356 texts · Page 2 of 8
The great sage Rabbi (Yehudah ha-Nasi, the editor of the Mishnah, who lived circa 135-217 CE) sent one of his disciples, Levi ben Sisi, to the town of Simonias in the Galilee to se...
Rabbi Gidel was a sage of the third century CE, a disciple of Rav in Babylonia, known for his rigor in halakhah. He also had a peculiar habit. He used to sit at the door of the wom...
Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania, one of the greatest sages of the first and second century CE, used to say: In my whole life, no one has ever bested me in argument, except a widow, a chi...
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 ...
Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Yossi the son of Zimra, asked about a verse that the eye passes over too quickly. What shall be given unto thee, or what shall be added unto...
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, ...
A man once wagered his friend four hundred zuzim that he could make Hillel the Elder lose his temper. Win and keep the money, lose and pay it out. The bet made him inventive. It wa...
Rabbi Meir, the great fourth-generation Tanna and student of Rabbi Akiva, taught that when a father teaches his son a trade, he should pair the lessons of the craft with the prayer...
The Talmud and midrashim collected thousands of pithy sayings, the pitgamim that teachers would fire off at students to make a point stick. Here is a short bouquet, preserved in Ha...
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...
A laborer once worked a long season for his master and came to receive his wages. The master met him at the door with bad news. I have no money to give you. Nor cattle, nor land, n...
Two women lived as close friends in one of the towns of late antique Israel. One day one of them was kneading dough at her neighbor's house, and a gold dinar slipped out of her pur...
Rabbi Matia ben Heresh, a second-century Tanna who founded a Torah academy in Rome during the age of the later Roman emperors, was known among his peers for an almost iron constanc...
The Talmud in Kiddushin 31a tells the story of Dama ben Netina, a gentile merchant of Ashkelon who became, in the rabbinic imagination, the standard for filial honor. The exempla c...
A drought gripped the land, and the wells were drying. The Rabbi of the town sat in sackcloth and prayed. Prayer yielded nothing. Then a bat kol, a heavenly voice, came to him with...
At the very tail of Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis, tucked in among the short sayings that the editor gathered from the diverse Gaster manuscripts, comes a single senten...
Rabbi Yochanan was suffering from scurvy — a miserable, bleeding affliction of the gums — and the standard remedies were not helping. In desperation he went to a woman skilled in f...
Rabbi Elazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, once condemned a man to death for a petty reason — the man had called him "Vinegar, son of Wine," a sly way of saying he was the b...
A fox was prowling outside a vineyard — one of those walled vineyards common in Judean farming villages — and saw grapes so ripe his mouth watered. But the palings of the fence wer...
The Talmud preserves floating aphorisms — lines remembered without the stories they once belonged to, collected into strings that read like the Jewish equivalent of a commonplace b...
Alexander of Macedon, conqueror of empires, traveled beyond the known world and arrived at a place called Afriki — a kingdom in the far south. He had come, as he came everywhere, h...
A Roman matrona — a high-ranking noblewoman, the kind who watched the Jewish sages with mingled suspicion and curiosity — once accosted Rabbi Yehudah ben Ilai on the street. She lo...
When Alexander of Macedon conquered Egypt, a delegation of Egyptian nobles came before him with a centuries-old complaint against the Jews. They pointed to the book of Exodus itsel...
A poor person came to a woman's door and gave her a dinar — a silver coin — to hold for safekeeping. She took it and, with characteristic absentmindedness, set it down near the flo...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Elazar owned a tree whose branches had grown out over his neighbor's field. The neighbor had never complained — rabbinic scholars were generally given deference ...
Rabbi Tarfon — a first-century Sage of the generation after the destruction of the Second Temple, one of the voices in Pirkei Avot — was famous among his colleagues for the extreme...
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...
Rabbi Rabina, a fifth-century Babylonian Sage, once learned from Rabbi Tabut (also called Tabyome) that there was a place on earth where truth was not an ethical preference but a l...
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...
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...
There was a man named Yochanan who served as High Priest for eighty years. Eighty. Longer than most men live, longer than any priest before or since had stood between Israel and th...
Ravina once sighed, "There is no truth left in the world." Rabbi Toviah would not let the statement stand. "If all the riches of the world were offered me," he would say, "I would ...
Rav Kahana was a scholar, but he was poor, and poor scholars in Babylonia often had to work as peddlers to survive. He earned his bread by selling women's baskets door to door. One...
When the waters of the flood began to rise and every living thing scrambled toward the ark, a strange creature came to Noah's gate — the Lie. The Lie asked to be admitted. Noah loo...
Elijah was traveling in disguise with a rabbi, as he often did in the legends. Toward evening they arrived at a large and imposing mansion, the home of a haughty, wealthy man. 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...
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...
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...
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...
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 Talmud (Kiddushin 80b) tells a grim little tale to justify a rule about guarding appearances. Once a woman stood weeping over her husband's fresh grave. Not far off, a guard ke...
For three years the house of Shammai and the house of Hillel stood locked in argument. Each claimed the law, the halacha, belonged to them. Both schools were sharp; both were pious...
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 ...
Before Rabbi Akiva died, he sat his son Rabbi Yehoshua down and gave him seven instructions. They read less like commandments than like the quiet advice of a man who had seen too m...
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi made a grand claim in Berakhot 19a: "The tribunal excommunicates for the honor of a Rabbi in twenty-four cases," he said, "and every one of them is laid out...
