There was a man called Yosef Mokir Shabbat, "Yosef the Honorer of the Sabbath." Every Friday he spent whatever he had on the best food available for the Shabbat table. Anything the market considered the finest, he bought. His neighbors thought him foolish with his money. He thought the Shabbat queen worth every coin.
Next door to him lived a wealthy Parsee, a Persian, who had no particular use for Yosef or his customs. A soothsayer told this Parsee that, by some strange turn of fate, all his property would eventually end up in Yosef's hands. The Parsee decided to outwit the prophecy. He sold every piece of property he owned, converted the whole sum into one enormous pearl, and fastened the pearl into the fabric of his turban. Wealth wrapped around his head could not be stolen or transferred.
One day, crossing a bridge, a sudden wind tore the turban from his head and blew it into the river below. The pearl slipped out of the cloth and sank. A fish swallowed it.
Late that Friday afternoon, a fisherman stood in the marketplace with that very fish, unable to find a buyer so close to Shabbat. Yosef, making his usual late-day tour for the best Shabbat food, saw the fine fish, paid well for it, and took it home.
He cut it open in his kitchen and the pearl rolled out. He sold it the following week for twenty-three thousand golden dinars (Gaster, Exempla No. 380).
The sages add a second vignette to the same chapter. Rabbi Hiyya was once a guest at the table of a rich Jew whose household brought in a golden table drawn on twenty-six silver chains by twenty-six servants. Rabbi Hiyya asked how the man had earned such a table. The man answered simply, "I was a butcher. Every Friday I set aside the best cut of every animal I bought, so that my Shabbat table would have the finest portion. This table is the accumulated interest."
The Torah teaches, "You shall call Shabbat a delight" (Isaiah 58:13). The sages read these stories as the Holy One answering, "When you delight in My Shabbat, I will delight in you, and My delight leaves visible marks on your week."