1,432 texts · Page 18 of 30
Abba Gurion: This is also called 'Agadta deMegilta' or 'Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) Megillah', as it is based on the Book of Esther. Rabbi Aharon Yellinek published ...
Book of Eldad the Danite A Question and Answer between the People of Kairouan and Rabbi Zemach Gaon [Epstein, Eldad the Danite, Story I] Before the chariot of Israel and its horsem...
Story of Eldad the Danite, Narrative B In the name of the LORD God of Israel, blessed be His name, of our God the King, King of kings, Who chose Israel from among all nations and g...
"Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) Esfah": This midrash is based on the verse "Gather for me seventy men" (Numbers 11:16), explaining the names of those seventy individual...
"And a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets": This midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) is based on the verse, "And a certain woman of the wives of the sons...
Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) Chacham HaRazim" (The Sage of Secrets): A Midrash regarding angels and gematria (Jewish numerology). According to Stein Schneider, this i...
Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) Levanat HaSapir is a midrash on the Torah in the style of kabbalah, in Aramaic like the Zohar. It is not extant before us today. The Yuha...
The Book of the Wellspring of Wisdom When Moses ascended on high, a cloud came up against him, and Moses our teacher did not know if one rides it or holds it. Immediately, the clou...
"It happened with King Jehoiachin, of whom it is written: 'Thus says the Lord, Write this man childless.' When he fell into the hands of the wicked Nebuchadnezzar, he was imprisone...
Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva (Nusaḥ II) [according to the Krakow and Amsterdam printings] Said Rabbi Aqibha: these are the 22 letters with which the Torah was given to the tribes of Isr...
These are the ten exiles which the precious Children of Zion have been exiled: Israel was exiled by Sennacherib in three expulsions; they were exiled afterward by Nebuchadnezzar wi...
Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) Read-but-not-Written I) But [the children of] Benjamin would not yield (Judges 20:13). The word the children of is missing, for they did ...
Written but not Read "For rather Amnon" (II Samuel 13:33) is written, because at first Jonadab son of Shim'ah said "for Amnon alone has died," for the truth of the matter that Amno...
The author of Rav Pealim [Vilna Gaon] wrote about the Socher Tov of Midrash Tehillim and said: I found in the book, Ohel Yosef by Rabbi Yosef the Sefaradi on Parashat Vayikra, on t...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai boarded a ship bound for Rome on a mission to the emperor. That night, on the water, a figure appeared in his dream. It was Ashmedai, king of the demons. "A...
The Aggadah (non-legal rabbinic narrative) of Shimon Kefa preserves a remarkable tradition about how the early Jewish sages worked to establish a clear separation between the Jewis...
These are the ten questions that Rabbi Eliezer asked regarding the resurrection of the dead: The first one is - will God resurrect some of Israel or all of them? The answer is that...
R. Isaac b. Samuel in the name of Rab said: "Three watches has the night and at the beginning of every watch the Holy One, praised be He! sits and roars like a lion and says 'Woe t...
We are taught that R. Jose says: "once upon a time I was walking on a road and I entered one of the ruins of Jerusalem to pray. Elijah, blessed be his memory! came and watched me a...
A disciple recited before R. Jochanan: "Whoever occupies himself with the study of the Torah and with the practice of loving kindness and (Ib. b.) buries his children [during his l...
(19) On New Year's Day all the inhabitants of the world pass before Him, Kibne Maron. What is the meaning of Kibne Maron? Here (in Babylonia) they translated it "like sheep." But R...
(22) We are taught in a Baraitha, R. Simeon b. Jochai said: "There are four matters that R. Akiba expounded, but which I interpret differently. The fast of the fourth, means the se...
Three clever Jewish slaves, sold into captivity after the destruction of the Temple, outwitted their Roman masters using nothing but their wits. Each was given an impossible task, ...
In a time of devastating drought, the people of Israel came to Honi ha-Meagel — "Honi the Circle-Drawer" — and begged him to pray for rain. Honi drew a circle in the dirt, stepped ...
The vision of Obadiah — the shortest prophetic book in the Hebrew Bible — is entirely about the punishment of Edom. Rabbi Berachiah asked: why did God choose Obadiah specifically f...
When Rabbi Yaakov bar Yuda stood up to teach in the name of Rabbi Yonatan of Beit Govrin, he opened with a verse that reads like a traveler's warning: "The way of the sluggard is l...
Rav Yitzchak asked: what did David mean when he wrote, Grant not, O Lord, the desires of the wicked; further not his wicked device, lest they exalt themselves. Selah (Psalms 140:8)...
During the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the storehouses had been burned by Jewish zealots to force the city to fight. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, walking through the streets a...
A Jewish child, still young enough to be sitting with a melamed, had just finished memorizing a portion of the book of Bereshit (Genesis) when the soldiers came. He was captured an...
Hananiah, the nephew of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah, was living in Babylonia in the second century CE when he began doing something the Sages in the Land of Israel could not toler...
The Roman Emperor Antoninus — traditionally identified with one of the Antonine emperors of the second or third century CE — came to Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi, the redactor of the Mish...
Four men sat together one afternoon in the Galilee: Rabbi Yehudah ben Ilai, Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and a certain Yehudah ben Gerim. They fell into conversation about ...
The question hung in the beit midrash: what happened to the ten tribes exiled by Assyria, and will they ever come home? The sages opened (Deuteronomy 29:28) and read: And the Lord ...
The prophet Hosea was instructed to buy back his unfaithful wife for a price that seemed arbitrary — fifteen pieces of silver, and an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley (...
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...
Rabbi Yehudah ben Hanina was traveling through Rome when he learned that a Jewish child had been taken captive — a boy of remarkable beauty and already, in his young life, of remar...
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...
Rabbi Beroka of Be Chozae had a gift. The prophet Elijah, the undying messenger, would sometimes appear to him in ordinary places — in a marketplace, among vendors and travelers — ...
Rabbi Oshaia asked what the prophet meant when he wrote, "I took unto me two staves; the one I called Amiable and the other Destroyer" (Zechariah 11:7). The answer the sages offere...
The wicked kingdom once sent two officers to the sages of Israel with a curious assignment: teach us your Torah. The manuscript was put into their hands, and three times over they ...
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...
The wicked kingdom once decreed that the Jews should no longer keep the Sabbath, nor circumcise their sons, nor observe the laws of ritual purity the Torah commands. Three commandm...
An apostate once led the king into a synagogue at precisely the hour when the Torah reader was chanting the verse from Deuteronomy: "How can one pursue a thousand, and two put ten ...
The rabbis counted the wounds and found that five had opened on the seventeenth of Tammuz and five more on the ninth of Av, the two fast days that frame the Three Weeks of summer m...
On the ninth of Av, the blackest day on the Jewish calendar, the normal pleasures drop away one by one. No eating. No drinking. No anointing with oil. No leather shoes on the feet....
A folk legend survived about how Moses ben Maimon, known to the world as Maimonides or the Rambam (1138-1204), supposedly fled the court of his king in Egypt. The story is unhistor...
Her name was Tzafnat, daughter of Peniel, and her father had been high priest of Israel. She had grown up in the holiest household in the land, with the aroma of incense in her clo...
