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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...
There was a man who lived in the Greek city of Laodicea, and he had a rule he followed every week of his life. Whenever he found some particularly fine food in the market — the bes...
Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai lay dying. He had been one of the greatest of all the sages — the man who, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, had been smuggled out of the city in a coff...
Rabbi Akiva had a saying he repeated so often his disciples knew it by heart: Kol de'avid Rachmana letav avid — "Whatever the Merciful One does is done for the best." Once he was t...
The son of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai had fallen dangerously ill. His father, the greatest sage of his generation, prayed — and nothing happened. Yohanan then sent word to a strange,...
A Greek philosopher came to Rabban Gamliel with a complaint disguised as a question. "Why," he asked, "should I give to the poor with a smile? Giving drains my purse. A smile on to...
A woman came to Rabbi Eliezer with a dream. She described what she had seen in the night. Rabbi Eliezer listened carefully and said: "You will bear a male child." In time, the woma...
A terrible famine had descended on the land. Grain was scarce. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi — the Prince, the compiler of the Mishnah, the richest and most influential sage of his generatio...
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...
There was a man in a certain town who was always seen in tattered clothes. He sat on the synagogue floor among the poorest of the congregation. He ate what was given him. He accept...
There is a brief, bruising story preserved in Gaster's Exempla (no. 294, 1924) about Rabbi Safra, a well-known legal scholar of the Babylonian tradition. One day he found himself a...
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 question of how oral tradition becomes binding is an old one, and the Talmud answers it with a scene in Solomon's court. Rav Yehudah, reporting in the name of Shmuel, taught th...
Alexander of Macedon stopped, so the sages tell it, to test the elders of the Negev with ten hard questions. Some of their answers have come down to us, and they show a people conf...
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 twelfth blessing of the Amidah, the eighteen benedictions prayed three times daily, is known by its opening Hebrew word V'lamalshinim — "and for the slanderers." Its language i...
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 ...
When Maimonides — Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known to Jewish tradition as the Rambam — fled the persecutions in Andalusia and reached the court of Egypt in the late twelfth century, t...
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...
A Roman matrona once posed a sharp question to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta. "Your Bible says, 'He gives wisdom to the wise' (Daniel 2:21). But this makes no sense. A wise person already...
Among the Ten Martyrs whose deaths Jewish tradition recalls on Yom Kippur and Tisha B'Av were Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, the Patriarch of the Jewish people under Roman occupation, ...
Rabbi Akiva is remembered as the greatest student of Torah in his generation — but he did not begin that way. The Exempla preserves a small story about the door through which he en...
The Roman emperor Antoninus was a friend of Rabbi Judah the Prince — the compiler of the Mishnah, known to tradition as Rabbi. The two men ate together often, and the emperor notic...
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 ...
A disciple of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had left the academy for business and had come back years later a wealthy man. When he walked into the beit midrash in his fine clothes, the...
Hanina ben Dosa, the humble hasid of the first century, was known for prayers that went through the roof. When Rabban Gamliel's young son lay gravely ill, burning with a fever that...
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...
Rabbah bar Nahmani, the great head of the academy at Pumbeditha in the early fourth century, was accused by the government of a crime invented out of jealousy — that he was keeping...
Rabbi Pinhas ben Yair was a sage so scrupulous in his observance that the tradition says even his animals followed the law. Thieves once stole his donkey from his stable, thinking ...
When Herod seized the throne of Judea in the first century BCE, he fell in love with a Hasmonean princess — Mariamne — whose royal blood would legitimize his rule. She despised him...
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 ...
In the generation after the Second Temple was destroyed, some men claimed to be descendants of the priestly lines and demanded the privileges of kohanim — including the right to ea...
A certain king once woke from a disturbing dream and could not remember what it contained. All he remembered was the terror. He called his wise men and demanded they tell him the d...
Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Yonathan walked the road one afternoon until it split in two. One path ran past the door of an idol shrine. The other ran past a house of ill fame. They ha...
For seven days before Yom Kippur, the high priest lived as if rehearsing for a wedding he could not afford to fumble. Oxen, rams, and lambs were paraded past him one by one so that...
The Torah is blunt: An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter the congregation of the Lord, even to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:4). The verse has stood for a thousand years. ...
Ulla and Rav Chasda were walking together when they came to the gate of the old house of Rav Chana bar Chenelai. Rav Chasda looked up at the crumbling walls, stopped, and let out a...
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...
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...
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...
In Jerusalem there was a great courtyard called Beit Yaazek, and its only business was to receive witnesses. Every month, two Jews who had seen the thin sliver of the new moon hang...
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...
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 ...
The rabbis of the Talmud and midrash did not only tell stories. They minted aphorisms, tight as coins, that still circulate in Jewish conversation two millennia later. Here are a d...
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...
The Roman Empire had outlawed Torah study. Jews who gathered to learn risked execution. Pappos ben Yehudah, a cautious man, saw Rabbi Akiva publicly teaching Torah in open defiance...
A man had publicly dishevelled the hair of a Jewish woman in the street, a humiliating act in the ancient world, where a married woman's covered hair was a point of dignity. Rabbi ...
Nakdimon ben Gurion, one of the three wealthiest men of Jerusalem before the Roman siege, had been so rich that, according to tradition, his daughter's dowry alone was twelve thous...
