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This idea of "servant" comes up in Sifrei Devarim, that's the book of Deuteronomy, and it got me thinking. The verse we're looking at is (Deuteronomy 3:24), where Moses is pleading...
Jewish tradition understands this bond deeply, and it's beautifully illustrated through stories in our sacred texts. Take King Hezekiah, or Chizkiyahu, of Judah. He didn’t just rul...
A collection of early rabbinic legal commentaries on the book of Deuteronomy, it's something we should be constantly mindful of. R. Shimon, often identified as Rabbi Shimon bar Yoc...
The fear of being led astray. The book of Devarim, Deuteronomy, wrestles with this very fear. It lays out the laws, the commandments, the stories of our people – all to guide us, t...
To Sifrei Devarim 117, a passage that explores the profound impact of giving, both in deed and in word. The passage begins by asking, "Whence do I derive (the same for) even a hund...
It's all about capital punishment, and it raises some serious questions about accountability. The text states: "And whence is it derived that if he does not die by the hand of the ...
Sometimes, it's in the seemingly small details that we find the biggest surprises. Take horses, for example. Yes, horses! Deuteronomy, Devarim in Hebrew, chapter 17, verse 16, tell...
The Sifrei Devarim, a collection of legal midrashim (rabbinic interpretive commentary) on the Book of Deuteronomy, tackles this very feeling in a fascinating way. It starts with th...
Ever stumble upon a mystery so perplexing, so deeply rooted in ancient law, that it makes you scratch your head and wonder, "How did they even figure this out?" Well, pull up a cha...
It’s not just about what we owe to God, but what we owe to each other. Today, let’s delve into a fascinating passage from Sifrei Devarim, a commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy, c...
It's in those moments, when things feel darkest, that Jewish tradition offers a powerful, almost defiant, message of hope. Sifrei Devarim, a collection of legal midrashim (rabbinic...
The ancient text of Sifrei Devarim, a commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy, uses just such a feeling to illustrate a terrifying point. The passage we're looking at grapples with t...
Some get fertile fields, others rolling hills, but Zevulun? They get… the sea. Naturally, they weren't thrilled. As Sifrei Devarim 354 tells it, Zevulun essentially says, "Hey, God...
A blessing: "Blessed is He that broadens Gad." What does it mean? Simply put, the passage teaches us that the territory allotted to the tribe of Gad expanded eastward. Pretty strai...
The verse says that Moses, "the servant of the L-rd," died "by the word of the L-rd" (Deuteronomy 34:5). Seems simple enough. But the ancient rabbis saw layers of meaning here. The...
The Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 187 preserves a terse but powerful warning about the danger of asking the wrong questions — or more precisely, about knowing when to stop asking. God de...
Four rabbis entered the Pardes (פרדס)—the orchard, a code word for the deepest levels of mystical knowledge. According to Chagigah 14b, only one came out whole. The four were Ben A...
Elisha ben Abuya—the rabbi the Talmud calls "Aher" (אחר), "the Other"—became a heretic because of something he saw in heaven. According to Chagigah 15a, the vision that broke his f...
After Elisha ben Abuya became a heretic, his student Rabbi Meir never stopped trying to bring him back. According to Chagigah 15b, the attempts were heartbreaking—and futile. Elish...
The mysteries of creation — the Maaseh Bereshit — were considered so dangerous that the sages restricted who could study them. The Talmud (Hagigah 14b) famously records the story o...
The meeting — whether real or legendary — between Rabbi Eleazar of Worms and Maimonides represents one of the great contrasts in Jewish intellectual history. Eleazar, the Ashkenazi...
The Throne of Glory is an important feature in the Cabala. It is placed at the highest point of the universe (Ḥag. 12b); and is of the same color as the sky—purple-blue, like the "...
Metatron is the name of an angel found only in Jewish literature. Elisha b. Abuyah, seeing this angel in the heavens, believed there were "two powers" or divinities (Hag. 15a). Whe...
When the Song of Songs sings, "King Solomon made for him a palanquin" (Song of Songs 3:9), the sages of Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 1:2 hear something far beyond a royal carriage. The Ki...
"Go forth and gaze, daughters of Zion, upon King Solomon" (Song of Songs 3:11). The sages of Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 1:3 read that word tziyyon as m'tzuyanim — the distinguished ones...
One of the stranger teachings in the later Kabbalah concerns gilgul — the transmigration of souls. The Nishmat Chaim of Rabbi Menashe ben Israel, published in Amsterdam in 1651, pr...
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 prophet Ezekiel, by the river Chebar, saw the heavens open and a chariot descend. Beneath it were four living creatures, and each creature had four faces. As for the likeness o...
There was a time, the sages taught, when the Divine Name of twelve letters was taught openly to anyone who came to learn. A student could carry it home the way he carried any other...
The sages counted two hundred and forty-eight limbs in the human body — the same number, they noted, as the positive commandments of the Torah. A curse, they taught, enters and exi...
Abdimos the Gardite once approached Rabbi Meir with one of the largest possible questions. "Tell me," he said, "how was the earth created?" Rabbi Meir did not open a book or begin ...
The Roman emperor Hadrian (may his bones be ground, the rabbis add in a growl) was fond of cornering Jewish sages with theological questions. One day he turned to Rabbi Joshua ben ...
A man should study less on Friday, the kabbalists teach, and spend the saved hours preparing for the Sabbath. This is one of the stranger reversals in Jewish life. Normally Torah s...
A small boy was traveling in a boat along the coast when the prophet Elijah appeared to him. Elijah was famous for wandering the world in disguise, testing Jews, delivering message...
Ashmedai, king of the demons, wanted to humiliate Solomon, whose wisdom was famous in every kingdom. So Ashmedai brought up from the netherworld a man with two heads, a living curi...
Of the four sages who entered Pardes, the mystical orchard of divine secrets, one emerged and lost his belief. His name was Elisha ben Abuyah, and the tradition eventually renamed ...
A kabbalistic manual preserved in Kitzur Shalah (an abridgment of the early seventeenth century ethical-mystical work Shenei Luchot HaBrit by Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz) describes the p...
Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Yehoshua, two of the sages who witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and helped to rebuild Jewish life in the generation that followed, wer...
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...
Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef (c. 50 to 135 CE), the shepherd who began his Torah studies at the age of forty and rose to become one of the foundational figures of the Mishnaic age, was ma...
Rabbi Isaac noticed something in the book of Eicha, the Lamentations read on the Ninth of Av every year. "Her children are gone into captivity before the enemy" (Lamentations 1:5)....
When Solomon needed the king of the demons to help build the Temple without iron, he sent his captain Benaiah son of Jehoiada into the wilderness. Benaiah carried two weapons that ...
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...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was so great that, during his lifetime, no rainbow ever appeared in the sky over the Land of Israel. The rainbow, in rabbinic tradition, is not only a coven...
At creation, Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 156, tells, the lower waters of the tehom — the primordial abyss — tried to surge upward and swallow the heavens. To hold them back, God c...
Rabbi Janai and Rabbi Johanan sat watching two men leave the study house. They knew something about these men that the men did not know about themselves. Two astrologers had predic...
Rabbi Hoshaya ben Levi discovered a numerical poem in an old Aggadah book. Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 285, preserves it in four lines. The Torah contains one hundred seventy-five...
Rabbi Levi taught that on the day Solomon carried the Ark into the Temple, something unusual happened to the wood. The beams of cedar that lined the walls and the ceilings, long si...
