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A ma'aseh preserved among the Gaster manuscripts tells the story of a rich man and his wife who were, by every measure, bad people. Their house had four walls, and in one of those ...
Open the book of Kings and read: And the days that David reigned over Israel were forty years: seven years reigned he in Hebron, and thirty and three years reigned he in Jerusalem ...
The Talmud (Pesachim 119b) pictures the end of days as a banquet. A great cup of wine — two hundred and twenty-one logs, more than a third of a hogshead — will be brought to the ta...
Rav Huna once woke to find that four hundred of his casks of wine had soured into vinegar. This was not an inconvenience. This was ruin. Word spread. Rav Yehudah, the brother of Ra...
At the foot of Mount Sinai, when Israel answered the Torah with five Hebrew words — na'aseh v'nishma, "we will do and we will hear" (Exodus 24:7) — they did something strange. They...
A young man traveling through the country met a young woman, and they fell in love. When he had to leave her town, they swore to wait for each other until they could marry. "Who wi...
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...
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 ...
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...
A man from the Galilee once traveled to Jerusalem for the three festival pilgrimages. On his way home, rather than carry all his coin across the dangerous roads, he entrusted two h...
A rich man, old and childless, prayed for years for a son. In his advanced age God granted him one. He named the boy Saul, after the first king of Israel, and lavished everything o...
When Abraham came to the cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah, he did not find the cave empty. According to the Yalkut Chadash, the first couple was already there, and they were not ple...
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 ...
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...
King Manasseh of Judah reigned fifty-five years, longer than any other king of David's line, and the book of Kings accuses him of a staggering catalog of evils (2 Kings 21:1-18). H...
The book of Kings rarely spares a good word for King Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel (reigned c. 874 to 853 BCE). He built a temple to Baal in Samaria, married Jezebel, and ...
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...
The month of Elul, in Jewish tradition, is the month of return. The shofar is blown every morning in synagogues around the world, and propitiatory prayers — selichot — are recited ...
When the Romans stormed the Second Temple, they faced a problem their swords could not solve: none of them wanted to be the first to walk into the sanctuary. The inner chambers wer...
A pious man was walking along the shore of Haifa, the harbor city on the Mediterranean coast of the Galilee. As he walked he was thinking about a rabbinic tradition — a well-known ...
Elazar ben Dordaya was, by his own admission, a man who had lived as low a life as a Jewish soul could live. He had chased every pleasure, broken every fence of decency, and finall...
A woman was left in the care of her brother-in-law while her husband was away on a long journey. The brother-in-law pressed her to commit adultery. She refused. Furiously, he accus...
A lame Jew in a pagan city heard a rumor about a local idol. The idol, people said, had been healing lame people. Those who slept in its temple overnight woke with their legs strai...
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...
Rabbi Eleazar said that the month of Tishri holds more Jewish history than any other. "Abraham and Jacob were born in Tishri," he taught, "and in Tishri they died. On the first of ...
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 ...
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 Lakish — the one we call Resh Lakish — had once been a highway robber. He ran with two companions, robbing travelers on the roads outside Tiberias, and their names...
There was a Jew who had given everything up. He spent his life trying to blend in with the gentile elite, adopting their dress, their manners, their tastes. His parents had been ob...
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...
The sages illustrated repentance with a parable, and this one has sailed down the centuries. A great ship was crossing the ocean on a long voyage. Before reaching port, a storm dro...
Rabbi Meir was one of the great teachers of the generation after the destruction of the Temple, and he had a problem. Wicked men in the neighborhood were harassing him. He prayed f...
On the day Solomon sought to bring the Aron, the Ark of the Covenant, into the newly finished Temple, the gates refused to open. Solomon stood before them and began to recite psalm...
"Those passing through the valley of weeping make it a well; also blessings shall cover the teacher" (Psalms 84:6). Rabbi Yochanan read the verse and pressed on its first image. Th...
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...
A ship docked at an island on its way between two ports. The captain announced that he would weigh anchor at a set hour, and he warned the passengers that a bell would sound three ...
Elisha ben Abuyah had once been one of the greatest scholars of his generation, a colleague of Rabbi Akiba. Then he turned away from the tradition so completely that the rabbis sto...
A man in a Jewish town conceived an intention to commit adultery. He approached a woman who was not his wife and arranged to meet her secretly at a set hour in a set place. The Exe...
A wicked man lay on his deathbed. He had lived a long life of greed. He had never given charity. He had never sent food to a poor neighbor. His door had remained closed against eve...
The sages taught that four things cancel an evil decree sealed in Heaven, and they built each proof from Scripture itself. The first is tzedakah, the righteous gift. "Righteousness...
The prophet Joel called him "the hidden one," and the sages took the phrase at its full weight. "I will remove far from you the hidden one, and I will drive him into a land barren ...
A traditional prayer of personal return, drawn from the anthologies of Jewish rabbinical writings, places the worshiper on his knees before the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. "E...
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 Rosh Hashanah (folio 16, column 2) teaches that on the Day of Judgment three ledgers are opened and three groups of souls appear before the Holy One, blessed be He. The pe...
One of the most formidable women in the Talmud was Beruriah, wife of Rabbi Meir. She appears mostly in fragments — but in one famous passage she corrects her husband's Hebrew, and ...
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, one of the great first-century sages, lay ill in his bed. Four of his colleagues came to visit him — among them Rabbi Tarfon, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elaz...
Gaster's exemplum No. 333 tells a longer, stranger story of Mar Ukva — the same Babylonian exilarch celebrated for his secret charity — before he became the man of secret charity. ...
