A gentile once came to the great sage Shammai with a provocative request: "Convert me to Judaism, but only on the condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot." It was an impossible demand — the Torah contains 613 commandments, volumes of law, generations of wisdom. To reduce it to a single sentence seemed like mockery.
Shammai thought it was mockery. He drove the man away with the builder's measuring rod he held in his hand.
The same man then went to Hillel with the identical request. Hillel, the gentle sage of Babylon, did not reach for a stick. He did not lose his temper. Instead, he accepted the challenge. "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor," Hillel said. "That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."
The man converted. He became a devoted student of Torah, eventually learning all the details and complexities that Hillel had condensed into a single golden rule.
The Talmud (Shabbat 31a) records this story alongside two others in which Shammai rejected potential converts and Hillel welcomed them. In each case, Hillel's patience accomplished what Shammai's strictness could not. Years later, the three converts met and said: "Shammai's strictness nearly drove us from the world. Hillel's gentleness brought us under the wings of the Divine Presence."