309 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, shown in source order. Page 5 of 7.
The ancient rabbis certainly thought so. They saw the heart as the seat of… well, just about everything. In Pesikta DeRav Kahana, a collection of homiletical teachings, we find a f...
The Book of Lamentations, a raw and mournful lament over the destruction of Jerusalem, grapples with this very feeling. It asks, in a voice thick with sorrow: "What shall I testify...
The Pesikta DeRav Kahana, a collection of Midrashic (rabbinic interpretive commentary) teachings, offers a fascinating insight into this very question. It all starts with a verse f...
They're…complicated, to say the least. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers. So, when the Song of Songs (8:1) says, "If only you were like my b...
The prophet Jeremiah heard the verse as a riddle. "I have struck you with the wound of an enemy," said the LORD over fallen Jerusalem. But the sages turned the word a half-turn on ...
Rabbi Abbahu noticed a strange mercy hidden inside God's judgments. When the Holy One, blessed be He, brings a nation low, He does not simply knock it flat and leave it sprawled in...
God did not first appear at the gate of broken Jerusalem. He sent His prophets ahead, one by one, like envoys carrying letters of consolation. Hosea came first and offered her tend...
When a king's palace burns, who walks the ashes in grief? Not the scorched stones, but the owner who built it and loved it. Rabbi Avin turned this question on the destruction of th...
The people pressed Isaiah with a doubt that any mourner might raise. When you promise comfort, they asked, do you mean only the broken generation that watched the Temple fall in it...
The sages read the broken body of Jerusalem as a ledger kept limb by limb, and they found the same threefold rhythm written into each one: with this part you sinned, in this part y...
In the dark of exile, the Assembly of Israel lies awake and remembers. One sage hears her recalling the breaking she suffered among the kingdoms; another hears her humming the song...
The psalmist names his pain with a strange medical image: this is my sickness, that the right hand of the Most High has changed. The sages turn the phrase over, trying to diagnose ...
We all do sometimes. But maybe... maybe we should think twice before we do. The Pesikta DeRav Kahana, a collection of rabbinic teachings for special Sabbaths and festivals, dives i...
One verse near the end of the Torah seems to slam every door shut at once. The LORD warns that His anger will burn, that He will turn away His face, that troubles will swallow the ...
When the enemy broke into Jerusalem, they bound the hands of Israel's warriors behind their backs and led them out. The sages picture the Holy One watching, and recalling His own p...
Zion's complaint that she has been forsaken gets turned over and over. Maybe "forsaken" means like the sheaf a farmer leaves in the field for the poor. Maybe it means left exposed ...
Isaiah asks whether a nursing mother could ever forget the child at her breast. The sages hear Israel pressing the same question upward: surely, they plead, You have not forgotten ...
Rabbi Abbahu noticed that Israel's prayers, however heartfelt, sometimes aimed too low, and the prophets gently corrected them. When the people prayed that God would come to them l...
The pisqa opens by asking who the "sons of man" are in the psalm where David cries, "How long will my glory be turned to shame?" The sages answer that they are Doeg and Ahitophel, ...
The prophet names Jerusalem "afflicted and storm-tossed," and the sages press on every word. "Afflicted" is read as stripped bare. The city was emptied of its righteous people, emp...
The phrase "not comforted" could sound like a sentence of permanent despair. But Rabbi Levi spots a pattern running through all of Scripture and reads it as a hidden promise instea...
When the prophet promised the rebuilding of Jerusalem, he chose the language of adornment. "Behold, I will set your stones in fair colors" (Isaiah 54:11), the sages heard, echoing ...
Isaiah promised that the future Jerusalem would gleam with carbuncle, a jewel so rare the sages could barely describe it. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi longed to see it, so he asked Elij...
The prophet ends his vision of the rebuilt city with a startling image: "And all your border of precious stones" (Isaiah 54:12). Rabbi Binyamin ben Levi pictured it plainly. In thi...
The chapter of consolation opens, oddly, with a wound. "I, I am He who comforts you" (Isaiah 51:12) is read against a verse of raw pain: "Reproach has broken my heart, and I am sic...
"They have heard that I sigh, and there is none to comfort me" (Lamentations 1:21). Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin read this back to the death of Aaron. The Torah says the Canaanite kin...
"As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion" (Psalms 103:13). But which father is the measure? The sages answer: the most compassionate of the patriarch...
Rabbi Abba bar Kahana, in the name of Rabbi Yochanan, told a parable about waiting. A king betrothed a noblewoman and wrote her a lavish marriage contract, promising bridal canopie...
"I, I am He who comforts you" (Isaiah 51:12). Why does the word "I" repeat? Resh Lakish offered a parable. A king grew angry and sent his queen away. When he later wanted her back,...
When the Sea of Reeds saw what was coming, it fled. But what exactly did it see? Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Nehemiah disagreed. One said the sea caught sight of the staff in Moses' hand...
It’s in those very moments that Jewish tradition whispers some of its most powerful promises. to one such whisper, found in the Pesikta DeRav Kahana, a collection of rabbinic teach...
Isaiah's call to "sing, O barren one" sounds like a contradiction. Why would the childless woman be told to rejoice? The sages heard layers in that single word. Rabbi Meir caught a...
Just a single line, but the sages let it carry real weight. Isaiah praises the woman "that did not bear," and Rabbi Levi pulls back to notice a quiet pattern running through Script...
When Isaiah tells the once-sorrowing city to "break forth into singing and shout," the sages pause over how richly the Hebrew language can name happiness. They count ten distinct w...
"More are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife." The sages take this strange promise and turn it into a meditation on what ruin can produce. Rabbi Abb...
What kind of tree was it? Scripture never says, and the rabbis could not resist guessing. Rabbi Meir said wheat, because we still say a fool has "never eaten bread." When a student...
The sages of old certainly did. A fascinating story unfolds in the Pesikta DeRav Kahana, a collection of homiletical teachings, that explores this very question. It all starts with...
"Arise, shine, for your light has come." The sages link Isaiah's summons to another verse that urges us to "honor the LORD in the regions of light." How do we honor God with light?...
Rabbi Aha begins with God's most jealous declaration: "I am the LORD, that is My name." He explains that this is the name God reserved as a private agreement between Himself and th...
A traveler is caught on the road as the sun goes down. A passerby lights a lamp for him, and the wind snuffs it out. A second stranger lights another, and that one dies too. Finall...
One of the most stunning images is the idea of a ready-made, glorious Jerusalem descending from the heavens! Some say that in the future, God will cause the Jerusalem on high to de...
Rabbi Hoshaya, quoting Rabbi Afes, paints a breathtaking picture of the future. He says that in the days to come, Jerusalem will be like a torch for all the nations, and they will ...
Before there was a world, Rabbi Chiyya taught, the Holy One already saw the whole story of the Temple in a single glance: built, ruined, and rebuilt. The opening words of Genesis c...
The prophet warns that a day is coming when darkness will cover the earth and thick gloom will settle over the nations. To understand what that darkness means, the sages reach back...
When Sarah finally held Isaac, she laughed and said that everyone who heard would laugh along with her. The sages pressed on that word everyone. Why should a stranger's joy reach i...
"This is the day the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it." Rabbi Avin admitted he was puzzled. Rejoice in what, exactly, in the day, or in God Himself? Solomon answered...
A noblewoman watched her husband, her son, and her son-in-law all sail off to a distant land across the sea. One day messengers arrive with news. Your sons have come home, they tel...
Think of an orphan girl raised in a royal palace. When the time comes for her wedding, people ask whether she has any dowry of her own, anything to bring to the marriage. She is no...
