A Jewish child, still young enough to be sitting with a melamed, had just finished memorizing a portion of the book of Bereshit (Genesis) when the soldiers came. He was captured and thrown into prison with no charge and no release date.
At the same time, far off in the capital, the Roman Emperor had a strange impulse. He asked his librarians to bring him a book. When the scroll was unrolled in front of him, no one in the imperial library could read it. It was the Hebrew Bible. None of the Greek scholars could make out a word.
Someone remembered the Jewish boy in the prison. They brought him, half-starved, to the throne room. "Can you read this?" they asked. He looked up at them. He knew refusing meant death. He knew failing meant death too. He placed his finger on the first line and began: Bereshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim v'et ha-aretz — In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).
The Emperor listened. The child did not stumble. When he had finished the passage, the Emperor asked him to tell his own story — how he had come to prison, who his parents were. The Emperor is reported to have said something startling. "The reason I suddenly wanted that book brought to me, which I did not understand — I see now it was to restore you to your parents." The child was freed and sent home.
The story is preserved as exemplum no. 38 in Moses Gaster's 1924 collection The Exempla of the Rabbis, drawn from the Ma'aseh Book. The point, the Rabbis say, is plain: great reward comes from studying even a small part of Torah. A child who had memorized just one chapter of Genesis saved his own life and was used, without knowing it, as the reason the Emperor's strange impulse even existed. The Rabbis did not teach that Torah study was practical. They taught that it was providential. Sometimes a chapter you learned at six is the thing that carries you home when you are twelve.