360 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Mekhilta DeRabbi Shimon Ben Yochai, shown in source order. Page 5 of 8.
Jethro came out to the wilderness camp and watched his son-in-law work. From morning until evening Moses sat in a single seat, and the whole nation pressed around him in a line tha...
Moses answered Jethro that the crowds did not come for trivial reasons. They came to seek God, to learn what the Holy One, blessed be He, required of them in each tangled situation...
Moses listed for Jethro the kinds of matters that flowed to his seat all day long. Some were questions of purity, where a person needed to know whether an object or a condition was...
When Jethro told Moses outright that his method of judging was not good, the sages did not hear arrogance. They heard a man being handed a gift. Jethro was beloved, for Heaven left...
Jethro warned that the work as Moses was doing it would cause him to wither away. The sages turned that single verb over and found layers in it. Rabbi Yehoshua heard a warning abou...
Jethro pressed his counsel further, telling Moses to listen to his voice and promising that things would go well if he did. But the advisor knew the limits of his own authority. He...
Jethro told Moses to teach the people the statutes, the laws, the way they should walk, and the deeds they should do. The sages mined each phrase for meaning. Rabbi Yehoshua read t...
Jethro told Moses to seek out the right men to share the burden of judging, and the sages explored what kind of person he meant. Moses was to discern them not by appearance but thr...
Jethro told Moses to appoint judges who could sit "at all times." The sages asked who could possibly be that available. The answer surprised them: not idlers, but scholars freed fr...
One short verse, two readings, and a real disagreement underneath them. Scripture says Moses listened to Jethro and then "did all that he said." The first word, "certainly," both s...
When Moses chose able men from all Israel and set them as judges, the sages saw two separate commands hidden in the act, pointing in opposite directions, and both necessary. To the...
The verse hands Moses a flattering role. The ordinary judges handle the people day to day, but the hard cases, the knotty ones, come up to Moses. He is the supreme court, the final...
When Jethro turned to leave the camp, the people begged him to stay. He had given Moses the counsel that built Israel's courts, and the Holy One, blessed be He, had endorsed it. Wh...
The Torah dates the arrival at Sinai "in the third month after the children of Israel went out of the land of Egypt." The sages built an entire chronology on those last words. Isra...
The verse seems to repeat itself. Israel journeyed from Rephidim and came to Sinai, a fact already listed elsewhere among their travels. So why say it again? The sages answer that ...
Moses climbs the mountain on the second day, and the sages are careful to insist he did not go up on his own initiative. He went only at God's command, just as later verses spell o...
God begins His proposal at Sinai not with hearsay but with eyewitness proof. "You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt." No witnesses, no written record, no tradition passed mo...
Having recalled the miracles of the Exodus, God turns to the future with a logic the sages could not resist. If He worked all those wonders for a people who had not yet received th...
At Sinai, God names Israel His own treasure, set apart to be busy with Torah and busy with His commandments. The Sages refused to let the grand title "kingdom of priests and a holy...
When God finished speaking, Moses wasted no motion. He did not go home, and he did not let any other business pull him aside. He came straight back and called the elders of the peo...
The people answered as one. The Sages stress what kind of answer it was. They did not respond with flattery, mouthing agreement to please Moses or to please God. And they did not h...
God announces that He will come to Moses in the thickness of the cloud. The Sages explain that this cloud was no soft mist but a dense darkness, the same heavy darkness that would ...
God tells Moses to sanctify the people today and have them wash their garments. The Sages turn the words into a careful calendar. "Today" was the fourth day, and on it the people i...
God commands the people to be ready for the third day, and the Sages hear in that readiness a plan being made. The people set themselves a fixed meeting place, a house of assembly,...
As the third day nears, God orders Moses to draw a boundary around the mountain on every side. The Sages note that elsewhere Scripture warns that even flocks and herds must not gra...
The law of the forbidden mountain grows precise. No hand may touch the one who has crossed the line; he is too charged with holiness to be reached directly. He must be stoned or ca...
Moses came down from the mountain and did not wander home or busy himself with errands. The mission burned in him. And the rabbis noticed something about how he always worked: ever...
Moses tells the people, be ready for three days, and a careful reader might wonder whether Moses invented that timetable himself. The sages refuse to let it stand as his own idea. ...
It happened in the morning, the rabbis insist, never at night, because the Torah is the gift of life to everyone who enters the world, and life belongs to the daylight. And it did ...
When Moses led the people out to meet God, Rabbi Yose ben Yudan heard wedding music in it. Scripture says God came from Sinai, and the rabbi reads it not as a king inspecting a mou...
The whole of Mount Sinai went up in smoke, not just its holy heights but every inch of it, because the Lord came down upon it in fire. The sages picture that fire licking the very ...
A human voice fades the longer it goes. Shout long enough and you grow hoarse, the sound thins out and dies. But the voice at Sinai broke that rule. The shofar blast did not weaken...
Scripture says the Lord descended onto Sinai, yet elsewhere it says He spoke from heaven. The rabbis hold both at once. The upper heavens split open, fire was given leave to make w...
Even at the height of revelation, God's first word to Moses after the ascent is a warning. Go down and warn the people. The ones who had climbed should not strain to see more, and ...
Before the Torah was given, before any tribe of Levi had been set apart for the altar, who counted as a priest? In this teaching the sages reach back to that earlier order. Rabbi Y...
Moses had just been told to go down and warn the people again not to crowd the mountain. He answers back. The people cannot come up, he says, because You Yourself already commanded...
The mountain at Sinai was not one open slope where anyone could climb as high as their courage allowed. It was a place of measured nearness, with each rank held at its own distance...
When Moses came down from the mountain, he did not stop at home and he did not turn to any other business. The sages press the point: this was true not only at Sinai but throughout...
Why does the verse say God spoke "all these words," as if everything came out in a single breath? The sages turn the phrase over again and again. First, a matter of consent. God te...
The opening word of the commandments is a claim and a challenge at once. When God says "I am the LORD," the sages hear Him add: I am the One, and let anyone who has the standing to...
The second commandment forbids more than building an idol for your own shrine. The sages read it tightly: you may not keep an idol for yourself, and you may not keep one for anyone...
The prohibition on images stretches as wide as creation itself. Even the opening words do double duty: whoever makes an idol for himself breaks both the command "you shall not make...
What exactly turns an act into worship? The Mekhilta presses the question hard. Bowing was already forbidden, yet the Torah singles it out so we can learn from it. Bowing is a sing...
The verse promises kindness "to thousands," and the sages will not let that number be small. Does it mean only your own descendants? No. Does it cap at a thousand generations? No a...
The third commandment forbids lifting up God's name in vain, and the sages first ask what "vain" even means. Their answer is stark: vain is a thing that never was, is not now, and ...
"Remember" the Sabbath in Exodus, "keep" it in Deuteronomy. How can a single commandment use two different words? The sages answer with awe: both words left the divine mouth in one...
We usually read this verse for its second half, the command to rest. The sages stop on the first half: "six days you shall labor." Rabbi treats it as a genuine command, not mere pe...
How far does the Sabbath rest actually reach? The sages build it out layer by layer. From "the seventh day is a Sabbath" they hear a positive command; from "you shall not do any wo...
