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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...
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...
The Talmud (Shabbat 89a-b) notices something strange: the mountain where Israel received the Torah is called by five different names in the Hebrew Bible. Why? Because a single moun...
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...
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...
Someone once came to Rabbi Ishmael, the son of Joshua, with a question that must have been asked in every generation: how did the wealthy of the land of Israel come by their wealth...
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...
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 question of how oral tradition becomes binding is an old one, and the Talmud answers it with a scene in Solomon's court. Rav Yehudah, reporting in the name of Shmuel, taught th...
When Boaz sent Ruth home in the early morning, he poured into her shawl "six measures of barley" (Ruth 3:15). The sages, reading closely, asked: can this really mean six grains, so...
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 ...
The wicked kingdom once sent two officers to the sages of Israel with a curious assignment: teach us your Torah. The manuscript was put into their hands, and three times over they ...
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...
In the old generations, the Talmud remembers, a Jew would not wear black shoes (Taanit 22a). Even in later centuries, in the Jewish towns of Poland, a chasid — a truly pious man — ...
No one in Israel, the sages taught, could humble himself more thoroughly than David when a commandment was at stake. Before God he spoke the words of Psalm 131, and the midrash tea...
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...
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 ...
In the generation after the Second Temple was destroyed, some men claimed to be descendants of the priestly lines and demanded the privileges of kohanim — including the right to ea...
An Aramean king ruling in one of the cities of the Land of Israel once assembled the Jews of his domain and issued a decree. If they could prove to him the superiority of Moses and...
Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Yonathan walked the road one afternoon until it split in two. One path ran past the door of an idol shrine. The other ran past a house of ill fame. They ha...
The Torah is blunt: An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter the congregation of the Lord, even to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:4). The verse has stood for a thousand years. ...
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...
The rabbis of Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer chapter 48 imagined the hand of God as a kind of cosmic instrument, each finger doing its own piece of sacred work. With the little finger, th...
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...
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, ...
When Achan took the banned spoil from Jericho, the book of Joshua describes his crime with a strange fivefold repetition. They have transgressed my covenant which I commanded them;...
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 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...
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 ...
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...
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...
The Midrash of the Ten Commandments, a medieval midrashic anthology organized around the Decalogue that was popular in Jewish communities from Spain to Yemen in the eleventh and tw...
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 teachi...
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 ...
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...
Every day three choirs of ministering angels stand before the throne and sing. The first class sings, "Holy!" The second answers, "Holy!" The third completes the line: "Holy is the...
In the days when Alexander the Great marched through Asia, the Ishmaelites came before him with a lawsuit. They claimed Canaan. They were descended from Abraham, they argued; the I...
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...
