382 texts in Kabbalah & Mysticism
The workers of Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak were clearing a small mound on the edge of a field when the earth gave way beneath their spades and a man sat up from the soil. He was fully...
The sages liked to place two sons side by side to show how kibbud av, honor of a father, can be faked and how it can be real. The first son fed his father lavishly. He set out rich...
A Roman governor once made the acquaintance of the prophet Elijah. The meeting changed him. Elijah persuaded him to take the huge wealth he had amassed in office and, instead of sq...
A poor man came before Rabba asking for support. The rabbi inquired about his usual diet, as was the practice when setting the rate of assistance. The man explained that he habitua...
Before Moses was born, Pharaoh had a dream. He saw a giant set of scales. On one side lay the entire weight of Egypt: the pyramids, the armies, the treasuries, the granaries, the p...
Rabbi Akiva wanted to know which of his students had the temperament of a scholar and which did not. He devised a simple test at the dinner table. He first set before them a dish t...
Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel all went through seasons of barrenness before they bore children, even though each was promised a great nation through her womb. The sages asked why the ...
The prophet Elijah once appeared to a pious but struggling man and handed him four gold dinars. The man was astonished. Four dinars was enough to start a modest trade. It was a pro...
The prophet Elijah came to a young man with a simple offer. He could have seven good years of prosperity, either at the beginning of his life or at the end. The choice was his. The...
In the coastal city of Ashkelon, two men died on the same day. One was Baya, the local tax collector, a figure the community despised. The other was a gentle Torah scholar. Both pr...
In the time of King Suleiman, a vizier's wife had borne nine daughters in a row. As her tenth pregnancy advanced, the vizier grew frantic for a son. He warned his wife that if she ...
There was a man called Yosef Mokir Shabbat, "Yosef the Honorer of the Sabbath." Every Friday he spent whatever he had on the best food available for the Shabbat table. Anything the...
Ben Sabar was a man famous for his tzedakah. When word came that a poor couple in a distant town needed money for their wedding, he packed a sack of coin and set out without hesita...
Abaye, one of the greatest sages of the Babylonian Talmud, had a vision of the world to come. He learned who his neighbor in Gan Eden would be, and the neighbor turned out to be a ...
A wealthy man had an only son and trusted him completely. In his later years he signed over the entire estate to the son's name, keeping nothing for himself except the promise of h...
Rabbi Akiva had a pious first wife who fed and housed his five hundred students for years. On her deathbed she asked her daughter to continue the work. The daughter accepted the tr...
The Sefer HaMa'asiyot — the Book of Exempla — compiled by Moses Gaster in 1924 from medieval Jewish manuscripts, preserves a short and sharp story about the daughter of a Roman emp...
A Kuthean — a Samaritan — once came to Rabbi Meir with an accusation against the patriarch Jacob. It is preserved as exemplum No. 32 in Moses Gaster's 1924 collection. "Your ancest...
A min — a sectarian — once argued with Rabbi Ami against the resurrection of the dead. "How can God bring back bodies that have returned to dust?" he demanded. "The dust scatters; ...
This is one of the cruelest and most luminous stories in the Talmud, preserved both in tractate Avodah Zarah and in Moses Gaster's 1924 collection as exemplum No. 67. Rabbi Chanina...
The great martyr Rabbi Akiva, who lived roughly from 50 to 135 CE and was flayed alive by the Romans for teaching Torah in public, was once asked a dangerous question. "How great i...
(Leviticus 19:9-10) and (Deuteronomy 24:19) lay out a peculiar agricultural law. When you harvest your field and forget a sheaf behind you, you are forbidden to go back for it. It ...
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, one of the great first-century sages, lay ill in his bed. Four of his colleagues came to visit him — among them Rabbi Tarfon, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elaz...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the second-century sage to whom tradition attributes the core of the Zohar, once sent his son to the study house so that the scholars might bless him. What...
Gaster's exemplum No. 160 is one sentence long, but it unfolds into a whole theology. "Rabbi Akiva in prison used half of the drinking water to wash his hands." The Talmudic versio...
Gaster preserves, as exemplum No. 194, a tiny, terrible story — almost a folk horror — about a mother whose son was murdered by his own brothers. She gathered the blood of her son ...
A short, bitter parable preserved as Gaster's exemplum No. 210 teaches the kind of lesson a Jew is meant to carry with him into the street. A man was clearing his field of stones. ...
Mar Ukva, a fourth-century Babylonian sage and exilarch, was famous for his habit of secret charity. Every day he would pass by a certain poor man's house and drop a small purse of...
Gaster's exemplum No. 258 preserves a story that has startled every generation of Talmud students, because it involves Rabbi Akiva following his teacher Rabbi Yehoshua into the bei...
Gaster's exemplum No. 273 preserves two short Talmudic stories about how seriously the sages took small signs. In the first, Rav — the third-century Babylonian sage who founded the...
Gaster's exemplum No. 288 preserves a paired story from the Hadrianic persecutions of the second century — the same killing-field that took Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Chanina ben Terady...
Gaster's exemplum No. 303 preserves a Jewish folktale about a father's last clever gift to his son. A wealthy Jewish merchant lay dying in a distant city far from home. He drew up ...
It was prophesied to Rabbi Akiva that his beloved daughter would die on the day of her wedding. Akiva was a student of signs and omens; he believed the prediction. But he also beli...
Gaster's exemplum No. 333 tells a longer, stranger story of Mar Ukva — the same Babylonian exilarch celebrated for his secret charity — before he became the man of secret charity. ...
Gaster's exemplum No. 348 preserves a Jewish folk tale about the strangest accounting in the heavenly court. A wicked man died and was brought before the Holy One for judgment. The...
Gaster's exemplum No. 381 preserves a cascading folktale from the Midrash Aseret HaDibrot, the Midrash on the Ten Commandments, all arranged around the commandment to honor one's f...
Gaster's exemplum No. 399, drawn from the Ben Attar collection of medieval Jewish exempla, preserves a courtroom puzzle about a cunning father's last will. A wealthy Jewish merchan...
Gaster's exemplum No. 414, drawn from Rabbenu Nissim Gaon's 11th-century Chibbur Yafeh Me-HaYeshuah, tells the story of a rich man who decided to conduct an experiment on despair. ...
Gaster's exemplum No. 438, drawn from the Gaster Hebrew manuscripts, tells the story of a stubborn merchant who decided to prove that a person can lose his property any time he wan...
Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta was a sage of the late second century, a younger contemporary of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi — known simply as "Rabbi," the compiler of the Mishnah around 200 CE....
A Roman emperor once asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah a question designed to be unanswerable: do the dead truly return to life? "They have become dust," the emperor said. "How can d...
A pagan once approached Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai — the sage who had smuggled himself out of besieged Jerusalem inside a coffin and refounded Judaism at Yavneh — and said bluntly,...
A heretic — a min in the Talmud's vocabulary — once confronted a simple Jew named Gaboha ben Pesisa and mocked him. "Woe to you, you living who say that the dead rise again. You wi...
After the Bar Kokhba revolt the Roman Empire passed a decree that struck at the heart of Jewish continuity: any sage who ordained a student to the rank of rabbi, and any student wh...
The sages taught that on the day of judgment, every soul will be asked why it did not devote itself to Torah. Three common excuses will be raised — poverty, wealth, and youth — and...
Rabbi Tarfon was a wealthy sage who believed in personal tzedakah but preferred to hold his money close. Rabbi Akiva came to him one day and asked for a considerable sum, promising...
Jewish law draws a careful line around the rituals of mourning — the seven days of shiva, the tearing of garments, the torn clothes and covered mirrors — and reserves them for the ...
A woman attended the lectures of Rabbi Meir and came home late. Her husband, furious, demanded to know where she had been. When she told him she had been listening to Torah, he gav...
