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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...
Abdimos the Gardite once approached Rabbi Meir with one of the largest possible questions. "Tell me," he said, "how was the earth created?" Rabbi Meir did not open a book or begin ...
A certain king once woke from a disturbing dream and could not remember what it contained. All he remembered was the terror. He called his wise men and demanded they tell him the d...
A man once lived in the capital who was recognized as remarkably clever — but he was also desperately poor. He used to walk the streets crying out, "Why has God dealt so harshly wi...
A rich man once sent his only son abroad to trade in distant markets. During the son's long absence the old father died, and he had left his will in the safekeeping of a trusted sl...
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...
Why, the rabbis ask, did Abraham only now, at the border of Egypt, realize that Sarah was beautiful? Had he never noticed before? One reading of (Genesis 12:11) goes like this. Abr...
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 the Talmud and midrash did not only tell stories. They minted aphorisms, tight as coins, that still circulate in Jewish conversation two millennia later. Here are a d...
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...
A man had entrusted a sum of money to a neighbor, Bar Temalian, for safekeeping. When he came back to collect it, Bar Temalian lied to his face and said, I never received any money...
Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania, one of the greatest sages of the first and second century CE, used to say: In my whole life, no one has ever bested me in argument, except a widow, a chi...
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...
A man lay dying. He had ten sons. His wife, in a bitter moment late in the marriage, had once told him that only one of the ten was biologically his. The other nine were fathered b...
Ashmedai, king of the demons, wanted to humiliate Solomon, whose wisdom was famous in every kingdom. So Ashmedai brought up from the netherworld a man with two heads, a living curi...
A king summoned Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania and pressed him with a hard question. Is your God really just? He creates some people blind, others lame, others deformed, through no faul...
There was once a man named Joseph who was famous in his city for one thing above all others: he honored the Shabbat. Every Friday his table groaned under fish and wine, whatever th...
A fox once persuaded a wolf to slip into a Jewish household to help prepare the Shabbat meal. No sooner did the wolf step through the door than the whole household rose up and beat...
A man once wagered his friend four hundred zuzim that he could make Hillel the Elder lose his temper. Win and keep the money, lose and pay it out. The bet made him inventive. It wa...
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 Meir, the great fourth-generation Tanna and student of Rabbi Akiva, taught that when a father teaches his son a trade, he should pair the lessons of the craft with the prayer...
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...
There is an old rabbinic legend about Alexander the Great that the Ma'aseh Book and other medieval collections loved to retell. The sources are summarized in the 1924 anthology The...
A heathen once pressed Rabban Gamliel with a question he thought would trip up the Rabbi. Why, he asked, did the God of Israel reveal Himself to Moses out of a bush? There are ceda...
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...
In the time of King David (who reigned c. 1010 to 970 BCE) there were three years of famine across the land of Israel. A poor man with nine sons and daughters went without food for...
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...
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, a third-century sage of the Land of Israel, was granted a companion on the road that no one else in his generation was offered. Elijah the prophet, the tirel...
At the very tail of Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis, tucked in among the short sayings that the editor gathered from the diverse Gaster manuscripts, comes a single senten...
Before Abraham was a patriarch he was a shopkeeper's son. His father Terach sold idols in Ur, and Abraham — still a boy — worked behind the counter. The customers came in believing...
Simeon ben Shetach, president of the Sanhedrin in the first century BCE, had a problem in Ashkelon: eighty witches living together in a cave, working malevolent magic that terroriz...
A philosopher once came to Rabbi Eliezer with what he thought was an airtight argument against Jewish prophecy. He cited (Malachi 1:4), where God says of Edom, "They shall build, b...
A fox was prowling outside a vineyard — one of those walled vineyards common in Judean farming villages — and saw grapes so ripe his mouth watered. But the palings of the fence wer...
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...
A Roman matrona — a high-ranking noblewoman, the kind who watched the Jewish sages with mingled suspicion and curiosity — once accosted Rabbi Yehudah ben Ilai on the street. She lo...
When Alexander of Macedon conquered Egypt, a delegation of Egyptian nobles came before him with a centuries-old complaint against the Jews. They pointed to the book of Exodus itsel...
Rabbi Yochanan went to visit his colleague Rabbi Elazar, who was gravely ill. The room was dark — shutters closed, lamps unlit, the particular dimness that comes when a household h...
Simeon the Temanite — a Sage from Teman, a region in ancient Arabia where Jews had lived for centuries — was a regular fixture of the study hall. He could be counted on to attend t...
Rabbi Akiva was standing on a shore — the Talmud places the scene at the edge of the Mediterranean — when a ship offshore broke apart in a storm. He watched passengers thrown into ...
Someone once asked King Solomon about a famously bitter line he had written in (Ecclesiastes 7:28) — "One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not ...
King Solomon — master of seventy languages, including the speech of birds and insects (1 Kings 4:33) — was boasting. He had spent an afternoon detailing to his court the strength o...
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...
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...
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 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...
