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Shabbat Shekalim arrives on the Shabbat before the month of Adar ends, the first of the four special Sabbaths that prepare the Jewish people for Passover. The Torah reading is brie...
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...
Some verses in Isaiah sound like they are narrating a future cataclysm, and the rabbis who sat in the study halls of the Galilee knew a secret about such verses. Sometimes the prop...
A Roman matrona once came to Rabbi Yosei bar Chalafta with a question that sounded innocent and was not. "In how many days did your God create the universe?" she asked. Rabbi Yosei...
A single verse in Proverbs sparked one of the most unsettling debates in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 2:5. "Tzedakah -- righteousness -- elevates a people; and chesed to the nations is a ...
Rabbi Yudan opened his teaching on Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 2:6 with a verse from Proverbs: "Choice silver is the tongue of the righteous; the heart of evildoers is worth little" (Pro...
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 Holy One announced that He was going to give the Torah to flesh and blood, the angels objected. "What is man that You are mindful of him," they said, quoting the psalm, "a...
The Talmud (Shabbat 89a-b) notices something strange: the mountain where Israel received the Torah is called by five different names in the Hebrew Bible. Why? Because a single moun...
The Talmud (Pesachim 119b) pictures the end of days as a banquet. A great cup of wine — two hundred and twenty-one logs, more than a third of a hogshead — will be brought to the ta...
At the foot of Mount Sinai, when Israel answered the Torah with five Hebrew words — na'aseh v'nishma, "we will do and we will hear" (Exodus 24:7) — they did something strange. They...
The Torah says (Numbers 16) that Korah led a rebellion against Moses and Aaron, and that the earth opened and swallowed him. What the Torah does not say — what the midrash fills in...
Two men once prayed at length before Rabbi Eliezer. The first stretched his Amidah far beyond the usual length, swaying and adding private petitions until the congregation grew res...
An Aramean king ruling in one of the cities of the Land of Israel once assembled the Jews of his domain and issued a decree. If they could prove to him the superiority of Moses and...
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...
The venerable Hillel had eighty disciples. That number is not a boast but a ledger. The rabbis kept careful count. Thirty of those eighty, they said, were worthy that the Shekhinah...
The rabbis of Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer chapter 48 imagined the hand of God as a kind of cosmic instrument, each finger doing its own piece of sacred work. With the little finger, th...
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 ...
When Achan took the banned spoil from Jericho, the book of Joshua describes his crime with a strange fivefold repetition. They have transgressed my covenant which I commanded them;...
A heathen once pressed Rabban Gamliel with a question he thought would trip up the Rabbi. Why, he asked, did the God of Israel reveal Himself to Moses out of a bush? There are ceda...
The Midrash of the Ten Commandments, a medieval midrashic anthology organized around the Decalogue that was popular in Jewish communities from Spain to Yemen in the eleventh and tw...
When Solomon set out to build the Temple, he faced a strange obstacle hidden in plain sight in the Torah. Scripture says that "the house, when it was in building, was built of ston...
The Sages had a quiet problem to solve. The Torah insists that on the seventh day God rested from all the work of creation — yet the world is full of objects that seem to lie outsi...
The month of Elul, in Jewish tradition, is the month of return. The shofar is blown every morning in synagogues around the world, and propitiatory prayers — selichot — are recited ...
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...
Rabbi Yossi gave a teaching that startles the ear. The Shechinah, he said, has never descended below, and Moses and Elijah never truly ascended on high. Heaven and earth keep a sma...
When Israel came out of Egypt and stood at the shore of the Reed Sea, Samael — the angel who serves as heavenly prosecutor — rose up to accuse them. "Lord of the Universe," Samael ...
Rabbi Levi told a parable that holds three prophets in one sentence. Israel, he said, is like a noblewoman who had three friends. One knew her in her prosperity. One knew her in he...
The plague of frogs rose out of the Nile, and the sages wondered: how does a single verse describe it in the singular? And the frog came up and covered the land of Egypt (Exodus 8:...
Sanhedrin 91a preserves a courtroom drama from the age of Alexander of Macedon. The people of Egypt appeared before the conqueror to lodge a complaint against Israel. Their argumen...
A Roman matron came to Rabbi Eleazar with a sharp theological question. "For the single sin of the golden calf," she asked, "why were the Israelites punished with three different k...
When Moses ascended to receive the Torah (Exodus 19), an angel stood at the gate of Heaven and refused him entry. "This is not your place," the angel said. "You are made of earth. ...
The sages of the Talmud taught that the yetzer hara, the evil inclination within every human being, goes by seven different names in Scripture. Each prophet saw a different face of...
Scripture says that Jacob's family went down to Egypt numbering seventy souls (Genesis 46:27). When the sages sat down to count the names listed in the chapter, they reached only s...
Before Moses was born, Pharaoh had a dream. He saw a giant set of scales. On one side lay the entire weight of Egypt: the pyramids, the armies, the treasuries, the granaries, the p...
A Tzeduki — a Sadducee, member of the party that rejected the Oral Torah — once came to Rabbi Abhu with a question meant to sting. "Your God is a priest," he said, "for it is writt...
The children of Israel left Egypt in the Hebrew month of Nisan, in springtime, and immediately the sukkot — the booths of the wilderness — went up. They lived in these booths for f...
A strange episode is preserved in the Talmud: a witch once transformed a man into an ass. He found himself in the marketplace on four legs, mounted like any beast of burden. One of...
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...
A student once stood before Rabbi Chanina in prayer and reached for every adjective he could find. O God — who art great, mighty, formidable, magnificent, strong, terrible, valiant...
The kabbalists posed a problem that sounds simple until you sit with it: no one is truly perfect unless he has observed all 613 mitzvot. And yet — who has ever done so? Not even Mo...
Hillel the Elder — the Babylonian immigrant who rose to lead the Jewish people in the first century BCE — had eighty students by the end of his life. The Talmud in Sukkah 28a divid...
A tradition delivered at Sinai remembers the day Og, king of Bashan, nearly crushed the camp of Israel under a single stone. Og stood above the valley and measured the camp with hi...
The last conversation between Moses and Joshua began as a gift and ended as a rebuke. On the day Moses was to enter Paradise, he turned to his closest student and said, "If any dou...
When Moses sent twelve spies into the land of Canaan, the legend of the Rabbis remembers that the land was inhabited by giants — not merely tall men but beings of such scale that a...
The rabbis preserved a strange little tradition about how Og, the giant king of Bashan, survived the Flood. The Torah never explains it. Og appears later, towering over the Israeli...
The Talmud in Maccoth preserves a remarkable teaching: Moses pronounced four severe judgments over Israel, and four later prophets rose up and softened them. This is not rebellion....
