The daughter of Rabbi Meir, one of the greatest sages of the second century CE, had a vision in a dream that her fate was sealed. Twenty-one years of suffering lay ahead. Seven years of slavery, seven years in a brothel, and seven years of unpaid service in a synagogue and study hall. She was the daughter of the most famous rabbi of her generation and the wife of the head of the academy. She could not accept it. She tried to kill herself, hanging herself from a beam.

Her husband found her hanging, cut her down, and carried her to the cemetery. Because it was Friday afternoon and Sabbath was about to begin, she could not be buried before sundown. They placed her in a burial cave to wait. At midnight she stirred. She had been unconscious, not dead. She awoke alone in a cave in the dark and began to weep.

At dawn a duke riding past heard her crying. He ordered the cave opened, pulled her out, and took her home as a slave for his wife. Seven years passed in service. Then, as the duke was expected home from a long trip, his wife asked the slave to string a necklace of pearls. Mid-task, a bird swooped down and carried the string of pearls away. Her mistress refused to believe her. As punishment, she was sold into a brothel. Another seven years passed.

The king of that country ordered a new palace built. A great tree in the garden was cut down to serve as a beam. High in its branches, the workers found a bird's nest with a string of pearls woven into it. The missing necklace. The duke's household remembered the slave they had punished. They sent for her, begged her pardon, and freed her. She found her way to a synagogue where she took up unpaid work. Seven more years passed.

One day a traveling scholar arrived in her town. He refused the inn and refused every private house. He insisted on sleeping in the synagogue itself. The woman, now caretaker, attended to him. One night she heard him weeping until dawn. When she pressed him, he told her his story. Years ago his wife had tried to hang herself. He had laid her in a burial cave. When they went to bury her the next evening, the cave was empty. He had spent his life hoping she might still be alive, refusing to remarry, waiting.

She sat down beside him. I am your wife, she said. She gave him the identifying signs of their marriage. He recognized her. The twenty-one years of her sentence were complete. They went home together and lived many more years in peace.

This story from Codex Gaster 66, preserved in The Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), is a remarkable Jewish folk tale of yissurin, decreed suffering, and its counterpart, patient faith. What is decreed from heaven cannot always be outrun. But the end of it, in the rabbinic imagination, is reunion.