382 texts in Kabbalah & Mysticism
Rabbi Akiva began his life illiterate and ended it the greatest Torah teacher of his generation. The bridge between the two was a woman named Rachel. Rachel was the daughter of Kal...
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa lived in such poverty that his family often had nothing for Shabbat. One Friday, his wife stood in the empty kitchen, ashamed. The neighbors would notice the ...
The Samaritans of late antiquity insisted they were descendants of Joseph through the northern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. It was a matter of pride. Rabbi Meir disagreed. Meir ...
One of Rabbi Akiva's students fell gravely ill, and no one in the household thought to care for him. He lay in a corner, forgotten, while the illness ran its course. Akiva heard ab...
A Roman official named Hadrakitilios wrote a troubled letter to the Emperor Hadrian. "Clearly the God of the Jews hates me," he wrote. "I do not circumcise myself as the Saracens d...
When a condemned woman died under Roman sentence, the students of Rabbi Ishmael made an unusual decision. They performed one of the earliest recorded forensic examinations in Jewis...
When King Solomon was stripped of his throne — cast out by Ashmedai, the king of the demons, and forced to wander his own kingdom as a beggar — he discovered that hospitality has t...
The Jewish community of Alexandria was enormous — perhaps the largest outside Judea in the first century CE — and its scholars were known for asking difficult questions. Once, they...
In the study hall, who rises for whom is not a small matter. Standing signals reverence. The Rabbis watched very carefully whom they chose to honor in this way. Rabbi Zeira was onc...
A student was walking behind Rabbi Ishmael ben Yose. Another student was walking behind Rabbi Hamnana. Both students were following their teachers closely, learning by watching. Th...
A charitable man kept three chests in his house. One filled with gold, one with silver, one with copper. From these he gave to every beggar who came to his door, matching the gift ...
When Moses sent twelve spies into the land of Canaan, the legend of the Rabbis remembers that the land was inhabited by giants — not merely tall men but beings of such scale that a...
King Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre once marched their armies to opposite banks of a river. Tension rose. Solomon, worried his soldiers would collapse in the sun, summoned birds to...
King Solomon warned a skilled builder — the man who had constructed his palace — that the builder's wife was unfaithful. The builder refused to believe it. Solomon did not argue. H...
Two brothers lived in the same town — one rich, one poor. After the festival of Sukkot, the poor brother walked through the neighborhood gathering up the etrogim that families had ...
A merchant on the road was joined by an innkeeper who asked to travel with him. As they walked, they passed a blind man by the roadside. The merchant stopped, opened his purse, and...
Three young men apprenticed themselves to King Solomon for three years. When the term ended they approached the king, disappointed. They had seen wonders at court but believed they...
Rabbi Yudan was famous in his city for two things. He was very rich. And he was so charitable that he had been known to run down the street after the collectors of alms, begging to...
A man walking across a frozen field saw a snake lying stiff in the snow. Touched by pity, he picked up the creature, placed it inside his shirt against his chest, and continued on....
A man named Yochanan once kept a pet frog. The frog, according to the Rabbis, was not a frog at all. It was a child of Lilith, the demon of night. The creature taught Yochanan. Fir...
The Emperor Hadrian once asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah a sharp question. “Why is the Name of God mentioned only in the first five of the Ten Commandments, and not in the la...
The Roman governor Turnus Rufus and Rabbi Akiva argued often. Once they argued about tzedakah. “Akiva,” said Turnus Rufus, “if your God decreed that a certain man...
A philosopher named Proklos, son of Filoslos, once pressed Rabban Gamliel with a hard question. “If the idols of the nations are false, why does your God not simply destroy t...
There was once a custom in a Jewish town that newlyweds were greeted with a hen and a rooster, symbols of fruitfulness. One day Roman soldiers marched through the town, saw the bir...
Rabbi Elazar ben Shimon was a mountain of a man. Broad-shouldered, thick-armed, he used to earn a few coins carrying travelers across the river on his back. His strength was legend...
The throne of King Solomon, the legend-weavers said, was a marvel of engineering and meaning. It was made entirely of gold, with thirty-three steps ascending to the seat. On every ...
The tale is told of a certain Abu Golis, a pagan priest in the city of Damascus who later lived in Tiberias. He served an idol and prospered in its shadow, taking what he pleased o...
The emperor Antoninus was a secret friend of Rabbi Judah the Prince, the compiler of the Mishnah. They visited each other, but Rome could not know of it. Antoninus had an undergrou...
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa lived in such fearless piety that the scorpions feared him. The Talmud tells this miniature story like a punchline. A scorpion had taken up residence in a hol...
There was once an innkeeper who ran his business as a trap. Each night, deep in the small hours, he would wake his guests with false alarms — shouts of fire, of thieves, of s...
The Temple had been burned. Rabbi Joshua walked through the ashes of Jerusalem and said aloud, to no one in particular, “Woe to us. The place where Israel atoned for its sins...
Rabbi Ishmael was known as a master of dream-interpretation. Two students with identical dreams could come to him and walk away with opposite readings, because Ishmael understood t...
When Rabbi Judah the Prince — the great redactor of the Mishnah — lay dying at Tzippori, the rabbis gathered around his bed. The people of Israel fasted and prayed. On ...
The old collections preserve a small anecdote about a woman named Justina, daughter of Asverus, who was said to have been married at six years old and to have borne a child at seve...
Rabbi Gamliel and Rabbi Akiva were once sailing together on the Mediterranean when a storm struck. Akiva’s vessel went down in deep water. Gamliel, on a different ship, assum...
The Torah gives one of its most peculiar laws. If a Hebrew slave, after six years of service, chooses to stay with his master rather than go free, his ear is brought to the doorpos...
Beruriah, the brilliant wife of Rabbi Meir, was the daughter of the martyred sage Hanina ben Teradyon. When her father was burned at the stake by the Romans for teaching Torah, her...
There was once a man who lived near an old tree. One morning, cutting branches for firewood, he raised his axe, and a voice came out of the wood. “Stop,” said the voice...
The rabbis preserved a small, cutting anecdote about a wealthy pagan whose appetite had outgrown his reason. He sat down one evening at his fine marble dining table, which had been...
The Torah tells the story quickly — too quickly, the rabbis felt. Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, was taken and violated by Shechem, the prince of the local city. Her ...
King Solomon once wrote in Ecclesiastes, “One man out of a thousand I have found, but a woman among all those I have not found” (Ecclesiastes 7:28). It was a line his m...
A medieval Jewish legend tells of a king of Poland who fell under the influence of a sorcerer — a wizard — and issued a decree: the Jews of his kingdom must convert, be...
The Talmud in Gittin tells one of the strangest stories about King Solomon. The king, in his pride, once compelled Ashmedai, the chief of demons, to serve him. Through a chain of t...
Before he was king, Solomon was a young boy with a gift for untangling impossible lawsuits. The tradition collected in the Parables of Solomon preserves one such case. A wealthy an...
There were two men in a distant country who had been friends since boyhood. When war broke out between their two nations, they were forced apart. Years passed. One day, one of the ...
There was once a widow who wept over her husband’s grave day and night. The rabbis kept the story as a bitter parable about how quickly grief, left alone, forgets itself. Not...
