Three times a year, the Torah commanded, every Jewish man should make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the festivals (Deuteronomy 16:16). Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot drew tens of thousands of pilgrims into the city. And water became a crisis.
One year there was a drought. The city's cisterns ran low, and thousands of pilgrims were arriving with thirsty children and thirstier animals. A nobleman of Jerusalem owned three great wells outside the city. A pious man named Nakdimon ben Gurion came to him and offered a deal.
Lend us the water in your three wells, he said. The pilgrims will drink. By a fixed date, rain will fall and I will refill your wells exactly as you left them. If I fail, I will pay you an enormous sum of silver.
The nobleman agreed. The water flowed. The pilgrims drank.
The day of reckoning arrived. No rain had fallen all season. The three wells stood dry. At dawn the nobleman sent a messenger to Nakdimon demanding the silver. Nakdimon looked up at the cloudless sky and answered calmly: The day is but begun. There is yet time.
The rest of this story, told in tractate Taanit 19b-20a, has Nakdimon going into the Temple, praying with all his force, and calling down a torrent that fills all three wells by sunset. But this passage, preserved in Hebraic Literature (1901), breaks off at the moment of faith, leaving Nakdimon standing in the sunlight saying, There is yet time. That line is the entire Jewish theology of prayer in a single breath.