96 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Pesikta Rabbati, shown in source order. Page 2 of 2.
The angels said before the Holy One, ‘Master of the World! Isn’t this Jerusalem?!’ as it is said “This is Jerusalem; in the midst of the nations I have placed her…” (Yechezkel 5:5)...
Jeremiah opens with a summons that sounds gentle and is anything but: hear the word of the Lord, house of Jacob. The sages hear in it a warning wrapped in mercy. The land had once ...
R’ Yitzchak expounded on, “On willows in its midst we hung our harps.” (Psalms 137:2) Come and see – the dirt of the land of Israel is for repentance. While they were still in the ...
A world where sorrow turns to song, and ruins give way to radiant hope. What does that world look like? For many Jewish traditions, the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem is cen...
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept." The sages refuse to let the verse stay safely on the riverbank. They drag it upward, to the throne itself. When the Temple f...
There was a time, a very dark time, when God Himself considered doing just that. The scene: The Temple in Jerusalem lies in ruins. The people of Israel are in exile, weeping by the...
"She weeps bitterly in the night" (Lamentations 1:2). The rabbis asked: who weeps? Jerusalem weeps for her slain, and she weeps for the famine, the horror of mothers who boiled the...
The piska begins with a quiet legal question about the Ninth of Av and immediately turns it into something vast. May a priest forfeit one purifying immersion for the sake of the ru...
It's a powerful, heartbreaking moment in our history. But what if I told you that in their darkest hour, God chose to share their pain, to literally go into exile with them? There'...
How do you comfort someone whose grief has no equal? The sages picture the usual method: a widower will accept consolation when friends remind him that another man lost a wife just...
The mystics imagine it as an incredibly intimate moment, a divine gift presented with love. They say that when God was ready to give the Torah to Israel, God fashioned the very let...
The story goes that after the Temple was torn down and Jerusalem was ablaze, God, in His infinite compassion, sought to soothe the city’s pain. As Pesikta Rabbati 30:3 tells us, Go...
Teach us oh, teacher: once the Ninth of Av has ended, is everything permitted? R’ Chiyah the Great taught like this: once the Ninth of Av has ended, one is permitted to do anything...
The piska opens with a ruling that sounds like relief and lands like a wound. Once the Ninth of Av has passed, everything is permitted again, the way a mourner returns to meat and ...
Another explanation: “O poor tempestuous one, who was not consoled…” (Isaiah 54:11) R’ Levi said any where that it says she does not have, she has. It is written “…that is Zion who...
"O afflicted one, storm-tossed, not comforted." The sages read each word of that title as a wound. Afflicted of Torah, of commandments, of righteous men; stormed against by the nat...
Teach us o teacher: toward where should one who prays orient his heart? This is what our Rabbis taught: one should orient his heart toward the place of the Holy of Holies (Berachot...
The Temple lies in ashes, and the people ask the hardest possible question. Your own Torah, they say, rules that whoever lights a fire must pay for the damage. And You lit this one...
It sounds like something out of a fantastical story, but according to tradition, there was a time when the Hebrew alphabet itself was called upon to do just that. God, seeing that ...
The prophet calls the daughter of Zion to rejoice over a king who comes humble and riding on a donkey. But the midrash lingers first on the people who earned that joy: the mourners...
Another explanation. “Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion… And many nations shall join the Lord…” (Zechariah 2:14-15) R’ Chanina bar Papa said: this verse is only speaking of that...
Zion is told to sing because God is coming back to dwell in her midst, and the midrash immediately raises the wound that makes the promise necessary. When the Second Temple went up...
Arise, my light, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you [For behold, darkness will cover the earth, and thick darkness will cover the nations, and th...
Some traditions suggest the answer is a resounding yes! They paint a picture of the Messiah existing even before creation itself. Before the sun, moon, and stars were even a twinkl...
Before the universe even existed, before the stars twinkled into being, there was an idea. A seed of hope. That idea, that seed, was the Messiah. It’s a powerful thought, isn’t it?...
Some of their answers… well, they're One fascinating myth, collected orally and preserved in Howard Schwartz’s Tree of Souls, tells us that the Messiah was actually created at the ...
It’s a powerful and, frankly, pretty startling image. Jewish tradition, in certain strands, paints just such a picture. The idea of a suffering Messiah isn't exactly front and cent...
The story goes that even before the universe existed, the idea of the Messiah already existed in God's mind. Before stars, before planets, before anything, the potential for redemp...
"Arise, shine, for your light has come." The midrash asks what light Israel is waiting for, and the answer reaches back before the world existed. The light God saw on the first day...
Jewish tradition actually gives us a glimpse, a stunning vision of just such an encounter. It's the month of Nisan, the time of Passover, a season of rebirth and redemption. Accord...
It's not subtle. According to Pesikta Rabbati 36:2, a Midrashic (rabbinic interpretive commentary) collection of homilies, the whole world is going to be shrouded in darkness. Utte...
The prophet exults that God has clothed him in garments of salvation, like a bridegroom in a priestly garland and a bride in her jewels. The midrash takes this joy and sets it in t...
Teach us, oh teacher – if one has an argument with their friend, how shall they attain atonement on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)? This is what our Rabbis taught: transgression...
The Day of Atonement is generous, but it has a hard limit. Sins between a person and God, the day wipes clean. Sins between a person and another person, the day does not touch unti...
The psalm calls Israel to shout aloud to the God of Jacob, and the midrash wants to know why Jacob in particular gets the name. Balaam, of all people, supplies the first answer. He...
… And He said to him ‘go away to the land of Moriah and bring him up there for a burnt offering’ (Bereshit 22:2) What is the land of Moriah? There is a whole bundle of Sages here, ...
Rosh Hashanah is the day of judgment, and the midrash gives the verdict away early. God does not want to condemn. He says it almost like a merchant counting losses: when I win, I l...
Teach us oh, teacher: A court which sanctified the month, but not at Eintav with witnesses, is it sanctified? R’ Abahu said in the name of R’ Chiya the great: if a court sanctified...
The day will come when a shofar is blown not for warning but for homecoming. The prophet Joel pictured it: a great horn sounding from Zion, and the whole world turning its face tow...
It’s a question the rabbis grappled with for centuries, resulting in some truly mind-bending imagery about Gehenna, often translated as Hell. The wicked themselves apparently wonde...
Sarah had spent decades hearing herself called barren. Rulers mocked her; even she had once told herself plainly, the Lord has held me back from bearing. And the sages noticed some...
“He does the will of those who fear Him…” (Tehillim 145:19) Meaning that Gd does not annul his prayers and gives him what he requests. This refers to David, of whom it is written “...
Hannah stood in the sanctuary year after year, her lips moving, her voice unheard, while her rival's children filled the house with noise. The verse that opens her story is plain: ...
The prophet's word sounds harsh until you turn it over. "You have stumbled in your iniquity," Hosea says, and the sages caught the gentleness hidden in that verb. The other prophet...
David watched the Day of Atonement do its work and could not stop calling the people happy. The psalm he wrote begins with that word twice over: happy is the one whose wrongdoing i...
That first Sabbath wasn't just a day of rest, it was also the first Rosh ha-Shanah, the Jewish New Year! It fell on the first of Tishrei, the month that marks the beginning of the ...
Aaron lost two sons in a single moment, and the Torah marks the law of Yom Kippur with their death. The sages opened the wound gently. They began by asking which is stronger, praye...
" And perhaps no holiday embodies this more beautifully than Sukkot (the Festival of Tabernacles). Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, or Tabernacles. It's a time we build temporary shelt...
