Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 240, preserves a story that the Talmud tells at length in Makkot 24b. Rabbi Akiva was traveling with colleagues when they came within sight of Rome. The city gleamed — marble, fountains, Roman glory built on Jewish blood. The other rabbis wept. Akiva laughed.
Later, the same group climbed up to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, now a field of ruins. They saw a fox slip out of the rubble where the Holy of Holies had stood. The rabbis tore their garments and burst into tears. Akiva laughed again.
His colleagues turned on him. "Akiva, how can you laugh? The fox is walking out of the place the High Priest entered only once a year. Romans are feasting in the courts where the Temple stood."
Akiva explained. "The prophets wrote two kinds of prophecy — disaster and consolation. Uriah prophesied ruin: Zion shall be plowed like a field, Jerusalem shall become heaps (Micah 3:12, quoted by Uriah). Zechariah prophesied comfort: Old men and old women shall yet sit in the streets of Jerusalem. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing (Zechariah 8:4–5)."
"I was afraid," Akiva said, "that if Uriah's prophecy did not come true, Zechariah's would not either. Now that I have seen Uriah's words fulfilled — foxes in the ruins, Romans in triumph — I know Zechariah's will also come. If I could not laugh when the first prophecy came true, how could I ever trust the second?"
His colleagues answered him in a single line: "Akiva, you have comforted us. Akiva, you have comforted us." Ruin can be a receipt. Every destroyed verse is a deposit on the verse still waiting to come true.