Hanina ben Dosa, the humble hasid of the first century, was known for prayers that went through the roof. When Rabban Gamliel's young son lay gravely ill, burning with a fever that would not break, Gamliel sent messengers from Jerusalem all the way to the village where Hanina lived, begging him to intercede.
Hanina climbed to the upper room of his small house, alone, and prayed. When he came down, his face was calm.
"Go," he told the messengers. "The fever has left him. He is drinking water."
The men looked at each other, then at Hanina. "Are you a prophet?" they asked. "Are you the son of a prophet?"
"I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet," Hanina said. "But I have this test. When my prayer comes out of my mouth easily, when the words are fluent and unbroken, I know it has been received and that the request is granted. When my prayer stumbles — when the syllables trip and the verses scatter — I know the answer is no. Today the prayer flowed like water. That is how I know."
The messengers wrote down the hour he had spoken. When they returned to Jerusalem, they discovered that the fever had broken at precisely that minute and the boy had risen from his bed and asked for a drink.
The Exempla preserves this story as a teaching about how to pray. Fluency, in Hanina's reading, is not the measure of a great performer; it is the echo of an answered prayer. When heaven is ready to say yes, it lets the prayer pour out; when heaven is saying no, it makes the words tangle.
(From The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster, 1924, no. 167, based on Berakhot 34b.)