335 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Hebraic Literature (1901), shown in source order. Page 5 of 7.
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi made a grand claim in Berakhot 19a: "The tribunal excommunicates for the honor of a Rabbi in twenty-four cases," he said, "and every one of them is laid out...
On the twenty-eighth of Adar the Jewish community received word that the Roman government had passed a cruel decree: Jews were forbidden to study Torah, to circumcise their sons, o...
Three times a year, the Torah commanded, every Jewish man should make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the festivals (Deuteronomy 16:16). Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot drew tens of th...
Before he launched his final assault on Judah, Nebuchadnezzar paused to consult the omens. He was a king of his age, and the practice of his age was belomancy, divination by arrows...
The Torah says something strange when Balaam, the prophet hired by Balak of Moab to curse Israel, finally opened his mouth. And the Lord put a word in Balaam's mouth (Numbers 23:5)...
When Israel came out of Egypt and stood at the shore of the Reed Sea, Samael, the angel who serves as heavenly prosecutor, rose up to accuse them. "Lord of the Universe," Samael sa...
Tractate Bava Batra preserves a strange debate about classroom size that turns, without warning, into a story of life and death. The rabbis were arguing about elementary education....
The Rabbis of the Talmud (Yoma 21b) teach that there are six kinds of fire in the world, and not all of them behave the way fire should. The first is ordinary fire, it eats but doe...
The Romans had thrown Rabbi Akiva into prison, and his disciple Yehoshua Hagarsi was permitted to bring him water, a small ration, carefully measured, just enough to keep an old ma...
The First Temple, the sages taught, held five tokens of God's nearness that the Second Temple lacked: the Ark and its cover, the sacred fire that came down from heaven, the Shekhin...
In Jerusalem there was a great courtyard called Beit Yaazek, and its only business was to receive witnesses. Every month, two Jews who had seen the thin sliver of the new moon hang...
The rabbis of the Talmud once ruled that a woman should not walk between two men, and a man should not pass between two women. The reasons were tangled up with concerns about purit...
The schools of Hillel and Shammai disagreed even about how to kindle a candle. On Chanukah, Shammai said: begin with eight lights on the first night and remove one each evening, so...
In the old generations, the Talmud remembers, a Jew would not wear black shoes (Taanit 22a). Even in later centuries, in the Jewish towns of Poland, a chasid, a truly pious man, wo...
The prophet Ezekiel, by the river Chebar, saw the heavens open and a chariot descend. Beneath it were four living creatures, and each creature had four faces. As for the likeness o...
Rabbi Oshaia asked what the prophet meant when he wrote, "I took unto me two staves; the one I called Amiable and the other Destroyer" (Zechariah 11:7). The answer the sages offere...
Four rabbis were walking together on Mount Scopus, looking down at the ruin of Jerusalem. They saw a fox running out of the Holy of Holies. The three older sages began to weep. Rab...
The sins of Israel had grown too heavy for the patience of the Holy One. The prophet Jeremiah had warned for decades and had been ignored, mocked, thrown into a pit. A time came wh...
The midrashic retelling of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE preserves an image that belongs to nightmares. The high priest stood in the burning courts of the Beit HaM...
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was twenty-two years old when he defied his father and walked to Jerusalem to study Torah under Rabbon Yochanan ben Zakkai. His family were wealthy lando...
A visitor arrived at the royal court of Solomon, hoping for an audience with the wisest of kings. He was not admitted. Three days passed, and each day he was told to wait. On the f...
Rava said something that rabbis are not supposed to say. "Life, children, and sufficient livelihood," he taught, "do not depend on merit. They depend on mazal, on the star under wh...
The twelfth blessing of the Amidah, the eighteen benedictions prayed three times daily, is known by its opening Hebrew word V'lamalshinim, "and for the slanderers." Its language is...
When Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai lay dying, his disciples came to gather at his bedside. They expected composure from the man they called the Light of Israel, the Pillar of the Right...
Rabbi Eleazar said that the month of Tishri holds more Jewish history than any other. "Abraham and Jacob were born in Tishri," he taught, "and in Tishri they died. On the first of ...
The Rabbis of Bava Metzia 29b worked out what a person owes to what he finds. If you discover a lost scroll in the road, you have duties of preservation, not enjoyment. You may unr...
On the ninth of Av, the blackest day on the Jewish calendar, the normal pleasures drop away one by one. No eating. No drinking. No anointing with oil. No leather shoes on the feet....
The verse says Rejoice with trembling (Psalm 2:11). The rabbis took that seriously. If joy goes unchecked, they feared, it becomes carelessness, and carelessness forgets that the T...
How far must a person go to honor a parent? Rav Ulla was asked this question, and instead of answering with a verse, he told a story. There was a man in Ashkelon named Dammah ben N...
The sages taught that when a person stands at the judgment seat of the Holy One after death, six questions are put to the soul. They are not trick questions. They are the exam the ...
A gentile once came to Shammai asking to be made a proselyte, but only on condition that he be taught the Written Torah and not the Oral. Shammai sent him away with sharp rebuke. T...
Alexander of Macedon stopped, so the sages tell it, to test the elders of the Negev with ten hard questions. Some of their answers have come down to us, and they show a people conf...
Three Sages sat together. Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Yossi, and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. And Rabbi Yehudah remarked how impressive the Romans were: they had built markets, bathhouses, br...
King David, lying on his couch one evening, let his thoughts wander through the corners of creation he could not make sense of. "Of what use is the spider in this world?" he asked ...
Rabbi Yochanan taught a strict rule in Yevamot 34b: a widow who waits ten years before remarrying will have no children with her new husband. The ten-year gap, the sages believed, ...
The Torah tells the encounter briefly: Potiphar's wife caught Joseph by his cloak, and he fled. The midrash, unwilling to leave so fierce a struggle so thinly described, puts Psalm...
The midrash on Abraham's hospitality in Genesis 18 notices something small and opens it into a whole theology. The patriarch had just made a covenant with the peoples of the land. ...
It is popular to lump all Pharisees together. The rabbis themselves did not. In Avot de-Rabbi Natan (chapter 37), the sages drew up a list, not of their enemies, but of themselves,...
Shechem son of Hamor once assembled a troupe of girls with tambourines to play outside the tent of Dinah, and when she "went out to see them" (Genesis 34:1), he carried her off. Fr...
The wicked kingdom once sent two officers to the sages of Israel with a curious assignment: teach us your Torah. The manuscript was put into their hands, and three times over they ...
The rabbis divided the first day of Adam's life into twelve hours, and read his whole arc, from dust to exile, into a single daylight. In the first hour the dust was gathered from ...
Caesar once said to Rabbi Tanchum, "Come, let us become one people." The rabbi answered calmly. "Very well. But we are circumcised, and we cannot simply become as you are. If, howe...
The sages taught that forty years before the Second Temple burned, its destruction had already begun to show in the quiet details only the priests could read. On Yom Kippur, the lo...
Rabbi Levi taught that on the day Solomon carried the Ark into the Temple, something unusual happened to the wood. The beams of cedar that lined the walls and the ceilings, long si...
"And it came to pass, when Abram was come into Egypt" (Genesis 12:14). So the verse tells us, matter-of-factly. But where was Sarah? The midrash fills the silence. Abraham, knowing...
Rav Kahana was a scholar, but he was poor, and poor scholars in Babylonia often had to work as peddlers to survive. He earned his bread by selling women's baskets door to door. One...
Samuel the prophet once stood at the bank of a river and watched a strange sight. A frog was swimming across the water with a scorpion riding on its back. The scorpion could not sw...
When Nimrod hurled Abraham into the blazing furnace at Ur of the Chaldeans, the place whose very name, the Rabbis note, means fire, the angel Gabriel stood up in the heavenly court...
