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A ma'aseh preserved in the Gaster manuscripts describes a strange people in a distant country who had built their religion around fire. Every morning at dawn they lit one great sta...
The Romans had thrown Rabbi Akiva into prison, and his disciple Yehoshua Hagarsi was permitted to bring him water — a small ration, carefully measured, just enough to keep an old m...
It is popular to lump all Pharisees together. The rabbis themselves did not. In Avot de-Rabbi Natan (chapter 37), the sages drew up a list — not of their enemies, but of themselves...
The prophet Hosea was instructed to buy back his unfaithful wife for a price that seemed arbitrary — fifteen pieces of silver, and an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley (...
Joseph's brothers had carried their father's coffin up from Egypt to bury him in the Cave of Machpelah. At the mouth of the cave, Esau was waiting. "This grave is mine," Esau said....
(Genesis 6:6) is one of the most unsettling verses in the Torah: And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. How could the All-Know...
In the years after the fall of the holy city, a mother named Hannah and her seven sons were thrown into prison. One by one, in order of their ages, the tyrant brought the boys befo...
Simeon ben Kamhith was serving as High Priest. He had walked with a foreign king, and in the course of the conversation a drop of spittle from the king's mouth touched Simeon's gar...
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...
Three men were traveling together through a lonely country. As Friday afternoon wore on, one of them stopped. "The sun is setting," he said. "I will not travel on Shabbat. I will s...
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...
Rabbi Beroka of Be Chozae had a gift. The prophet Elijah, the undying messenger, would sometimes appear to him in ordinary places — in a marketplace, among vendors and travelers — ...
A drought had settled on the land. The sages, running out of options, remembered the legend that Abba Hilkiah — the grandson of the famous rainmaker Honi ha-Me'aggel — had inherite...
The Torah tells the encounter briefly: Potiphar's wife caught Joseph by his cloak, and he fled. The midrash, unwilling to leave so fierce a struggle so thinly described, puts Psalm...
Rabbi Achiya, the son of Abba, used to tell this story of a Sabbath he spent in the town of Ludik. He had been invited into the home of a wealthy man. The table was laid with a sum...
Abraham stepped out of the cave where he had been hidden as an infant, and for the first time saw the world above ground. He looked up and saw the sun climbing, enormous and warm, ...
When the wicked kingdom destroyed the Temple and carried the people into slavery, the son and daughter of Rabbi Ishmael — both famous for their beauty — were seized and sold to dif...
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...
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 ...
A pious but desperately poor man owed more money than he could ever earn, and his creditors had him dragged to the debtor's prison, where he was left to rot until his family could ...
When Nimrod the wicked cast Abraham into the fiery furnace for smashing his father's idols, the angel Gabriel stepped forward in the heavenly court. Ribbono shel Olam, Master of th...
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...
During the war with Amalek, the Israelites were losing whenever Moses's hands grew heavy and fell. Aaron and Hur took a stone and placed it under him so he could sit and raise his ...
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 ...
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...
Abraham the Carpenter lived in Jerusalem in the early medieval period. He worked wood, lived plainly, and over many years saved a small bag of gold. A neighbor coveted the gold, br...
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 strange statistic is buried in tractate Yoma. During the 410 years of the First Temple, only eighteen high priests served in succession. During the 420 years of the Second Temple...
In the Temple of Jerusalem, the most fragrant service of the day was the burning of the ketoret, the compound incense of eleven spices that rose in a thin column from the golden al...
The emperor's daughter was found murdered in Rome, and the Romans blamed the Jews. An edict was prepared. The city's Jewish community stood under the shadow of a general massacre i...
A laborer once worked a long season for his master and came to receive his wages. The master met him at the door with bad news. I have no money to give you. Nor cattle, nor land, n...
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 st...
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...
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...
There was once a pious Jew in one of the villages of late antique Israel who kept a cow to till his fields. Six days a week the cow worked, and on the seventh day she rested. Her m...
A man lay dying, and he gave his son one final instruction. With the money I leave you, go and trade. Put it to work. The son refused. People who trade are cheats, he told his fath...
A drought gripped the land, and the wells were drying. The Rabbi of the town sat in sackcloth and prayed. Prayer yielded nothing. Then a bat kol, a heavenly voice, came to him with...
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...
Monobaz was a prince of the royal house of Adiabene, a small kingdom east of the Tigris whose royal family famously converted to Judaism in the first century CE. His mother Queen H...
Benjamin the Righteous was the keeper of the communal poor-box in his city. He had one job: to guard the coins and give them out to the hungry. In a year of famine a woman came to ...
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 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 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...
A pious man had a magnificent tree in his garden. For years it had been the pride of his land — tall, shady, heavy with fruit. Travelers and neighbors loved to rest beneath it. But...
Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua ben Ilem were walking toward Jerusalem on pilgrimage when they saw something few human eyes ever see: an angel, flying low over the road, carrying a ...
And it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham (Genesis 22:1). Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Rabbi Yossi ben Zimra, asks in Sanhedrin 89b: after what thin...
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...
