Samuel the Small and the Blessing Against Slanderers

Midrash Aggadah Berakhot 28b-29a

Curated by The Jewish Mythology Team · Published January 15, 2025

The twelfth blessing of the Amidah, the eighteen benedictions prayed three times daily, is known by its opening Hebrew word V'lamalshinim — "and for the slanderers." Its language is sharp: "Let the slanderers have no hope, let all the wicked perish speedily, let the arrogant be cut down and humbled quickly in our days. Blessed are You, O Lord, who destroys enemies and humbles the arrogant."

The sages preserved the memory of its composer: Samuel the Small, Shmuel ha-Katan, a gentle teacher whom the tradition describes as so devoted that Rabban Gamliel the Elder and Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah eulogized him at his graveside.

His reputation was spotless; the tradition in Semachot 8 insists he died a good Jew, and his key and his personal journal were laid on his coffin because he had no son to carry on his household.

The blessing he wrote was not aimed at outsiders; it was a prayer against the kind of informers who betrayed fellow Jews to hostile authorities and against the internal rot of slander within the community. The lesson the sages draw is sober: the Jewish people pray against wickedness not with private anger but in a fixed, liturgical voice — so that even outrage remains an act of worship.

(From the 1901 Hebraic Literature anthology, drawing on Berakhot 28b-29a and Semachot 8.)

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