306 texts · Page 1 of 7
The Psalmist wrote, "He will regard the prayer of the destitute" (Psalms 102:17), and the Kabbalists pressed hard on the verb. Why does it say regard, and not simply hear? Because ...
The Rabbis teach that three things come into the world directly from the hand of the Holy One, never secondhand. Famine. Plenty. And a wise ruler. For famine, Scripture says, The L...
When the Torah commands that each tribe camp under its own standard — every man by his own banner, with the ensigns of their fathers' house (Numbers 2:2) — the Rabbis were curious....
Although the reading of the Book of Esther — the Megillah — on Purim is not commanded anywhere in the Pentateuch, the Rabbis teach that it is binding on us and on every generation ...
On his deathbed, Rabbi Yose began to weep. His students, surprised, asked why. He had been a great scholar, a faithful teacher, a man whose life by any reasonable accounting had be...
The Romans had thrown Rabbi Akiva into prison, and his disciple Yehoshua Hagarsi was permitted to bring him water — a small ration, carefully measured, just enough to keep an old m...
Buneis, son of Buneis, came to pay a call on Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi — Rabbi, the Prince, the redactor of the Mishnah, the wealthiest and most celebrated sage of his age. As Buneis e...
Someone once came to Rabbi Ishmael, the son of Joshua, with a question that must have been asked in every generation: how did the wealthy of the land of Israel come by their wealth...
Some rabbinic teaching comes as narrative. Some comes as argument. And some comes as short, edged sentences that land like stones. Here is a handful from the Proverbial Sayings and...
Rabbi Yohanan ben Matya instructed his son one morning to go out and make sure the Jewish workers hired for the day were fed well. "Feed them adequately," he said. "Do not cut corn...
A terrible famine had descended on the land. Grain was scarce. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi — the Prince, the compiler of the Mishnah, the richest and most influential sage of his generatio...
There was once a pious scholar who left behind a son, Rabbi Isaac, greater in learning and piety than himself, and a dayyan — a judge in the Jewish court. On the eve of Rosh Hashan...
The people of Israel once came before God with a complaint that only a working people could make. Rabbi Eliezer preserved their words: "We are anxious to be occupied day and night ...
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 i...
In the old generations, the Talmud remembers, a Jew would not wear black shoes (Taanit 22a). Even in later centuries, in the Jewish towns of Poland, a chasid — a truly pious man — ...
The Alexandria synagogue, the Talmud remembers, was so large that a cantor had to wave a flag when the congregation was meant to answer Amen — no human voice could carry from pulpi...
Rabbi Achiya, the son of Abba, used to tell this story of a Sabbath he spent in the town of Ludik. He had been invited into the home of a wealthy man. The table was laid with a sum...
Among the Ten Martyrs whose deaths Jewish tradition recalls on Yom Kippur and Tisha B'Av were Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, the Patriarch of the Jewish people under Roman occupation, ...
The Roman emperor Antoninus was a friend of Rabbi Judah the Prince — the compiler of the Mishnah, known to tradition as Rabbi. The two men ate together often, and the emperor notic...
In a year of terrible drought, when the rains had not fallen and the fields were cracking, the people of Israel came to Honi the Circle-Maker and begged him to pray for them. Honi ...
The Torah is blunt: An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter the congregation of the Lord, even to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:4). The verse has stood for a thousand years. ...
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 ...
Rabbi Joshua came to the academy one afternoon and asked the students what Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah had taught that morning. The young man had been appointed head of the Sanhedrin...
Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh and Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania were once traveling together by ship on a long voyage. Gamliel was the head of the Sanhedrin, the recognized leader of Palest...
A min, a sectarian or heretic, came to Rabbi Kahana with a pointed question. Jewish law permits a husband and wife to lie in the same bed even when she is niddah, in her menstrual ...
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, ...
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...
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...
The emperor's daughter was found murdered in Rome, and the Romans blamed the Jews. An edict was prepared. The city's Jewish community stood under the shadow of a general massacre i...
Rabban Gamliel II, grandson of Hillel and head of the Sanhedrin at Yavneh in the generation after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, was a brilliant man with a hard str...
There was once a pious Jew in one of the villages of late antique Israel who kept a cow to till his fields. Six days a week the cow worked, and on the seventh day she rested. Her m...
A man had invited the whole community to his son's wedding. The tables were set. The musicians were tuning. The chuppah was standing. And then, on the morning of the ceremony, a sn...
Simeon the Temanite — a Sage from Teman, a region in ancient Arabia where Jews had lived for centuries — was a regular fixture of the study hall. He could be counted on to attend t...
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 ...
Every day three choirs of ministering angels stand before the throne and sing. The first class sings, "Holy!" The second answers, "Holy!" The third completes the line: "Holy is the...
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...
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...
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...
The Rabbis taught, in Chullin 94a, a cluster of warnings about the small deceptions that undo a household. None is dramatic. Each is deadly.The shoe. Do not sell a neighbor shoes m...
The Rabbi had traveled with Elijah for days and seen strange justice everywhere. A poor couple had hosted them with warmth, and that night the family cow died. A wealthy man had tu...
Bar Kappara was walking along the seashore when he saw a naked man washed up in the tide. The man was called an Antipatos — a title of rank in the imperial bureaucracy — and he had...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), Nos. 360–362, preserves three old parables about what friendship really means. This adaptation focuses on the first — a teaching about the difference betwe...
A famous debate arose in the academy between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua over the ritual status of a particular oven, called the oven of Akhnai. The technical question has bec...
A man walked into a public eating house and sat down to eat. Before sitting, he neglected to perform netilat yadayim, the ritual washing of the hands that observant Jews perform be...
In one Jewish town, the leaders of the community had developed a custom of carrying a Torah scroll with them when they went to meet the king on ceremonial visits. The Torah in its ...
A man in a certain Jewish town had produced a good harvest. His cellar filled with casks of oil pressed from his olives and wine fermented from his grapes. The harvest was private....
