Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai lay dying. He had been one of the greatest of all the sages — the man who, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, had been smuggled out of the city in a coffin to beg Vespasian for the academy at Yavneh. He had saved the Torah's transmission when the Temple fell. His students gathered at his bedside expecting a last teaching. What they got, instead, was his tears.
"Master," they said, "why do you weep? You who preserved the Torah — why, now, at the end?"
He answered them honestly. "I am about to appear before a King before whom no bribe is possible. Before a human king, I could plead, I could explain, I could find an angle. This is a King before whom all angles fall flat. And I do not know," he said, "which of two roads He will send me down — the narrow road that leads to Eden, or the broad road that leads to Gehinnom."
His disciples were silent. The man who had outmaneuvered Vespasian was trembling before a trial he could not strategize.
Then Yohanan gave them his final blessing, and it was not a blessing in the usual sense. It was a warning shaped like a prayer. "May the fear of Heaven be to you," he said, "as great as the fear of flesh and blood. For you see human beings, and you are careful not to be detected doing wrong. So learn to fear God as much as you already fear a nosy neighbor."
Gaster's Exempla (no. 133, 1924) preserves the teaching because it captures something startling: the greatest sage of his age wished only that his students could live with as much vigilance before the Unseen as they already did before the seen.