Rabbi Beroka of Be Hozai used to go walking through the crowds of the marketplace in the company of the prophet Elijah, who would point out to him those among the ordinary people who were destined for the World to Come.
One day Elijah pointed to two men.
They did not look unusual. They did not wear the fringed garments of the great scholars. They did not carry the staff of a sage. They looked, in fact, like wandering entertainers — two ordinary men moving from place to place.
Rabbi Beroka went up to them and asked what they did with their lives. They answered him plainly. "We are jesters. When we see people who are sorrowing — a mourner at a funeral, a family collapsed by trouble, a couple quarreling — we go to them. We make them laugh. We tell them a foolish story, or pull a face, or sing a silly song, until the sadness loosens and they smile. That is what we do."
Rabbi Beroka understood then why Elijah had marked them. The two men had not studied Torah to the level of the masters. They had not composed commentaries. But they had taken one commandment — V'ahavta l're'acha kamocha, "love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18) — and turned it into a full-time trade. A sad person became, for them, an appointment from heaven. They brought the lightness of Gan Eden down into the dusty street.
The Exempla preserves this teaching as a small explosion against scholarly snobbery. The World to Come is not reserved for the scholar alone. It is open also to the joke-teller who makes a widow laugh for the first time in a year. He, too, is doing the work of the Torah.
(From The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster, 1924, no. 406, from Rabbi Nissim's Hibbur Yafeh meha-Yeshu'ah, based on Ta'anit 22a.)