Rabbi Yohanan ben Matya instructed his son one morning to go out and make sure the Jewish workers hired for the day were fed well. "Feed them adequately," he said. "Do not cut corners."
The son went. He saw how they worked. He saw how they ate what was put before them. And when he returned to his father, he said something startling.
"Father, it is impossible to feed the children of Abraham adequately. Even if I were to feed them at the table of Solomon — where, as Kings tells us (1 Kings 4:22-23), every day saw thirty measures of fine flour, sixty measures of meal, ten fat oxen, twenty pasture oxen, a hundred sheep, along with deer and gazelles and fatted fowl — even then I would not have given them what they are owed. For they descend from the patriarchs, and the dignity they carry cannot be matched by any meal I can put before them."
The son did not mean this as an excuse to feed the workers less. He meant it as an argument to feed them more. Because they are children of Abraham, he said, we must strain ourselves every day to approach a standard we can never quite reach.
Gaster's Exempla (no. 200, 1924) preserves the teaching because it does something remarkable with labor relations. Your workers, the son is saying, are not cheap help. They are royalty in disguise. Feed them as if the table of Solomon were the floor you were starting from, not the ceiling you were aiming at.