335 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Hebraic Literature (1901), shown in source order. Page 7 of 7.
There was a time, the sages taught, when the Divine Name of twelve letters was taught openly to anyone who came to learn. A student could carry it home the way he carried any other...
The Jewish calendar marks three pilgrimage festivals and twelve new moons. The Kitzur ShLaH explains that the three festivals correspond to the three patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, an...
Rav Pinchas pointed out that King David called five times upon the Holy One to arise in the book of Psalms. "Arise, O Lord, save me, O my God" (Psalms 3:7). "Arise, O Lord, in Your...
When Esau came back from the hunt and saw that Jacob had taken the blessing, he plotted his revenge quietly. The sages, reading the reunion years later in Genesis 33, noticed that ...
The Talmud (Kiddushin 80b) tells a grim little tale to justify a rule about guarding appearances. Once a woman stood weeping over her husband's fresh grave. Not far off, a guard ke...
Rabbi Elazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, once condemned a man to death for a petty reason, the man had called him "Vinegar, son of Wine," a sly way of saying he was the ba...
"Those passing through the valley of weeping make it a well; also blessings shall cover the teacher" (Psalms 84:6). Rabbi Yochanan read the verse and pressed on its first image. Th...
Rabbi Yochanan was suffering from scurvy, a miserable, bleeding affliction of the gums. And the standard remedies were not helping. In desperation he went to a woman skilled in fol...
Elijah was a regular visitor at Rabbi's academy. He would slip in quietly, take his seat, and listen. One first-of-the-month he came in late, and Rabbi asked him what had kept him....
When Moses blessed the tribe of Asher at the end of his life, he said, "Let him dip his foot in oil" (Deuteronomy 33:24). The rabbis of the Talmud took the blessing literally. Ashe...
Buneis, son of Buneis, came to pay a call on Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi. Rabbi, the Prince, the redactor of the Mishnah, the wealthiest and most celebrated sage of his age. As Buneis en...
The Roman official had one cup too many set before him, and his face twisted unnaturally. A Rabbi knew the cure, rearrange the cups so the even number became odd, and the face woul...
When Ravah bar Nachmani, one of the giants of the Babylonian academies in the fourth century, died alone in the wilderness, his students searched for him for days without success. ...
On the day Isaac was weaned, Abraham threw open his tents and invited every household in the land. It was meant as a celebration, but rumor crawled in with the guests. Whispers pas...
At the foot of Mount Sinai, when Israel answered the Torah with five Hebrew words, na'aseh v'nishma, "we will do and we will hear" (Exodus 24:7), they did something strange. They c...
The sages taught that the Land of Israel was not destroyed until seven royal courts had turned to idolatry. They counted them by name: Jeroboam son of Nebat, Baasha son of Ahijah, ...
When the Holy One announced that He was going to give the Torah to flesh and blood, the angels objected. "What is man that You are mindful of him," they said, quoting the psalm, "a...
And it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham (Genesis 22:1). Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Rabbi Yossi ben Zimra, asks in Sanhedrin 89b: after what thin...
Sanhedrin 91a preserves a courtroom drama from the age of Alexander of Macedon. The people of Egypt appeared before the conqueror to lodge a complaint against Israel. Their argumen...
The prophet Hosea was instructed to buy back his unfaithful wife for a price that seemed arbitrary, fifteen pieces of silver, and an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley (H...
The Rabbis taught, in Chullin 94a, a cluster of warnings about the small deceptions that undo a household. None is dramatic. Each is deadly. The shoe. Do not sell a neighbor shoes ...
The sages loved to measure the enemies of Israel, because their sheer size made the victory more astonishing. When Sennacherib the Assyrian invaded Judah, he came with forty-five t...
Rabbi Abhu once said, "Were it not for this Scripture text, it would be impossible to repeat what is written." He meant the verse in Isaiah: "On that day the Lord shall shave with ...
When Sennacherib the Assyrian emperor came against Jerusalem, his pride was as tall as his army. The midrash tells how God humbled him in a sequence of ordinary-seeming errands. Fi...
Ravina once sighed, "There is no truth left in the world." Rabbi Toviah would not let the statement stand. "If all the riches of the world were offered me," he would say, "I would ...
The Sages of the Talmud were obsessed with the question of when the Mashiach would come. And fiercely allergic to anyone who tried to nail it to a date. Sanhedrin 97 preserves both...
Among those who forfeit their share in the world to come, the sages taught, is the one who reads sefarim chitzonim, "outside books." The phrase is a technical term. It refers to wr...
Someone once asked Rabbi Akiba how it could be that King Hezekiah, the righteous teacher of Torah, had raised a son as wicked as Manasseh. "Twelve years old was Manasseh when he be...
Rava once told a story in the name of Rabbi Yochanan that was preserved in tractate Sanhedrin (folio 104, column 2). And it is really a story about how a Jew is supposed to see. Tw...
Open the book of Kings and read: And the days that David reigned over Israel were forty years: seven years reigned he in Hebron, and thirty and three years reigned he in Jerusalem ...
Rabbah bar Nachmani ran one of the great academies of Babylonia, and twice a year, in the month before Passover and the month before the Feast of Tabernacles, thousands of Jews tra...
At the very end of Genesis, Joseph, viceroy of Egypt, the savior of the known world during the famine, calls his brothers to his deathbed. Instead of dispensing political advice or...
Rav Chiya bar Adda was tutor to the children of Resh Lakish. One week he vanished for three days without explanation. When he returned, his employer, one of the sharpest minds in t...
Before Rabbi Akiva died, he sat his son Rabbi Yehoshua down and gave him seven instructions. They read less like commandments than like the quiet advice of a man who had seen too m...
The rabbis of the Talmud were connoisseurs of soil. They compared regions by fertility the way others compare wines. The best land in the world, they said, is Egypt, for it is writ...
Two great tannaim weighed the ethics of the courtroom. Rabbi Ishmael taught: when an Israelite and a stranger come before you in judgment, acquit the Israelite by the laws of Israe...
Several Talmudic stories describe sages who took advantage of a non-Jew's arithmetical error. And they are preserved without varnish, because the rabbis wanted the argument to be l...
A man named Joseph, who kept the Shabbat with uncommon care, had a neighbor who was rich, fearful, and utterly convinced of astrology. The neighbor was told by a professional astro...
Someone once came to Rabbi Ishmael, the son of Joshua, with a question that must have been asked in every generation: how did the wealthy of the land of Israel come by their wealth...
At the end of days, the Rabbis of the Talmud (Bava Batra 75a, Pesachim 119b) tell us, the Holy One will set a great banquet for the righteous. The main course will be the flesh of ...
The Talmud (Pesachim 119b) pictures the end of days as a banquet. A great cup of wine, two hundred and twenty-one logs, more than a third of a hogshead, will be brought to the tabl...
Scripture says that Jacob's family went down to Egypt numbering seventy souls (Genesis 46:27). When the sages sat down to count the names listed in the chapter, they reached only s...
The venerable Hillel had eighty disciples. That number is not a boast but a ledger. The rabbis kept careful count. Thirty of those eighty, they said, were worthy that the Shekhinah...
When Nebuchadnezzar led Israel into the Babylonian captivity, he demanded that the Levites, the Temple singers, perform the Songs of Zion for his court. The Levites had spent their...
The Kabbalists, the sages of truth, as the tradition calls them, noticed something about the Hebrew letters of Adam. The word אדם spells three names. Aleph for Adam. Dalet for Davi...
A Sadducee came to Rabbi Abahu with a sharp question. "You rabbis teach," he said, "that the souls of the righteous are treasured up beneath the Throne of Glory. If that is so, how...
The children of Israel left Egypt in the Hebrew month of Nisan, in springtime, and immediately the sukkot, the booths of the wilderness, went up. They lived in these booths for for...
