Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Physical Labor Is Divine
Do not hate hard labor or farm work, which was created by the Most High.
Translation from the New Revised Standard Version.
Worthy and Unworthy Professions
R. Judah said: An unmarried man must not tend cattle, nor may two unmarried men sleep together under the same cover. But the sages permit it. One whose business is with women must not be alone with…
Deed of Gift from Babatha’s Husband, Judah, to His Daughter
In the consulship of Publius Metilius Nepos for the second time and Marcus Annius Libo sixteen days before the kalends of May, according to the compute of the new province year twenty-third on the…
Shavuot as the Date of the Giving of the Torah
The sages taught: On the sixth [day] of the month [of Sivan], the Ten Commandments were given to the Israelites. R. Yosi says: On the seventh [day] of [the month]. Rava said: Everyone agrees [that the…
A Post-Mosaic Festival
R. Jeremiah in the name of R. Samuel bar R. Isaac: What did Mordecai and Esther do? They wrote a letter and sent [it] to our rabbis. They [Mordecai and Esther] said to them [the rabbis], “Do you…
Legal Bills of Divorce
Any get which is not written [expressly] for the woman [for whom it is intended] is invalid. How is this so? If a man was passing through the street and heard the voice of a scribe dictating, “So-and…
Menstrual Impurity
1. Shammai says: For all women it suffices [to reckon] their [period of menstrual uncleanness from] their time [of discovering the flow].
Hillel ruled: [Their period of uncleanness is to be reckoned…
Good Deeds and Sins Accompany the Dead
R. Samuel bar Naḥmani said R. Jonathan said: Anyone who fulfills one commandment in this world, that commandment precedes him and goes before him in the world to come, as it is said: And your…
Abraham’s Return to His Ancestors
What is the meaning of: But you shall go to your fathers in peace, being nourished in a fair old age (Genesis 15:15)?
He here clearly indicates the incorruptibility of the soul: when it transfers…
Healthy Ways of Living
Hebrew
If one does the following six things, he will die immediately: if one comes weary from a journey, let blood, entered a bathhouse, drank and became drunk, slept on the floor, and had intercourse…
External Factors That Affect the Fetus
Aramaic
A woman who has intercourse in a [public] mill will have epileptic children.
[A woman] who has intercourse on the ground will have children with dislocated legs.
[A woman] who treads on donkey…