975 related texts · 16 related myths · Page 1 of 21
A Roman matrona once came to Rabbi Yosei bar Chalafta with a question that sounded innocent and was not. "In how many days did your God create the universe?" she asked. Rabbi Yosei...
Israel in Egypt, fruitful and multiplying, a thousand thousand and myriad myriads. And still, in God's eyes, like a single beloved child. That's the paradox this section of Aggadat...
Shabbat Shekalim arrives on the Shabbat before the month of Adar ends, the first of the four special Sabbaths that prepare the Jewish people for Passover. The Torah reading is brie...
When God commanded Israel to give a half-shekel for the census, Moses was confused. Not by the amount, half a shekel was nearly nothing, a laborer's loose change. What baffled him ...
The story of Moses on Mount Sinai offers a profound glimpse into this mystery, showing us not just what to pray, but how. The Book of Exodus tells us that Moses ascended Mount Sina...
After the intercession, the mercy, and the glimpse of the tefillin knot, the Lord gave Moses a practical command that would take him back up Sinai a second time. Targum Pseudo-Jona...
Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) Sheni Ketuvim In the beginning God created etc. - To declare the might of the acts of creation to creatures, and to make it known to them...
When a lion roars, every animal in the forest freezes. Even the ones who have never been hunted. Even the ones too far away to be prey. The sound itself is the message: there is so...
"Blessed is the man who fears the Lord" (Psalm 112:1). The rabbis asked: what ultimately happens to him? And they landed on Ecclesiastes: "In the end, everything will be heard, fea...
“I remember my song in the night; I meditate with my heart, and my spirit searches” (Psalms 77:7). Rabbi Yehuda ben Rabbi Simon and Rabbi Aivu.58The text of the midrash (rabbinic i...
The month of Elul, in Jewish tradition, is the month of return. The shofar is blown every morning in synagogues around the world, and propitiatory prayers, selichot, are recited tw...
Moses wore a veil over his face after Sinai, because the shining of his skin frightened the people (Exodus 34:30). But there was one moment he always took it off. Targum Pseudo-Jon...
Where do dreams come from? The Talmud in Berakhot 55a offers a surprisingly psychological answer: from the dreamer's own mind. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani taught in the name of Rabbi ...
When Moses came down Sinai and saw the calf, he did not only smash it. He burned it, ground it finer than any mortar should grind gold, and then he did something stranger. He scatt...
The rabbis of Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer chapter 48 imagined the hand of God as a kind of cosmic instrument, each finger doing its own piece of sacred work. With the little finger, th...
Three thousand men fell that day at the hands of the Levites. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, wants you to know exactly who died. "The sons of Levi did...
After forty days on Sinai, Moses came down with the two tablets of testimony in his hand, and something had happened to his face. The Torah's Hebrew says karan, literally, his face...
The Hebrew Bible says the people told Aaron: "Make us gods that will lead us, for this Moses, we do not know what happened to him" (Exodus 32:1). Targum Onkelos translates this wit...
After the sword went through the camp, the Levites stood with blood on their hands. They had killed brothers, neighbors, friends. And Moses turned to them with a startling instruct...
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught that in the future, all suffering will be revealed as good. Not philosophically. Experientially. You will bless God for your pain the same way you b...
Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef (c. 50 to 135 CE), the shepherd who began his Torah studies at the age of forty and rose to become one of the foundational figures of the Mishnaic age, was ma...
The story of the second set of tablets, the Luchot, is a powerful reminder of divine patience and the enduring bond between God and the Jewish people. It all starts with the afterm...
Remember the scene: Moses, up on Mount Sinai, receiving the very word of God, etched onto stone tablets. And then… disaster. The Israelites, impatient and faithless, melt down thei...
Some verses in Isaiah sound like they are narrating a future cataclysm, and the rabbis who sat in the study halls of the Galilee knew a secret about such verses. Sometimes the prop...
Bezalel of Judah was the master artisan of the Mishkan. But Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the Torah's insistence that he did not work alone. God appointed with him Oholiab bar A...
The Torah tells us about such a person: Moses. When he descended from Mount Sinai after those momentous forty days and nights, he was… different. The text says his body was bathed ...
Whence do we find that he gave his life for Torah? In (Exodus 34:28) "And he was there with the L–rd (to receive the Torah) … Bread he did not eat, etc." And it is written (Devarim...
When God gave the Torah at Sinai, the Israelites did not simply accept it freely. According to Shabbat 88a, Rabbi Avdimi bar Hama bar Hasa taught that God uprooted Mount Sinai and ...
The morning after the Levites had gone through the camp with swords, Moses gathered the people for a speech that was not a speech. It was a confession, delivered to the ones who ha...
There is a moment on Sinai when God tells Moses to write. Not to remember, not to transmit orally, not to carve into stone alone. But to write. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 34...
The number forty runs through the Torah like a drumbeat. Forty days of flood in Noah's time. Forty years in the wilderness. And here, in (Exodus 34:28) as preserved by Targum Pseud...
I'm talking about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The sages tell us Yom Kippur is so vital that even in the messianic future, when all other holidays fade away, this one will rem...
Originally, it was the firstborn sons who were meant to serve in the sanctuary. But, as Ginzberg tells us in Legends of the Jews, when the Israelites succumbed to idolatry and wors...
I've been pondering the story of the Levites, and how they came to be chosen in place of the firstborn sons. It's a fascinating tale, but it raises a question: What happens when th...
There's a beautiful little piece in Sifrei Devarim (a collection of legal Midrashim (rabbinic interpretive commentary), meaning interpretations of the Torah), that gives us a glimp...
The Israelites knew that feeling all too well. Remember the Golden Calf? A colossal screw-up. A moment of collective insanity that threatened to shatter everything. What happened a...
"When you take a census of the Children of Israel, each shall pay the Lord a ransom for his soul" (Exodus 30:12). Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev reads this as God offering the J...
A Roman matron came to Rabbi Eleazar with a sharp theological question. "For the single sin of the golden calf," she asked, "why were the Israelites punished with three different k...
When Moses came down from Sinai, he was carrying something that did not come from earth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the tradition with striking specificity: God gave to Moses...
The timeline is what makes the sin unbearable. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves God's charge with its full sting: "Quickly have they declined from the way which I taught them in Si...
This is one of the most haunting scenes in all of Jewish literature. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves it in its full strangeness: Moses approached the camp, saw the calf and the in...
When Moses saw the camp dancing around the calf, the Torah says he saw that "the people were naked." What kind of nakedness? Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the T...
When harsh decrees threaten the Jewish people, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov prescribes an unexpected remedy: dancing and clapping hands. The logic runs through a teaching about what co...
Imagine, if you will, a cosmic soup of Hebrew letters, swirling and chaotic. Before creation, that's what The letters of the alphabet, unmoored, without sequence. Then, God stepped...
God knew the ending before the first morning. Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah 1:2 begins there, with a terrifying mercy: if God collected the first debts of humanity as soon as they cam...
Berurya, one of the sharpest minds in all of Talmudic literature, once caught a student studying Torah in a whisper. She kicked him and said: Scripture teaches that Torah must be "...
The rabbis counted the wounds and found that five had opened on the seventeenth of Tammuz and five more on the ninth of Av, the two fast days that frame the Three Weeks of summer m...
The plain Hebrew says Aaron took the gold from the people's hands, fashioned it with a tool, and made a molten calf. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds a single phrase that changes the sc...
