A drought gripped the land, and the wells were drying. The Rabbi of the town sat in sackcloth and prayed. Prayer yielded nothing. Then a bat kol, a heavenly voice, came to him with a strange instruction. Go and ask a certain merchant in the market to intercede. His prayer will bring rain.
The Rabbi was troubled. The merchant the voice named was, as far as anyone in the town knew, an unlettered man. He could barely follow a page of Gemara. He was not a scholar, not a teacher, not a judge. To go to him and ask him to pray for rain, in front of the whole community, would embarrass the Rabbi and probably offend the merchant. But the voice was explicit, and the Rabbi obeyed. He went to the shop.
The merchant, when he heard the request, assumed at first he was being mocked. A Rabbi came to ask him, an illiterate, to pray for rain? He nearly sent the Rabbi away. When he saw the Rabbi was in earnest, his face changed. He reached under his counter and pulled out a small pair of brass scales. He set them on the countertop and said to the Rabbi, These scales are my witness. On them is the Ineffable Name. Every day I weigh goods for my customers. If ever in my life I have tilted these scales to cheat a fellow Jew or a gentile, let fire consume me now. But if I have kept them true every single day, let rain fall.
The words had barely left his mouth when the clouds opened. Rain poured down. The streets ran with water. The wells filled within hours. The Rabbi stood in the merchant's doorway, drenched, and understood. The bat kol had known what a scholar's eye could not see. In the town's whole population, the person who had most faithfully kept the commandment of mishkelot emet, honest scales (Leviticus 19:36), was a plain merchant who could not read a page of Talmud. This exemplum, preserved as number 425 in Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis, teaches that sometimes the prayer heaven hears most quickly is the one offered over a pair of honest brass scales.