335 texts in Kabbalah & Mysticism
During the war with Amalek, the Israelites were losing whenever Moses's hands grew heavy and fell. Aaron and Hur took a stone and placed it under him so he could sit and raise his ...
The rabbis of the Talmud and midrash did not only tell stories. They minted aphorisms, tight as coins, that still circulate in Jewish conversation two millennia later. Here are a d...
Three times a year, the Torah commanded, every Jewish man should make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the festivals (Deuteronomy 16:16). Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot drew tens of th...
A folk legend survived about how Moses ben Maimon, known to the world as Maimonides or the Rambam (1138-1204), supposedly fled the court of his king in Egypt. The story is unhistor...
The Emperor Antoninus once pressed Rabbi Judah the Prince with a sharp question. At the day of judgment, he said, neither body nor soul could be justly punished. The body would ple...
Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Yossi the son of Zimra, asked about a verse that the eye passes over too quickly. What shall be given unto thee, or what shall be added unto...
A difficult case came before the elders. A young man was suspected of illegitimate birth, and the Rabbis disagreed about his status. Rabbi Yehoshua ruled that he was a ben niddah, ...
When Abraham came to the cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah, he did not find the cave empty. According to the Yalkut Chadash, the first couple was already there, and they were not ple...
When Achan took the banned spoil from Jericho, the book of Joshua describes his crime with a strange fivefold repetition. They have transgressed my covenant which I commanded them;...
A strange statistic is buried in tractate Yoma. During the 410 years of the First Temple, only eighteen high priests served in succession. During the 420 years of the Second Temple...
As Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi drew near the end of his earthly career, the angel of death was sent to fetch him. Because of the Rabbi's merit, the angel was instructed to show him eve...
The prophet Isaiah puts a complaint into the mouth of Zion. The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me (Isaiah 49:14). The community of Israel, in the Talmud's reading, spe...
There was once a man named Joseph who was famous in his city for one thing above all others: he honored the Shabbat. Every Friday his table groaned under fish and wine, whatever th...
A band of robbers once stopped a group of travelers and demanded to know who they were. Disciples of Rabbi Akiva, the travelers answered. The robbers lowered their weapons and said...
Of the four sages who entered Pardes, the mystical orchard of divine secrets, one emerged and lost his belief. His name was Elisha ben Abuyah, and the tradition eventually renamed ...
Two men died on the same day in the same city. One was a great and righteous sage. The other was a tax collector, a known sinner. Both funeral processions met in the same narrow st...
A fox once persuaded a wolf to slip into a Jewish household to help prepare the Shabbat meal. No sooner did the wolf step through the door than the whole household rose up and beat...
A man once wagered his friend four hundred zuzim that he could make Hillel the Elder lose his temper. Win and keep the money, lose and pay it out. The bet made him inventive. It wa...
Near the end of his life, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus lay on his sickbed and pressed his disciples with a strange complaint. Had you come to study with me during these last years, h...
Rabbi Yochanan once taught that the royal mount of King Yannai (the Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus, who reigned 103 to 76 BCE) contained sixty myriads of cities. Each city held a pop...
When Noah released a bird to test whether the floodwaters had receded, the Torah tells us he sent out a raven (Genesis 8:7). The midrash on this verse imagines an argument breaking...
Isaiah writes, For My own sake, for My own sake will I do it (Isaiah 48:11). Why the repetition? Why does God say for My own sake twice? The midrash on this verse, preserved in Mid...
A kabbalistic manual preserved in Kitzur Shalah (an abridgment of the early seventeenth century ethical-mystical work Shenei Luchot HaBrit by Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz) describes the p...
Rabbi Meir, the great fourth-generation Tanna and student of Rabbi Akiva, taught that when a father teaches his son a trade, he should pair the lessons of the craft with the prayer...
The Talmud and midrashim collected thousands of pithy sayings, the pitgamim that teachers would fire off at students to make a point stick. Here is a short bouquet, preserved in Ha...
In the Temple of Jerusalem, the most fragrant service of the day was the burning of the ketoret, the compound incense of eleven spices that rose in a thin column from the golden al...
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known by Jews as the Rambam and by the wider world as Maimonides (1138 to 1204), did something no one had done before him. He took the vast, tangled ocean o...
The Talmud tells a parable about a king who planted a magnificent garden and hired two guards — one lame, one blind — reasoning that neither could steal the fruit. One day the lame...
The Talmud preserves a strange tradition about how Rome came to be. When Solomon married the daughter of Pharaoh — a politically brilliant match that would one day haunt the house ...
Rabbi Yochanan was suffering from scurvy — a miserable, bleeding affliction of the gums — and the standard remedies were not helping. In desperation he went to a woman skilled in f...
Before Abraham was a patriarch he was a shopkeeper's son. His father Terach sold idols in Ur, and Abraham — still a boy — worked behind the counter. The customers came in believing...
When Solomon set out to build the Temple, he faced a strange obstacle hidden in plain sight in the Torah. Scripture says that "the house, when it was in building, was built of ston...
For seven years after the destruction of the First Temple, the Sages say, the nations of the world cultivated their vineyards with no other manure than the blood of Israel. The soi...
The Sages had a quiet problem to solve. The Torah insists that on the seventh day God rested from all the work of creation — yet the world is full of objects that seem to lie outsi...
Three Sages sat together — Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Yossi, and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai — and Rabbi Yehudah remarked how impressive the Romans were: they had built markets, bathhouses, ...
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was twenty-two years old when he defied his father and walked to Jerusalem to study Torah under Rabbon Yochanan ben Zakkai. His family were wealthy lando...
Rabbi Elazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, once condemned a man to death for a petty reason — the man had called him "Vinegar, son of Wine," a sly way of saying he was the b...
Simeon ben Shetach, president of the Sanhedrin in the first century BCE, had a problem in Ashkelon: eighty witches living together in a cave, working malevolent magic that terroriz...
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was dying. Around his bed stood his greatest student, Rabbi Akiva, and what Eliezer did with his final breath changed Jewish law forever. He began teachi...
At the very end of Genesis, Joseph — viceroy of Egypt, the savior of the known world during the famine — calls his brothers to his deathbed. Instead of dispensing political advice ...
The Sages of the Talmud were obsessed with the question of when the Mashiach would come — and fiercely allergic to anyone who tried to nail it to a date. Sanhedrin 97 preserves bot...
Rabbi Yehoshua, the son of Korcha, heard the story from an old man of Jerusalem who had lived through the Babylonian destruction. In the valley below the city, Nebuzaradan — captai...
A philosopher once came to Rabbi Eliezer with what he thought was an airtight argument against Jewish prophecy. He cited (Malachi 1:4), where God says of Edom, "They shall build, b...
Rabbi Isaac noticed something in the book of Eicha, the Lamentations read on the Ninth of Av every year. "Her children are gone into captivity before the enemy" (Lamentations 1:5)....
A fox was prowling outside a vineyard — one of those walled vineyards common in Judean farming villages — and saw grapes so ripe his mouth watered. But the palings of the fence wer...
The Talmud preserves floating aphorisms — lines remembered without the stories they once belonged to, collected into strings that read like the Jewish equivalent of a commonplace b...
The prophet Elijah was traveling through the world with a disciple — the kind of journey the Sages often assigned Elijah in their stories, testing whether his disciple could see th...
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 ...
