2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 40 of 47.
The midrash offers a second way that Moses, wrapped in the timeless light of the mountain, could still distinguish one part of the day from another. This time the clue was not his ...
A third explanation rounds out the question of how Moses kept time on the mountain. The first answer pointed to his studies, the second to the angels' praise, and this one points t...
One way of telling time no clock can keep: the markers of day and night are not the rising and setting we expect, but the bowing of the heavenly bodies before their Maker. When the...
When Moses descended from Mount Sinai, his face shone with what the Torah calls rays of glory (Exodus 34:29). But the sages press a question that the verse leaves open. Where did t...
Rabbi Yehudah bar Nachman tells the story differently. When Moses finished writing the Torah at God's dictation, a small amount of ink remained in the pen, unused. Moses, not wanti...
After Moses came down with his shining face, the people held back in fear. The Torah records the order in which they finally approached, "Moses called to them, and they returned to...
The masters of Aggadah noticed something singular. From the first verse of the Torah to the last, no portion opens with the word "And he gathered" except this one, Vayakhel (Exodus...
The opening word of Vayakhel does heavy legal work. God had commanded, "They shall make Me a sanctuary" (Exodus 25:8), and one might assume that so urgent and holy a project could ...
The Mishnah teaches that the principal categories of forbidden Shabbat labor number forty less one. Thirty-nine. But why exactly thirty-nine? The sages offer two reckonings. Rabbi ...
The Torah singles out one labor by name, "You shall not kindle fire throughout your dwellings on the Shabbat day" (Exodus 35:3). Why mention fire on its own when it is already amon...
The same verse that forbids fire can be read four different ways, and the sages refused to let any single reading stand alone. "You shall kindle no fire on the Sabbath in any of yo...
A single word can carry the weight of a whole argument. The school of Rabbi Ishmael pressed on the phrase "in any of your dwellings." Why was it needed at all? After all, the Sabba...
The sages notice that the Torah keeps attaching the word "dwellings" or "entering" to commandments that, on the surface, would seem to apply anywhere and always. Each repetition gu...
In the Temple there was a warm room called the Chamber of the Hearth, where priests on the night watch could rest beside a fire. The Mishnah says they would light that fire as dusk...
The Torah calls the seventh day "a Sabbath of complete rest," and the sages drew several lessons from those words. First, a fence of time: wherever rest is commanded, we add a litt...
How much of a vow lives in the words, and how much in the will behind them? Shmuel set the strict rule first. If a person decides in his heart to give a gift to the Sanctuary, that...
The argument over vows continues, now testing whether a pledge can bind a person on the strength of intention alone. A verse warns, "that which goes out of your lips you shall keep...
When the people brought their gifts for the building of the Tabernacle, the Torah pauses to honor a particular group: "And every woman wise of heart spun with her hands" (Exodus 35...
When the people opened their hands to build a dwelling for the Holy One, blessed be He, the rabbis noticed something strange. The princes brought the great onyx stones for the high...
Where did Bezalel's greatness truly begin? Not in his own generation, the rabbis say, but generations earlier, with two brave women in Egypt. The midwives feared God and refused Ph...
When God told Israel to see that He had called Bezalel by name, He was pointing to something deeper than one man's talent. He was pointing to three gifts He had set in Bezalel's he...
The Torah calls Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and Chronicles fills in the line all the way back to Caleb. The rabbis used these genealogies to do somet...
When the Tabernacle materials were gathered, Moses sent a proclamation through the camp. The rabbis pause on a simple question. Where exactly was Moses sitting when he gave the ord...
The first thing Bezalel built was the Ark. The rabbis ask why, and answer with a memory of creation. When God set out to make the world, He wrapped Himself in light first, then str...
How big a courtyard may a person carry things in on the Sabbath without a separate enclosure permit? The rabbis fixed the measure at roughly seventy cubits and a fraction square, w...
The portion of Pekudei opens with a ledger. These are the accounts of the Tabernacle, every weight of gold and silver and bronze tallied and recorded. Why does the Torah bother to ...
The sages read a single proverb as a portrait of two men standing on opposite sides of one verse. When Scripture says, a faithful man abounds with blessings, but one who hastens to...
Moses kept his own books for the Tabernacle, yet he still called others to audit alongside him and recorded everything through Itamar. The rabbis make the standard plain. A man ent...
Moses never touched a thread of the Tabernacle alone. He built through assistants and recorded the work through Itamar, and he refused to give any accounting until the whole struct...
A single name in the Tabernacle's record opens a teaching about lineage and labor. Scripture pairs Bezalel with Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan, and Rabbi Yochanan dr...
The verse credits Bezalel with making all that the LORD commanded, not all that Moses commanded, and the rabbis seize on the precise wording. Even instructions Bezalel never heard ...
A Roman governor named Quntrikos came to Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai with an accusation dressed as arithmetic. Run the census silver, he said. Every man over twenty gave a half-shek...
The verse "and they brought the Tabernacle to Moses" sits beneath a line from Psalms: let the lying lips be silenced, which speak insolently against the righteous. The righteous on...
For all their skill, the wise artisans could build every piece of the Tabernacle and still not raise it. They had made the clasps, the boards, the bars, but the assembled structure...
King Solomon's verse speaks of a wedding day and a day when the heart is glad. The sages read those two days as two great moments in Israel's life. The wedding was the splitting of...
A single verse about screening the Ark with the curtain becomes a lesson in the laws of the festival booth. The sages asked a sharp question. When you sit in a sukkah, where must i...
When the Torah says frankincense was placed "upon" the row of showbread, Rav teaches that the word does not always mean stacked on top. Here it means beside, set alongside the loav...
When the work was done, Moses looked over the finished Tabernacle and blessed the people. The sages preserved his words. He prayed that the Divine Presence would rest on the work o...
Rabbi Nehemiah saw the whole of creation folded into the desert sanctuary. The hanging curtains were heaven and earth stretched out. The laver and its base stood for the six days o...
The greatest wonder, the sages say, was simply that the people fit. A whole nation of thousands upon thousands crowded into a courtyard fifty cubits across, a space that by any hon...
What follows is pure accounting, and that is its point. Each great curtain carried fifty loops of blue wool along its edge, matched loop for loop with the curtain beside it so the ...
The inner curtains were woven from blue, purple, and scarlet wool and fine linen, each thread doubled four times over, and Rabbi Yose adds a thread of beaten gold worked in among t...
When the sages described the Tabernacle that Israel built in the wilderness, they lingered on a detail most readers skip past. Every one of the upright boards, says Rabbi Nechemiah...
The Torah opens the building of the Tabernacle with a call for gifts, and the sages counted exactly eleven materials that Israel brought. They found a hint of that number in a stra...
After the gold came the silver, and the sages turned the Torah's totals into a careful audit. Every adult gave a half-shekel, and the midrash walks the math step by step: a hundred...
How did Israel arrange its enormous camp in the wilderness? The Levites, the verse says, encamped all around the Tabernacle, forming a band four thousand cubits wide on every side,...
The wilderness camp was no chaotic crowd. The sages lay out the Levite watches with the precision of a quartermaster: Kohath on the south, charged with the ark; Gershon on the west...
The book of Leviticus opens not with a command but with a call: "And He called to Moses." Rabbi Tanchum bar Chanilai found in that quiet summons a whole meditation on who deserves ...
