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When Rome forbade Israel to study Torah on pain of death, Rabbi Akiva went right on teaching it in the open, gathering crowds around him. His friend Pappus ben Yehudah stumbled acr...
Before Rabbi Akiva became the greatest sage of his generation, he was an illiterate shepherd in the employ of Calba Savua, one of the wealthiest men in all Jerusalem. He was forty ...
A Jewish child, still young enough to be sitting with a melamed, had just finished memorizing a portion of the book of Bereshit (Genesis) when the soldiers came. He was captured an...
Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah were teaching in the same academy — and during the set times of communal prayer, they deliberately did not pray in the same way. One wou...
Four men sat together one afternoon in the Galilee: Rabbi Yehudah ben Ilai, Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and a certain Yehudah ben Gerim. They fell into conversation about ...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Nuri taught that the priesthood did not begin with Aaron. It began with Noah's son. "The Holy One, blessed be He," the Rabbi said, "set aside Shem, separating hi...
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...
For twelve long years Rabbi Akiva had studied Torah far from home, leaving behind his wife Rachel, who had married him when he was an illiterate shepherd and had believed in him wh...
Buneis, son of Buneis, came to pay a call on Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi — Rabbi, the Prince, the redactor of the Mishnah, the wealthiest and most celebrated sage of his age. As Buneis e...
Rabbi Yehudah ben Hanina was traveling through Rome when he learned that a Jewish child had been taken captive — a boy of remarkable beauty and already, in his young life, of remar...
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 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 people of Israel once came before God with a complaint that only a working people could make. Rabbi Eliezer preserved their words: "We are anxious to be occupied day and night ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
On the ninth of Av, the blackest day on the Jewish calendar, the normal pleasures drop away one by one. No eating. No drinking. No anointing with oil. No leather shoes on the feet....
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...
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...
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...
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...
There were once three poor men, each with a different longing. The first wanted only to be rich. The second wanted to become a great scholar. The third wanted a good wife. The prop...
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...
The Talmud and midrashim collected thousands of pithy sayings, the pitgamim that teachers would fire off at students to make a point stick. Here is a short bouquet, preserved in Ha...
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...
Twice in the Hellenistic era the Torah crossed the language barrier into Greek, and the Rabbis remembered the two events very differently. Both are recorded in exemplum 61 of Moses...
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...
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 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...
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 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 Talmud preserves floating aphorisms — lines remembered without the stories they once belonged to, collected into strings that read like the Jewish equivalent of a commonplace b...
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...
A king — the exempla does not name him, which is part of the point — walked into a Jewish school one afternoon. He was doing what kings do: inspecting his realm, accepting the obei...
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...
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 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 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...
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 loved short sayings that carried a whole theology in a line. Here are a handful gathered from rabbinic tradition.Cold water morning and evening is better than all the cos...
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 ...
Ben Hei-Hei came to Hillel with a verse that troubled him. Malachi had said, "Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God a...
