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Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa once preached a sermon on the rabbinic teaching "Receive every man as a friend" — every stranger, every wayfarer, every unknown face at your door. He finishe...
A rabbinic fable: an ass was appointed toll-gatherer on a narrow road, trusted by the king of the region to demand payment from every traveler. A lion and a fox came down the path ...
Two brothers hated each other. Their father, growing old, asked each of them privately why. The elder said he did not know the reason — only that the hatred was so deep he would gl...
Rav Huna, the third-century head of the Babylonian academy at Sura, owned a vineyard and hired laborers to work it. One harvest day he refused to share wine with the men who were w...
The sages taught a secret about Friday night that changes the way you walk home from synagogue. Every Jew is escorted by two angels — one good, one evil — who follow him from the B...
When Abraham left Ur Kasdim and the idol-shops of his father Terach, he did not simply walk away. He pitched a tent, and the tent became a doorway. The rabbis imagined the scene th...
Ten measures of every quality came down into the world, said the sages in Kiddushin 49b, and nine of each were claimed by one nation while the rest of humanity had to share the las...
Rabbi Simlai delivered one of the most famous homilies in the Talmud (Makkot 23b). Moses, he said, was given 613 commandments at Sinai. And the number is not arbitrary. Three hundr...
Four small teachings, stitched together like beads on a string, preserve what the sages thought mattered most in daily life. Rava said the man who pursues wisdom will receive the b...
Rabbi Tarfon was walking through his own vineyard one day when his farm supervisor — who did not recognize him — assumed he was a trespasser and gave him a beating. Tarfon said not...
The story takes two breaths. Hillel the Elder was returning from a journey and walking the final miles toward his home in Jerusalem. As he approached the city, he heard loud noise ...
A father drank too much. His children, embarrassed, tried an extreme intervention. They refused to give him wine. They cut off the household supply. And when he kept finding it any...
Two brothers lived side by side. One was rich and had a bad wife. The other was poor and had a good one. On the eve of Passover, the poor brother's wife urged him to open his home ...
A merchant left his young wife at the start of a long trading voyage. She was pregnant at his departure, though he did not know it. He was gone many years — so many that the infant...
The Talmud returns often to a gentile from Ashkelon named Dama ben Netina, whom the sages held up as the gold standard of the commandment to honor father and mother. They told his ...
After the flood, Noah broke fresh ground for a vineyard. He had tasted the grape and prized it twice — for its fruit and for its juice. As he worked, Ha-Satan — the heavenly Accuse...
The Rabbis of Bava Metzia 29b worked out what a person owes to what he finds. If you discover a lost scroll in the road, you have duties of preservation, not enjoyment. You may unr...
The Talmud keeps a ledger of shorter sayings — proverbs worn smooth by repetition, each one a whole argument compressed into a sentence. "Do not do to others what you would not hav...
Rabbi Zeira bought a field one morning in the marketplace. A fair price. A closed deal. He walked home satisfied. Then he learned what he had not known when he made the purchase: R...
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...
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 ...
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 Ishmael ben Yossi had a tenant who tended his vineyard. Every Friday, the man brought a basket of grapes to the Rabbi’s door — the standard portion owed to the la...
The Mishnah in tractate Sotah teaches that four kinds of people tear down the world from within: foolish pietists, crafty villains, sanctimonious women, and self-afflicting Pharise...
The old rabbis were poets of the short sentence. Here is a small anthology of proverbs preserved in the Midrash — each one a stone you can carry in your pocket. On speech: Op...
A merchant died in an inn, far from home, leaving a young son who was yet to reach manhood. When the son finally came of age, he set off to claim his father’s property from t...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
When the Torah says simply "and God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night," Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:5) pauses to explain why. Naming, in the Targum, i...
This is one of the strangest moments in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's creation story — and one of its most famous. The Torah simply says God made "two great lights." The Targum on (Gene...
The Torah's famous line — "therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife" — gets a pointed rewording in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:24). A man "shal...
Adam's sentence, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:17), includes an unusual charge. "Accursed is the ground, in that it did not show thee thy guilt; in labour shalt thou eat ...
The curse of thorns and thistles arrives, and for the first time in the story, Adam argues back. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:18) has Adam pray: "I pray, through mercies fr...
The Torah's warning to Cain — "sin crouches at the door" — becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:7), one of the clearest statements of Jewish free will in the entire Tor...
Lamech's cryptic boast in the Torah — "I have slain a man to my wounding" — becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:23), a defense plea. "Hear my voice, wives of Lemek, he...
The Torah calls Noah "a righteous man, perfect in his generations." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 6:9) tightens the description: "Noah was a just man, complete in good works i...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 6:11) isolates the cause of the Flood. "The earth was corrupted through the inhabitants thereof, who had declined from the ways of righteousness ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 9:2) marks a sharp change in the relationship between humanity and every other living thing. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon e...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 9:4) delivers one of the oldest and most surprising laws in Torah. Flesh which is torn of the living beast, what time the life is in it, or that ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 9:5) extends the reach of divine justice to places human courts cannot follow. The blood of your lives I will require of every animal which hath ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 9:6) gives Torah's foundational teaching on the sanctity of human life a haunting expansion. Whoso sheddeth the blood of man, the judges, by witn...
