An Aramean king ruling in one of the cities of the Land of Israel once assembled the Jews of his domain and issued a decree. If they could prove to him the superiority of Moses and his Torah above the teachings of the rival faith that the court favored, he would himself convert to Judaism. If they could not, he would kill every Jew under his rule.

He gave them twenty days to prepare.

The Jews of that city declared a public fast. They wept and prayed. On the seventeenth day, when despair was pressing in, an old man in the synagogue began sobbing harder than the rest.

"Why do you weep more?" they asked him.

"I know of a young scholar in Tiberias named Meir," he said, "who could answer the king. But it is too far. I could not reach him in six days, and the deadline comes before that."

"Go anyway," they urged.

He set out. Rabbi Meir received him with a strange calm. "Be happy," Rabbi Meir said. "You will be back with the king by tomorrow morning." Rabbi Meir pronounced the Shem ha-Mephorash, the Ineffable Name, and the road shortened beneath them. They arrived in time.

On the appointed morning the king's soldiers came to the study hall to receive the answer or carry out the massacre. Rabbi Meir met them at the door. They raised their hands to strike him. Rabbi Meir uttered the Ineffable Name again, and the soldiers' hands withered in the air, fixed and useless above their heads. They could not lower them. They staggered back to the palace to report.

The king, astonished, sent for Rabbi Meir and seated him on a throne of honor. Rabbi Meir called the people together and prayed. A fiery serpent appeared and burned away the soldiers who had threatened Israel. Then Rabbi Meir called up the spirit of Moses, who brought with him the perfumes of Gan Eden, the garden of paradise — and the whole courtyard filled with a fragrance no earthly incense could imitate. Rabbi Meir then healed the withered soldiers, restoring their hands.

The king confessed before the whole assembly that Moses and his Torah had proved their superiority, and he accepted the yoke of heaven.

The Exempla keeps this defiant little tale because it is the fantasy of a persecuted people: that the power of Torah, spoken by a true master, could make a crown bow. Hidden in it is a quieter truth — that a Jew's deepest argument is not the Name he pronounces but the Moses he calls down.

(From The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster, 1924, no. 340, from Codex Gaster 66.)