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Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa was a first-century Galilean Sage so famously poor that his family sometimes went without bread. His wife, enduring yet another week of hunger, finally said t...
There was a man named Yochanan who served as High Priest for eighty years. Eighty. Longer than most men live, longer than any priest before or since had stood between Israel and th...
Ravina once sighed, "There is no truth left in the world." Rabbi Toviah would not let the statement stand. "If all the riches of the world were offered me," he would say, "I would ...
Rava said something that rabbis are not supposed to say. "Life, children, and sufficient livelihood," he taught, "do not depend on merit. They depend on mazal — on the star under w...
Rav Kahana was a scholar, but he was poor, and poor scholars in Babylonia often had to work as peddlers to survive. He earned his bread by selling women's baskets door to door. One...
Rabbah bar Nachmani ran one of the great academies of Babylonia, and twice a year — in the month before Passover and the month before the Feast of Tabernacles — thousands of Jews t...
Four rabbis were walking together on Mount Scopus, looking down at the ruin of Jerusalem. They saw a fox running out of the Holy of Holies. The three older sages began to weep. Rab...
Yose ben Yoezer of Tzeredah was being led to his execution during the persecutions of the Hellenistic kings. He was one of the earliest sages, a tzaddik whose teachings stand near ...
A gentile came to Rabbi Judah ben Ilai with a rude accusation. "Rabbi," he said, "your face is too well-fed. You must be living off usury, taking interest from the poor." Rabbi Jud...
Rabbi Akiba had been arrested by the Roman authorities during the Hadrianic persecutions and thrown into a cell. They demanded that he abandon the Torah and adopt the empire's gods...
Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah did something in Rome that no Jewish sage was supposed to do. He entered the house of a Roman matron, locked the door behind him, spent time alone with he...
Rumor reached the sages that Rabbi Shimon ben Antipatros was in the habit of beating his dinner guests. Beating them. Not turning them away at the door, not refusing them a second ...
When the son of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai died, the sages came to the house of mourning in waves. Each tried to comfort the old master. Each failed. He sat in his grief like a ston...
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...
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...
Rabbi Yochanan bar Nafcha was so beautiful that the Talmud said he was among the last of the handsome men of Jerusalem. His skin, his eyes, his bearing — men traveled to simply loo...
Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta was invited to a brit milah — the circumcision of an eight-day-old child. He arrived, sat with the family, recited the blessings. The child was ill, gravel...
Rabbi Judah bar Ilai was known for many fine qualities, but one of them became a teaching in itself. Whenever a bridal procession passed through the streets, Rabbi Judah would stop...
Onkelos son of Kalonikos was the nephew of the Roman emperor — by some accounts Hadrian, by others Titus — and one of the great converts to Judaism in the Talmudic age. When Onkelo...
Rabbi Meir was walking one day when he overheard something no human being is meant to overhear. A bat kol — a heavenly voice — was giving instructions to a serpent. "Go," the voice...
In the days of Maimonides — Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, 1138-1204 CE — evil decrees were issued against the Jews of his city. The laws were designed to humiliate. If a gentile were so ...
A gentile once lent a sum of money to a Jew. They had no written contract, but they swore their agreement beneath a great tree in the countryside, calling on the Holy One and on th...
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:...
For three years the house of Shammai and the house of Hillel stood locked in argument. Each claimed the law, the halacha, belonged to them. Both schools were sharp; both were pious...
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...
Rabbi Yochanan taught a strict rule in Yevamot 34b: a widow who waits ten years before remarrying will have no children with her new husband. The ten-year gap, the sages believed, ...
The Roman governor Turnus Rufus thought he had caught Rabbi Akiva in a contradiction. "If your God loves the poor," he pressed, "why doesn't He feed them Himself?"Akiva did not hes...
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi made a grand claim in Berakhot 19a: "The tribunal excommunicates for the honor of a Rabbi in twenty-four cases," he said, "and every one of them is laid out...
Sanhedrin 65b sets the sages debating: what exactly is an enchanter — the figure the Torah forbids?Rabbi Shimon gives the ugliest definition: one who passes the secretions of seven...
The Roman official had one cup too many set before him, and his face twisted unnaturally. A Rabbi knew the cure — rearrange the cups so the even number became odd, and the face wou...
Rabbi Eliezer lay between life and death. His disciples and friends gathered around the bed, weeping openly. The great teacher, the man who had trained a generation, was slipping a...
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...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 64, preserves one of the cleverest moments in rabbinic history. Rabbi Akiva was imprisoned — a fate he would eventually die in — and his student Rabbi ...
A pious man had given his life to discipline — studying Torah, eating little, owning less. His sister-in-law accused him of stealing her jewelry. The charge was false, but the cour...
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...
When Rome decreed death for Jews who taught Torah, Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai and his son fled into a cave. They stayed there thirteen years. A carob tree sprang up at the mouth of the...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 225, tells a sad little case study in academic cruelty. Rabbi Dimi of Nehardea had arrived in Babylon with a cargo of figs to sell. It was custom that ...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 240, preserves a story that the Talmud tells at length in Makkot 24b. Rabbi Akiva was traveling with colleagues when they came within sight of Rome. Th...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 255, remembers a forgotten act of judicial courage. King Yannai — the Hasmonean monarch — had a servant who had committed murder. Jewish law is uncompr...
Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi — the editor of the Mishnah — conducted long conversations with the Roman emperor Antoninus. Their friendship is one of the warmest cross-cultural exchanges in ...
Rabbi Meir was traveling and stopped for Shabbat at an inn. The innkeeper's name was Kidor. Meir did not like the name. It reminded him of a verse in Deuteronomy 32:20, where God w...
Samuel the prophet once stood at the bank of a river and watched a strange sight. A frog was swimming across the water with a scorpion riding on its back. The scorpion could not sw...
Scripture says of Samson that "the spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of Dan, between Zoreah and Eshtaol" (Judges 13:25). The rabbis reading that verse pause...
The rabbis of the Talmud once ruled that a woman should not walk between two men, and a man should not pass between two women. The reasons were tangled up with concerns about purit...
Rome had issued three decrees against the Jews. They were forbidden to keep the Sabbath, forbidden to circumcise their sons, and forbidden to observe the laws of family purity. The...
A visitor arrived at the royal court of Solomon, hoping for an audience with the wisest of kings. He was not admitted. Three days passed, and each day he was told to wait. On the f...
A man of Sidon came to Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai to arrange a divorce. He had lived many years with his wife and no children had been born to them. In the Jewish world of the time, c...
A group of philosophers once traveled to Rome and put a question to the elders of the Jewish community there. "If your God takes no pleasure in idolatry," they asked, "why does He ...
