62 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah, shown in source order. Page 2 of 2.
Charity, the prophet teaches, begins with bread shared and the wandering poor brought home. But the chapter insists on an order. A person with food to give first feeds his father a...
The prophet's call to share bread with the hungry is read here as something other than food. The real hunger, the chapter says, is hunger for the word of God, and the real bread is...
The chapter teaches that a person should love Israel and the Torah scholars most of all, just as God loves them, and that love of God is among the weightiest commandments, bound up...
The Congregation of Israel stands before the Holy One like a sunburned daughter and pleads her case. Look at the parable Rabbi Ishmael told. A king's daughter is driven into the fi...
One night of tears decided everything. When the spies brought back their report and the whole camp wept through the dark, the text calls it weeping for nothing, and that wasted wee...
Asaph opens with the wound itself. Nations have poured into God's own inheritance, fouled the temple, and left Jerusalem a heap of stones. Yet the Tanna insists that God never forg...
Exile reaches into the festivals themselves. Israel complains that on its own soil it kept each festival a single day and kept it right; now, far from home, it keeps two days and s...
Why does Asaph call this a psalm and not a lament when the nations have flooded God's inheritance and poured out blood like water? Because he saw further than the ruin. The Tanna g...
The nations stand over the bodies of the seven sons and tear at their hair, baffled. What kind of Father is this, that children die for Him? Their mother answers before she follows...
The prophet's cry, "Watchman, what of the night?" becomes a teaching about who guards whom. God Himself stands watch over anyone who carries true Torah within him, the way He watch...
Peace begins at the top. God keeps peace among the countless myriads of ministering angels who sanctify His Name day and night, and among the seventy nations of the world. So a per...
The Sages give us a builder's image for the start of all things. A human king who raises a palace works in stages: first he draws the chamber, the upper room, and every corner on a...
History, the text says, runs in five great eras. The first stretches from creation to the Flood; the second from the Flood to wicked Manasseh; the third from Manasseh to the rebuil...
The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem – twice – is one of the most profound traumas in Jewish history. It’s not just about losing a building; it’s about losing a connection, a...
