The Mekhilta immediately balances its teaching about short prayers with a counter-example. On another occasion, a disciple led the prayer service before Rabbi Elazar and was extremely long in his blessings. The other students complained: "This one is an elongater" — stretching the prayers far beyond what anyone expected or wanted.
Rabbi Elazar defended him with the same method his colleague had used: a precedent from Moses. "Not more so than Moses," he said, "who prayed (Deuteronomy 9:25): 'And I fell in prayer before the Lord these forty days and forty nights.'" Moses, the same prophet who healed Miriam with five words, also prayed for forty consecutive days and nights when he interceded for Israel after the sin of the Golden Calf.
The conclusion is elegant in its simplicity: "There is a time to be short and a time to be long." Prayer has no single correct length. The same Moses who demonstrated brevity also demonstrated endurance. Context determines form. A sister's illness called for five urgent words. A nation's apostasy called for forty days of sustained intercession.
Together with the previous teaching, this passage establishes one of the most balanced approaches to prayer in rabbinic literature. The rabbis refuse to legislate a single correct style. They mock neither the one who is brief nor the one who is lengthy. Both have Moses as their precedent. The only error is rigidity — insisting that prayer must always take one form when the greatest prophet showed it could take any form the moment required.