382 texts in Kabbalah & Mysticism
A woman was left in the care of her brother-in-law while her husband was away on a long journey. The brother-in-law pressed her to commit adultery. She refused. Furiously, he accus...
Someone once asked King Solomon about a famously bitter line he had written in (Ecclesiastes 7:28) — "One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not ...
King Solomon — master of seventy languages, including the speech of birds and insects (1 Kings 4:33) — was boasting. He had spent an afternoon detailing to his court the strength o...
An apostate — a Jew who had abandoned his people — invented a blood libel and decided to prove it. He found a bird, slaughtered it, drained its blood into a small bottle, and then ...
A lame Jew in a pagan city heard a rumor about a local idol. The idol, people said, had been healing lame people. Those who slept in its temple overnight woke with their legs strai...
Rabbi Meir left the synagogue one afternoon earlier than usual. His colleagues noticed. Rabbi Meir was not a man who cut services short. When he finally explained himself, the stor...
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa was a first-century Galilean Sage so famously poor that his family sometimes went without bread. His wife, enduring yet another week of hunger, finally said t...
A king — the exempla does not name him, which is part of the point — walked into a Jewish school one afternoon. He was doing what kings do: inspecting his realm, accepting the obei...
In the days when Alexander the Great marched through Asia, the Ishmaelites came before him with a lawsuit. They claimed Canaan. They were descended from Abraham, they argued; the I...
Yose ben Yoezer of Tzeredah was being led to his execution during the persecutions of the Hellenistic kings. He was one of the earliest sages, a tzaddik whose teachings stand near ...
A gentile came to Rabbi Judah ben Ilai with a rude accusation. "Rabbi," he said, "your face is too well-fed. You must be living off usury, taking interest from the poor." Rabbi Jud...
Rabbi Akiba had been arrested by the Roman authorities during the Hadrianic persecutions and thrown into a cell. They demanded that he abandon the Torah and adopt the empire's gods...
Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah did something in Rome that no Jewish sage was supposed to do. He entered the house of a Roman matron, locked the door behind him, spent time alone with he...
Rumor reached the sages that Rabbi Shimon ben Antipatros was in the habit of beating his dinner guests. Beating them. Not turning them away at the door, not refusing them a second ...
A man in need entrusted his entire savings to a neighbor who was famous for piety. The neighbor wore his observance on his sleeve; his neighbors spoke of him with admiration. The m...
The son of Rabbi Reuben the Libellarius was being married. The feast was in full swing. The music was loud, the wine was generous, and the family was radiant. An old stranger came ...
King Solomon had two trusted secretaries, Eliharaf and Ahijah, the sons of Shisha. One morning, as they entered the throne room to begin their duties, they noticed something that c...
Toward the end of his reign, David was asked by the Holy One to choose a punishment for the chain of disasters his decisions had caused — the slaughter of the priestly city of Nob,...
When the son of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai died, the sages came to the house of mourning in waves. Each tried to comfort the old master. Each failed. He sat in his grief like a ston...
Rabbi Tarfon lived at the edge of the first century, one of the great teachers of the Mishnah. He is remembered for sharp legal rulings and for a single small act of tenderness tha...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was so great that, during his lifetime, no rainbow ever appeared in the sky over the Land of Israel. The rainbow, in rabbinic tradition, is not only a coven...
Rabbi Yochanan bar Nafcha was so beautiful that the Talmud said he was among the last of the handsome men of Jerusalem. His skin, his eyes, his bearing — men traveled to simply loo...
Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta was invited to a brit milah — the circumcision of an eight-day-old child. He arrived, sat with the family, recited the blessings. The child was ill, gravel...
Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish — the one we call Resh Lakish — had once been a highway robber. He ran with two companions, robbing travelers on the roads outside Tiberias, and their names...
Rabbi Judah bar Ilai was known for many fine qualities, but one of them became a teaching in itself. Whenever a bridal procession passed through the streets, Rabbi Judah would stop...
Onkelos son of Kalonikos was the nephew of the Roman emperor — by some accounts Hadrian, by others Titus — and one of the great converts to Judaism in the Talmudic age. When Onkelo...
A ship full of travelers was crossing the sea when the wind died. The vessel drifted into still, silent waters and stopped. Each day the becalmed ship sat motionless on a surface l...
Rabbi Meir was walking one day when he overheard something no human being is meant to overhear. A bat kol — a heavenly voice — was giving instructions to a serpent. "Go," the voice...
The servants of King David were sitting together eating eggs. One of them finished his egg while the others were still eating theirs, and he felt embarrassed to be sitting empty-ha...
In the days of Maimonides — Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, 1138-1204 CE — evil decrees were issued against the Jews of his city. The laws were designed to humiliate. If a gentile were so ...
A gentile once lent a sum of money to a Jew. They had no written contract, but they swore their agreement beneath a great tree in the countryside, calling on the Holy One and on th...
A man left a dinar — a single silver coin — with a woman for safekeeping. She didn't want to forget where she had put it. She dropped it into a jar of flour and went about her day....
A pious man had a magnificent tree in his garden. For years it had been the pride of his land — tall, shady, heavy with fruit. Travelers and neighbors loved to rest beneath it. But...
Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua ben Ilem were walking toward Jerusalem on pilgrimage when they saw something few human eyes ever see: an angel, flying low over the road, carrying a ...
There was a Jew who had given everything up. He spent his life trying to blend in with the gentile elite, adopting their dress, their manners, their tastes. His parents had been ob...
Two men were crossing the desert together, each carrying his own provisions. One of them — the cunning one — proposed that they first eat all the provisions of his companion and sa...
Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis (1924), preserved from the Ma'aseh Book, tells a courtroom tale set in the court of Alexander. The people of Afriki — the descendants of Canaan who h...
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...
Rabbi Meir was one of the great teachers of the generation after the destruction of the Temple, and he had a problem. Wicked men in the neighborhood were harassing him. He prayed f...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 64, preserves one of the cleverest moments in rabbinic history. Rabbi Akiva was imprisoned — a fate he would eventually die in — and his student Rabbi ...
Jerusalem was dying of thirst. Nakdimon ben Gorion, one of the wealthiest men in the city, made a desperate deal. He borrowed twelve great cisterns' worth of water from a Roman Heg...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 104, tells a quiet parable with a sharp edge. A man decided to cheat on his tithe. The Torah commands the Israelite to give a tenth of the field's yiel...
A pious man had given his life to discipline — studying Torah, eating little, owning less. His sister-in-law accused him of stealing her jewelry. The charge was false, but the cour...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 140, tells the tale in a handful of sentences — which is precisely its horror. The two sons of Rabbi Reuben ben Astribulos lived in Tiberias. One day w...
At creation, Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 156, tells, the lower waters of the tehom — the primordial abyss — tried to surge upward and swallow the heavens. To hold them back, God c...
Rabbi Janai and Rabbi Johanan sat watching two men leave the study house. They knew something about these men that the men did not know about themselves. Two astrologers had predic...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 191, preserves one of the strangest stories of filial piety in rabbinic tradition. Rabbi Ishmael's mother came to him with a request. She wanted to was...
When Rome decreed death for Jews who taught Torah, Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai and his son fled into a cave. They stayed there thirteen years. A carob tree sprang up at the mouth of the...
