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Before Rabbi Akiva became the greatest sage of his generation, he was an illiterate shepherd in the employ of Calba Savua, one of the wealthiest men in all Jerusalem. He was forty ...
A short, chilling ma'aseh from the rabbinic tradition, preserved as exemplum no. 73 in Moses Gaster's 1924 collection The Exempla of the Rabbis, makes its point in a handful of sen...
A ma'aseh preserved in the Gaster manuscripts, and recorded as exemplum no. 308 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis, tells of a man who made a single vow early in his ...
A ma'aseh preserved among the Gaster manuscripts tells the story of a rich man and his wife who were, by every measure, bad people. Their house had four walls, and in one of those ...
A man in the Gaster manuscripts left his wife after many years of marriage. His reason was the oldest reason in the world: she had borne him only daughters. No son. No heir. He ann...
For twelve long years Rabbi Akiva had studied Torah far from home, leaving behind his wife Rachel, who had married him when he was an illiterate shepherd and had believed in him wh...
A young man traveling through the country met a young woman, and they fell in love. When he had to leave her town, they swore to wait for each other until they could marry. "Who wi...
A Roman matrona — a noblewoman who liked to corner rabbis with hard questions — came to Rabbi Joshua and asked him something she thought he could not answer. "If God finished His w...
A certain man in Jerusalem wanted to divorce his rich wife. The problem was that her marriage contract — her ketubah — stipulated a considerable sum to be paid to her in the event ...
A drought had settled on the land. The sages, running out of options, remembered the legend that Abba Hilkiah — the grandson of the famous rainmaker Honi ha-Me'aggel — had inherite...
The anthologists of the old Hebraic literature gathered Talmudic aphorisms the way a peddler gathers buttons — many small, each perfect. A handful: The rivalry of scholars advances...
A pious but desperately poor man owed more money than he could ever earn, and his creditors had him dragged to the debtor's prison, where he was left to rot until his family could ...
Why, the rabbis ask, did Abraham only now, at the border of Egypt, realize that Sarah was beautiful? Had he never noticed before? One reading of (Genesis 12:11) goes like this. Abr...
The verse says Rejoice with trembling (Psalm 2:11). The rabbis took that seriously. If joy goes unchecked, they feared, it becomes carelessness, and carelessness forgets that the T...
Rabbi Shimon ben Chalafta was famously poor. One Friday afternoon, as the Sabbath was closing in, his wife came to him with the familiar announcement: there was no food in the hous...
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 ...
The daughter of Rabbi Meir, one of the greatest sages of the second century CE, had a vision in a dream that her fate was sealed. Twenty-one years of suffering lay ahead. Seven yea...
There were once three poor men, each with a different longing. The first wanted only to be rich. The second wanted to become a great scholar. The third wanted a good wife. The prop...
A poor fisherman cast his net and pulled up a great fish. As he lifted it from the water, the fish spoke. Cut me open, it said. Gather my blood in three bottles. Keep them safely. ...
A king summoned Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania and pressed him with a hard question. Is your God really just? He creates some people blind, others lame, others deformed, through no faul...
Abraham the Carpenter lived in Jerusalem in the early medieval period. He worked wood, lived plainly, and over many years saved a small bag of gold. A neighbor coveted the gold, br...
A man lay dying, and he gave his son one final instruction. With the money I leave you, go and trade. Put it to work. The son refused. People who trade are cheats, he told his fath...
Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi (c. 1075 to 1141), the great Hebrew poet and physician of medieval Spain, author of the philosophical work The Kuzari, was urged by his wife to find a match fo...
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...
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...
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...
A woman was left in the care of her brother-in-law while her husband was away on a long journey. The brother-in-law pressed her to commit adultery. She refused. Furiously, he accus...
Someone once asked King Solomon about a famously bitter line he had written in Ecclesiastes 7:28 — "One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not fo...
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa was a first-century Galilean Sage so famously poor that his family sometimes went without bread. His wife, enduring yet another week of hunger, finally said t...
Look again at the opening of Genesis. "Zachar u-nekevah bara otam" — "male and female created He them" (Genesis 1:27). Why does the verse call the single creature otam, "them," if ...
Rabbi Akiba had been arrested by the Roman authorities during the Hadrianic persecutions and thrown into a cell. They demanded that he abandon the Torah and adopt the empire's gods...
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...
The son of Rabbi Reuben the Libellarius was being married. The feast was in full swing. The music was loud, the wine was generous, and the family was radiant. An old stranger came ...
Rabbi Yochanan bar Nafcha was so beautiful that the Talmud said he was among the last of the handsome men of Jerusalem. His skin, his eyes, his bearing — men traveled to simply loo...
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...
Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua ben Ilem were walking toward Jerusalem on pilgrimage when they saw something few human eyes ever see: an angel, flying low over the road, carrying a ...
Rabbi Yochanan taught a strict rule in Yevamot 34b: a widow who waits ten years before remarrying will have no children with her new husband. The ten-year gap, the sages believed, ...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 330, tells a folktale of two brothers. One was rich. The other was poor and had many children. The rich brother took one of the poor brother's sons — a...
A rich man lay dying, and he called his son to the bedside. He made him swear one oath — "Never take an oath yourself. Not in court, not in dispute, not for any price." The son agr...
Rav — one of the founding figures of the Babylonian Talmud, third century CE — had a difficult wife. Whenever he asked her to cook a particular dish, she would prepare its opposite...
A man of Sidon came to Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai to arrange a divorce. He had lived many years with his wife and no children had been born to them. In the Jewish world of the time, c...
A man in a Jewish town conceived an intention to commit adultery. He approached a woman who was not his wife and arranged to meet her secretly at a set hour in a set place. The Exe...
After Abraham had sent his son Ishmael away to live with his mother Hagar, Ishmael settled in the wilderness and married a Moabite wife. Years passed. Abraham wanted to see how his...
A man named Yochanan sat at the bedside of his dying father. The father made one strange request. "When I am gone, go to the marketplace on a day you choose, and whatever is the fi...
A woman in a certain town had a reputation for extraordinary piety. She visited every household in which a woman had gone into labor. She prayed by the bedside. She comforted the m...
A pious man in a certain town gave charity every day to the poor. The townspeople hated him for it. They passed a decree that anyone who gave charity would be cast into the sea or ...
A devoted couple in the Galilee had lived together for years without a child. Finally the husband came to Rabbi Shimon and said they had agreed to separate, since the marriage had ...
The sages taught that when a person stands at the judgment seat of the Holy One after death, six questions are put to the soul. They are not trick questions. They are the exam the ...
