Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa and his wife lived in crushing poverty. Every Friday before Shabbat (the Sabbath), his wife would fire up the oven and throw in some kindling—not to bake bread, because they had no flour, but to produce smoke so the neighbors would not know they had nothing to eat.
One neighbor was suspicious. "I know they have nothing," she muttered. "So what is producing all that smoke?" She marched over and knocked on the door. Rabbi Chanina's wife, mortified, fled to an inner room.
Then the miracle happened. The neighbor peered into the oven and found it full of bread. The kneading basin was overflowing with dough. She called out: "Hurry! Bring a shovel—your bread is burning!" Rabbi Chanina's wife called back, as if nothing were unusual: "I was just coming to get one." The Talmud in Tractate Taanit adds: she had entered the room expecting the miracle, because she was accustomed to them.
But the story does not end there. His wife eventually broke. "How long will we live in this poverty?" she asked. Rabbi Chanina prayed, and a golden table leg descended from heaven. That night, his wife had a dream: in the World to Come, all the righteous were eating at golden tables with three legs. Their table had only two. She woke in terror. Rabbi Chanina prayed again, and the leg was taken back. The Talmud notes: the second miracle was greater than the first, because heaven gives but does not normally take back.
On another occasion, his daughter accidentally lit the Shabbat candles with vinegar instead of oil. She was devastated. Rabbi Chanina said simply: "He who commanded oil to burn can command vinegar to burn." The vinegar burned all through Shabbat and into the next evening, long enough to use its flame for havdalah (the ceremony marking the end of Shabbat).
This is the world of Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa—a man so poor he had nothing, and so close to God that the laws of nature rearranged themselves around him.