Rabbi Meir was walking one day when he overheard something no human being is meant to overhear. A bat kol — a heavenly voice — was giving instructions to a serpent. "Go," the voice said, "to the house of Judah HaNasi, and kill him."
Rabbi Meir did not pause to wonder why. He ran.
He outpaced the serpent to the house of the Nasi — the Prince, the editor of the Mishnah — burst through the gate, and set to work. He closed every door. He shut every window. He checked every crack in the walls. Then he placed himself at the center of the house and began to pray.
His prayer was not a single blessing; it was a long, desperate act of bitachon, trust, the kind of prayer that a man prays when a life he loves depends on it. The words rose like a wall around the household.
The serpent arrived. It slid along the walls, seeking an opening. It tried doors, it tried windows, it tried the gaps between the stones. None would open to it. Frustrated, it coiled itself around the entire house, pressing inward, waiting for the prayer to break.
The prayer did not break.
At last a voice came from heaven: "Rabbi Meir's prayer has been accepted. The decree is withdrawn." The serpent unwound itself from the house and slithered away, its mission cancelled (Gaster, Exempla No. 314).
Judah HaNasi lived. He went on to redact the Mishnah around 220 CE — the sixty-three tractates that preserved the oral Torah for all later generations.
The small, wild teaching: a righteous prayer, spoken by someone who loves you, can stand between you and a decree from heaven itself.