Book of Remedies, containing cures for nearly every disease. To modern ears this sounds cruel — why withhol...
Every year, in the dark weeks of winter, Jewish homes kindle flames for eight nights — the Chag HaChanukah, the Feast of Dedication. The festival commemorates the purifying o...
The rabbis taught that Jerusalem was not like other cities. Ten laws applied to her alone, each one a small clue to her strange status. A mortgaged house there was never permanentl...
When Israel went up to Jerusalem for one of the three pilgrimage festivals (Exodus 34:23-24), a season came in which the wells ran dry. There was no water for the pilgrims to drink...
There were fifteen steps in the Temple that led down from the Court of Israel to the Court of the Women. The rabbis said they matched the fifteen Shir HaMa’alot, the Songs of...
Rabbi Yochanan was teaching his students on the verse, “I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles” (Isaiah 54:12). He said, “The Holy One, bl...
Rabbi Ishmael ben Yossi had a tenant who tended his vineyard. Every Friday, the man brought a basket of grapes to the Rabbi’s door — the standard portion owed to the la...
The Mishnah in tractate Sotah teaches that four kinds of people tear down the world from within: foolish pietists, crafty villains, sanctimonious women, and self-afflicting Pharise...
Elijah the Tishbite once appeared to Rav Yehudah, brother of Rav Salla the Holy, and the prophet asked him a question that could only come from a man who walked between worlds: &ld...
The rabbis counted the ways a human being can leave this world. They arrived at nine hundred and three, derived from the verse, “Unto God the Lord belong the issues of death&...
Abba Benjamin used to say, “If our eyes were permitted to see the malignant sprites that beset us, we could not rest for a moment on account of them.” The air, the rabb...
Bamidbar Rabbah preserves a tender moment in the imagined inner life of the Holy One. When God decided to bless Abraham, He paused. “What shall I tell him?” the Holy On...
The rabbis read the Torah with a quiet attention to who shows up at whose door. They noticed that wherever a righteous person travels, blessing travels with them, like a shadow tha...
The Yalkut Reuveni, a late Kabbalistic anthology, preserves one of the strangest Jewish teachings about the soul: gilgul, transmigration. Souls, this tradition says, do not vanish ...
The rabbis noticed a quiet escalation in the promises made to the patriarchs about the land. To Abraham, God said, “Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in th...
The old rabbis were poets of the short sentence. Here is a small anthology of proverbs preserved in the Midrash — each one a stone you can carry in your pocket. On speech: Op...
A merchant died in an inn, far from home, leaving a young son who was yet to reach manhood. When the son finally came of age, he set off to claim his father’s property from t...
The midrash tells of the last days of Jerusalem under Roman siege. One of the wealthiest women of the city, Miriam the daughter of Baythus, sent her servant to buy flour for the ho...
When God commanded Aaron and his sons to kindle the lamps of the menorah in the Tabernacle, Aaron worried. The tribal princes were bringing their own magnificent dedication offerin...
There was a man named Yochanan who served as High Priest for eighty years. Eighty. Longer than most men live, longer than any priest before or since had stood between Israel and th...
Rabbi Levi told a parable that holds three prophets in one sentence. Israel, he said, is like a noblewoman who had three friends. One knew her in her prosperity. One knew her in he...
A man of Sidon came to Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai to arrange a divorce. He had lived many years with his wife and no children had been born to them. In the Jewish world of the time, c...
A devoted couple in the Galilee had lived together for years without a child. Finally the husband came to Rabbi Shimon and said they had agreed to separate, since the marriage had ...
When the Torah commands that each tribe camp under its own standard, every man by his own banner, with the ensigns of their fathers' house (Numbers 2:2), the Rabbis were curious. W...
Rabbi Isaac noticed something in the book of Eicha, the Lamentations read on the Ninth of Av every year. "Her children are gone into captivity before the enemy" (Lamentations 1:5)....
A Kabbalistic meditation preserved in Kitzur Shnei Luchot ha-Berit teaches that the 613 commandments of the Torah form a covenant between the Holy One, blessed be He, and Israel. A...
