In a year of terrible drought, when the rains had not fallen and the fields were cracking, the people of Israel came to Honi the Circle-Maker and begged him to pray for them.
Honi went out into an open place. He drew a circle in the dust with his staff, stepped into the middle of it, and lifted his face to heaven. "Master of the Universe," he said, "Your children have turned to me because they believe I have standing before You. I swear by Your great Name that I will not step out of this circle until You send rain to Your children."
The rain began at once. That is why the tradition calls him Honi ha-Me'agel, Honi the one who drew the circle.
But the story does not end there. Honi once puzzled over a verse in the Psalms: "When the Lord brought back the captives of Zion, we were like them that dream" (Psalms 126:1). How, he wondered, could anyone sleep so long that a return from exile would feel like a dream?
One day, walking in the fields, he came across an old man planting a carob tree — a tree that bears fruit only after seventy years.
"Do you really expect to eat the fruit of this tree?" Honi asked.
"My grandfather planted carob trees for me," the old man answered. "I eat from their fruit. I now plant for my grandchildren, so they will eat from mine."
Honi sat down under a tree nearby to think on it. He fell asleep. A great hedge of brambles grew up around him as he slept, hiding him from passersby, and he slept through seventy years.
When he woke, he saw a man harvesting carobs from the same tree the old man had planted. "Are you the one who planted it?" Honi asked.
"No," the harvester said. "My grandfather planted it."
Honi made his way back to town, shaken. His donkey, which he had tied up for a nap, had given birth to foals, and those foals had given birth to foals; a little herd was grazing where he had left one animal. He asked after his son in the old neighborhoods — his son had died. He found a grandson, an old man by now, who would not recognize him. He went to the study hall where his own teachings were still quoted, and he announced, "I am Honi." No one believed him. "Honi lived long ago," they said, and waved him off.
Honi prayed to God to take him, and God did.
The Exempla preserves the full arc. Honi drew a circle to save his generation. Then he slept through seventy years and learned the price of waking alone — that a scholar without his companions, without the hands that once placed the Torah in his, is a scholar without a world.
The lesson is double. A tzaddik can make the rain fall by the strength of a vow. But even a tzaddik cannot outlive the community that made his Torah matter.
(From The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster, 1924, no. 422, based on Ta'anit 23a.)