A group of children in a Jewish village were playing on Shabbat. As the sun rose higher over the day of rest, they wandered too close to the edge of an old well and fell in. The well was deep. The children could not be reached without tools and ropes and effort.
Shabbat is the day of rest, but the sages had long ago ruled that pikuach nefesh, the saving of a life, overrides the Sabbath. Still, in the story preserved in the Exempla from the Midrash of the Ten Commandments, the rescue was not straightforward. The community believed the children had drowned. They grieved quietly, as one grieves on Shabbat, without breaking the restraint that the day requires.
The mother of one of the children told her husband the news with a striking image. She did not say, "Our son is dead." She said, in the language the midrash preserves, "Someone has come to reclaim pledges that were left with us." A pledge left with you is never truly yours. Every child is given to parents as a pledge. When the pledger asks for the pledge back, grief is real, but the framework in which it is received is different. The children had been entrusted to the parents by the Holy One, and now, apparently, the pledge was being recalled.
Evening came. The Sabbath ended. The community went to the well with their tools, expecting to retrieve the bodies. They found the children alive. They had been safe at the bottom all day.
The midrash joins this story with another, the story of the tailor who paid an extraordinary price for a fish on Yom Kippur, to teach the same lesson twice. Honoring the Sabbath does not mean abandoning human love. It means holding human love inside a frame that remembers who holds the pledge. Sometimes, inside that frame, the pledge is returned alive.