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A man in the Talmud (Bava Batra 58a) once overheard his wife whispering to their daughter. Of their ten sons, she admitted, only one was truly his. She would not say which. The fat...
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, a third-century sage famous in the Talmud for his conversations with the prophet Elijah and with the Angel of Death, once asked a question only a very confid...
Three quiet stories, each one about keeping Torah alive in a household. Rabbi Yehudah — the Prince, the redactor of the Mishnah — personally undertook the education of the daughter...
The prophet Isaiah met King Hezekiah outside Jerusalem. The meeting was not a diplomatic visit. Isaiah carried a message from God: Hezekiah's children would do evil. Hezekiah did n...
Rabbi Akiva was once walking along a deserted road when he met a ghostly figure — a man pale as smoke, staggering under a load of firewood he had cut himself. "Who are you?" Akiva ...
Rav Chiya bar Adda was tutor to the children of Resh Lakish. One week he vanished for three days without explanation. When he returned, his employer, one of the sharpest minds in t...
How far must a person go to honor a parent? Rav Ulla was asked this question, and instead of answering with a verse, he told a story. There was a man in Ashkelon named Dammah ben N...
Rabbi Joshua came to the academy one afternoon and asked the students what Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah had taught that morning. The young man had been appointed head of the Sanhedrin...
A man lay dying. He had ten sons. His wife, in a bitter moment late in the marriage, had once told him that only one of the ten was biologically his. The other nine were fathered b...
Rabbi Meir, the great fourth-generation Tanna and student of Rabbi Akiva, taught that when a father teaches his son a trade, he should pair the lessons of the craft with the prayer...
The Talmud in Kiddushin 31a tells the story of Dama ben Netina, a gentile merchant of Ashkelon who became, in the rabbinic imagination, the standard for filial honor. The exempla c...
Rabbi Yochanan bar Nappacha, the great third-century amora of Tiberias, was famous among his contemporaries for two things. He was one of the most brilliant legal minds of his gene...
Rabbi Zakkai, according to a tradition preserved in Rabbi Nissim of Kairouan's tenth-century work Chibbur Yafeh meha-Yeshuah, was granted an unusually long life. His students, puzz...
Rabbi Tarfon lived at the edge of the first century, one of the great teachers of the Mishnah. He is remembered for sharp legal rulings and for a single small act of tenderness tha...
Before Rabbi Akiva died, he sat his son Rabbi Yehoshua down and gave him seven instructions. They read less like commandments than like the quiet advice of a man who had seen too m...
The story is told in Tanna d'vei Eliyahu. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was walking one day when he saw a man gathering wood in the forest. He called out a greeting. No answer. He call...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 191, preserves one of the strangest stories of filial piety in rabbinic tradition. Rabbi Ishmael's mother came to him with a request. She wanted to was...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), Nos. 360–362, preserves three old parables about what friendship really means. This adaptation focuses on the first — a teaching about the difference betwe...
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...
Someone once asked Rabbi Akiba how it could be that King Hezekiah, the righteous teacher of Torah, had raised a son as wicked as Manasseh. "Twelve years old was Manasseh when he be...
Two men in the Babylonian exile claimed to prophesy in the name of the Lord. Their names were Ahab ben Kolayah and Zidkiah ben Ma'aseyah. Their false oracles are mentioned with dis...
Beruriah, the scholar and teacher married to Rabbi Meir in second-century Tiberias, was famous for being able to hold her own against any opponent in Scripture. A woman belonging t...
Rabbi Hananyah taught a puzzle that his students were expected to unravel. "Some children feed their parents badly," he said, "and still go to Paradise. Others feed their parents w...
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 group of children in a Jewish village were playing on Shabbat. As the sun rose higher over the day of rest, they wandered too close to the edge of an old well and fell in. The we...
On the day Isaac was weaned, Abraham threw open his tents and invited every household in the land. It was meant as a celebration, but rumor crawled in with the guests. Whispers pas...
The sages liked to place two sons side by side to show how kibbud av, honor of a father, can be faked and how it can be real. The first son fed his father lavishly. He set out rich...
Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel all went through seasons of barrenness before they bore children, even though each was promised a great nation through her womb. The sages asked why the ...
In the time of King Suleiman, a vizier's wife had borne nine daughters in a row. As her tenth pregnancy advanced, the vizier grew frantic for a son. He warned his wife that if she ...
A wealthy man had an only son and trusted him completely. In his later years he signed over the entire estate to the son's name, keeping nothing for himself except the promise of h...
Tractate Gittin (folio 57, column 2) preserves one of the most devastating martyrdom stories in all of rabbinic literature — a Jewish mother and her seven sons dragged before a Rom...
The Talmud tells of Elisha ben Abuyah, called afterward Acher — "Other" — one of the four sages who entered the mystical Garden and the only one who emerged a heretic. Somewhere in...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the second-century sage to whom tradition attributes the core of the Zohar, once sent his son to the study house so that the scholars might bless him. What...
Gaster's exemplum No. 381 preserves a cascading folktale from the Midrash Aseret HaDibrot, the Midrash on the Ten Commandments, all arranged around the commandment to honor one's f...
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...
Two of Rabbi Meir's sons died on Shabbat afternoon. They had been in the house while their father was at the synagogue leading the congregation. When Rabbi Meir came home, he asked...
Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa was a miracle-worker from the Galilee in the first century, known for a faith so exact that his prayers came true almost by default. He lived in poverty. He ...
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 ...
On a lonely road, Rabbi Akiva met an ugly, exhausted man bent double under a massive bundle of firewood. "I adjure you," Akiva said. "Tell me — are you a man, or are you a demon?" ...
The Emperor Hadrian, riding through the streets of Tiberias, spotted a very old man on his knees in the dirt, planting a fig tree. Hadrian dismounted. He could not resist the quest...
When Rabbi Judah the Prince — the great redactor of the Mishnah — lay dying at Tzippori, the rabbis gathered around his bed. The people of Israel fasted and prayed. On ...
Before any commandment and before any punishment, humanity's first word from God is a blessing. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:28) tells us Adam and his wife were blessed and...
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...
Eve's sentence in the Torah is brief. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:16) weighs it. "Multiplying, I will multiply thy affliction by the blood of thy virginity, and by thy con...
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...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:25) slows the Torah down. Adam did not immediately father another son after the murder. The Targumist tells us it took a hundred and thirty yea...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 5:3) reopens old wounds. "Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begat Sheth, who had the likeness of his image and of his similitude: for be...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 5:29) preserves the folk etymology of Noah's name. Lamech calls his son "Noach," which the Targum glosses as "Consolation," saying: "This shall c...
