When Rabbi Bon ben Rabbi Ḥiyya died, Rabbi Zeira came to eulogize him. “The sleep of the worker is sweet” (Ecclesiastes 5:11). I will tell you to what Rabbi Bon is comparable; to a king who had a vineyard and hired workers for it. There was one worker there who was more industrious in his work than all the others.
When the king saw that he was extraordinarily industrious in his work, he grasped his hand and began taking long and short strolls with him. At evening time, the workers came to collect their wages. That worker came to collect his wages with them, and the king gave him wages like them. The workers began complaining.
They said to him: ‘Our lord the king, it is we who exerted ourselves all day, and that one exerted himself for only two or three hours of the day, yet he is collecting his wages like us?’ The king said to them: ‘Why are you complaining? This one accomplished in two or three hours of the day what you did not accomplish in the entire day.’ So too, Rabbi Bon bar Ḥiyya accomplished in Torah what an experienced scholar does not accomplish in one hundred years.
Rabbi Yoḥanan said: Anyone who engages in Torah in this world, even in the future they do not allow him to sleep, but rather, they lead him into the study hall of Shem and Ever, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of Moses and Aaron. To what extent?5To what extent do they educate him in the future? It is until “I will give you great renown, like the renown of the great men of the world” (II Samuel 7:9).