Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa was a first-century Galilean Sage so famously poor that his family sometimes went without bread. His wife, enduring yet another week of hunger, finally said to him, "You pray every day for the whole world. Everyone you pray for gets what they need. Pray for yourself. Ask Heaven for a little of the reward waiting for you in the world to come — just enough to get us through this week."
The Dream and the Leg
Hanina agreed reluctantly. He prayed. That night he had a vision: a hand reached down from Heaven and gave him a single golden leg — one of the four legs of the magnificent table that had been prepared for him in Gan Eden.
The leg appeared in his house, pure gold. It was enough to end their poverty for the rest of their lives.
His wife was overjoyed. But that night, she dreamed too.
In her dream she saw the righteous in the world to come, each at his own table. Every table had four legs — except one. Her husband's table had only three. The fourth corner was propped up precariously on a stone, wobbling whenever he reached for his food, while every other righteous person ate in stability.
The Second Prayer
She woke and told him what she had seen. She begged him to pray again — this time that the golden leg be taken back, so his eternal table could be whole.
Rabbi Hanina prayed. The leg was taken back. The table in Paradise, the Sages say, was restored to its four legs. And the family remained poor.
The exempla, preserved in Rabbi Nissim of Kairouan's Hibbur Yafeh me-ha-Yeshu'ah (11th century CE), reads as one of the Talmud's gentlest teachings on the arithmetic of reward. A golden leg in this world is always a golden leg missing from the next. Hanina's wife, in the end, loved her husband more than she loved her bread — and chose a future where he could eat in peace forever, even if it meant another week of bread in the present.