How far must a person go to honor a parent? Rav Ulla was asked this question, and instead of answering with a verse, he told a story.
There was a man in Ashkelon named Dammah ben Nethina, a gentile, not a Jew at all. He ran a successful business. One day the sages of Israel came to his storehouse to buy goods worth sixty myriads, a staggering sum. They stood with their silver ready.
There is one problem, said Dammah. The key to the storeroom is under my father's pillow. And my father is asleep.
Well, they said, wake him. It is a fortune.
He would not. He let them walk away with their silver because he would not disturb his father's sleep, no matter the price.
Rabbi Eliezer was asked the same question on another occasion, and he told a nearly identical story, with a better ending.
The sages of Israel were looking for precious stones to replace the jewels in the high priest's breastplate (Exodus 28:17), worth sixty or eighty myriads of gold denarii. They came to Dammah. Again the key to the jewel chest was under his sleeping father's head. Again Dammah refused to wake him. Again the sages left empty-handed.
A year passed. Then, said Rabbi Eliezer, the Holy One, blessed be He, repaid Dammah for what he had refused to do. A red heifer, a parah adumah, was born in his herd. A red heifer was the rarest animal in the ancient world, required for the purification ritual (Numbers 19:2), and the sages of Israel needed one. They came back to Ashkelon with their chests of gold, and this time Dammah was allowed to open the door. They paid him a sum that made up every coin he had lost by refusing to wake his father.
This story from tractate Kiddushin 31a, preserved in Hebraic Literature (1901), was the rabbis' answer to anyone who found the fifth commandment too heavy. A gentile did this. What excuse do you have?