Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, the first-century miracle worker whom the Mishnah (Berakhot 5:5) calls a man whose prayers could heal from a distance, was once deep in tefillah — the silent standing prayer — when an adder slid out of its hole and bit his heel.
Hanina did not flinch. He did not break off the prayer. He did not look down. He continued through the Amidah to its end. When his students, who had been watching in terror, ran over to see what had happened, they found the snake lying dead in the dust beside him. Hanina himself was entirely unharmed.
The full version in the Talmud (Berakhot 33a) adds a detail. Hanina's students said to him, "Master, did you not feel it?" He answered, "I was so absorbed in prayer that I did not." And later the Rabbis drew the moral: Woe to the man the snake meets — but woe to the snake that meets ben Dosa.
The exemplum, preserved as no. 165 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis, is one of the most compact in the whole collection. But the Rabbis loved it. Hanina ben Dosa did not win a duel with the snake. He was not even aware of the snake. He was absorbed somewhere the snake could not reach. The venom that was meant to kill him had nowhere to settle — and so it killed the snake instead.
There is a kind of prayer, the Rabbis are saying, that is so entire it renders the worshipper temporarily untouchable. Not protected. Absent. The poison finds only the body of the one who meant the harm.