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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...
The great sage Rabbi (Yehudah ha-Nasi, the editor of the Mishnah, who lived circa 135-217 CE) sent one of his disciples, Levi ben Sisi, to the town of Simonias in the Galilee to se...
Rabbi Gidel was a sage of the third century CE, a disciple of Rav in Babylonia, known for his rigor in halakhah. He also had a peculiar habit. He used to sit at the door of the wom...
Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania, one of the greatest sages of the first and second century CE, used to say: In my whole life, no one has ever bested me in argument, except a widow, a chi...
Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh and Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania were once traveling together by ship on a long voyage. Gamliel was the head of the Sanhedrin, the recognized leader of Palest...
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...
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...
The Emperor Antoninus once pressed Rabbi Judah the Prince with a sharp question. At the day of judgment, he said, neither body nor soul could be justly punished. The body would ple...
Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Yossi the son of Zimra, asked about a verse that the eye passes over too quickly. What shall be given unto thee, or what shall be added unto...
A difficult case came before the elders. A young man was suspected of illegitimate birth, and the Rabbis disagreed about his status. Rabbi Yehoshua ruled that he was a ben niddah, ...
As Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi drew near the end of his earthly career, the angel of death was sent to fetch him. Because of the Rabbi's merit, the angel was instructed to show him eve...
A band of robbers once stopped a group of travelers and demanded to know who they were. Disciples of Rabbi Akiva, the travelers answered. The robbers lowered their weapons and said...
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 ...
Two men died on the same day in the same city. One was a great and righteous sage. The other was a tax collector, a known sinner. Both funeral processions met in the same narrow st...
A man once wagered his friend four hundred zuzim that he could make Hillel the Elder lose his temper. Win and keep the money, lose and pay it out. The bet made him inventive.It was...
Near the end of his life, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus lay on his sickbed and pressed his disciples with a strange complaint. Had you come to study with me during these last years, h...
Rabbi Yochanan once taught that the royal mount of King Yannai (the Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus, who reigned 103 to 76 BCE) contained sixty myriads of cities. Each city held a pop...
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known by Jews as the Rambam and by the wider world as Maimonides (1138 to 1204), did something no one had done before him. He took the vast, tangled ocean o...
Rabbi Akiva (c. 50 to 135 CE), the shepherd-turned-sage who became one of the towering figures of the Mishnaic age, told a short parable about a man he saw swept out to sea.The sto...
Rabbi Matia ben Heresh, a second-century Tanna who founded a Torah academy in Rome during the age of the later Roman emperors, was known among his peers for an almost iron constanc...
Rabban Gamliel II, grandson of Hillel and head of the Sanhedrin at Yavneh in the generation after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, was a brilliant man with a hard str...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, the sage who rescued Torah study from the ashes of Jerusalem's destruction in 70 CE by founding the academy at Yavneh, once taught that in the future, wh...
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...
Beruriah, the brilliant second-century sage who was the daughter of the martyr Rabbi Chananiah ben Teradyon and the wife of Rabbi Meir, is one of the few women whose Torah opinions...
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...
At a banquet in the academy of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the great redactor of the Mishnah around 200 CE, the wine flowed a little too freely. The sons of Rabbi Chiya, two brothers of s...
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 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 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 Yochanan was suffering from scurvy — a miserable, bleeding affliction of the gums — and the standard remedies were not helping. In desperation he went to a woman skilled in f...
Three Sages sat together — Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Yossi, and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai — and Rabbi Yehudah remarked how impressive the Romans were: they had built markets, bathhouses, ...
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was twenty-two years old when he defied his father and walked to Jerusalem to study Torah under Rabbon Yochanan ben Zakkai. His family were wealthy lando...
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...
Simeon ben Shetach, president of the Sanhedrin in the first century BCE, had a problem in Ashkelon: eighty witches living together in a cave, working malevolent magic that terroriz...
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was dying. Around his bed stood his greatest student, Rabbi Akiva, and what Eliezer did with his final breath changed Jewish law forever.He began teachin...
The Sages of the Talmud were obsessed with the question of when the Mashiach would come — and fiercely allergic to anyone who tried to nail it to a date. Sanhedrin 97 preserves bot...
A philosopher once came to Rabbi Eliezer with what he thought was an airtight argument against Jewish prophecy. He cited Malachi 1:4, where God says of Edom, "They shall build, but...
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)....
A Roman matrona — a high-ranking noblewoman, the kind who watched the Jewish sages with mingled suspicion and curiosity — once accosted Rabbi Yehudah ben Ilai on the street.She loo...
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi was one of the great Sages of the third-century Land of Israel, and the Talmud reports that he had a personal acquaintance with the Angel of Death — a rarity ...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Elazar owned a tree whose branches had grown out over his neighbor's field. The neighbor had never complained — rabbinic scholars were generally given deference ...
Eliezer ben Hyrcanus came from a wealthy farming family. When the Romans attacked the region, his father and brothers fled with as many of their possessions as they could carry. El...
Rabbi Tarfon — a first-century Sage of the generation after the destruction of the Second Temple, one of the voices in Pirkei Avot — was famous among his colleagues for the extreme...
Rabbi Yochanan went to visit his colleague Rabbi Elazar, who was gravely ill. The room was dark — shutters closed, lamps unlit, the particular dimness that comes when a household h...
Simeon the Temanite — a Sage from Teman, a region in ancient Arabia where Jews had lived for centuries — was a regular fixture of the study hall. He could be counted on to attend t...
Rabbi Akiva was standing on a shore — the Talmud places the scene at the edge of the Mediterranean — when a ship offshore broke apart in a storm. He watched passengers thrown into ...
Rabbi Meir left the synagogue one afternoon earlier than usual. His colleagues noticed. Rabbi Meir was not a man who cut services short. When he finally explained himself, the stor...
