The Rabbi Who Prayed
Once upon a time, many years ago, there lived a great rabbi. This rabbi was a wise and particularly religious man. He observed the sabbath each and every week -- precisely at sundown on Friday evening, the beginning of the Jewish sabbath day, he lit the candles and said the blessings and began to observe the sabbath. But perhaps that was not all that remarkable -- after all, many people observe a sabbath day each and every week.
Ah, but this wise and very religious rabbi did more than just observe the sabbath. He did more than think of the sabbath as a blessing. In fact, he did much more -- he prayed for an hour each and every day. That's how religious he was.
A man and a woman in his shul were most impressed with their rabbi, especially that he prayed for an hour each day. But, at the same time, they didn't quite believe that the rabbi really prayed for a whole hour each and every day. So one day, when they met him in the street, they went up to him and asked him: "Rabbi, is it true that you pray for an hour each and every day?" asked the woman.
"Yes," said the rabbi. "It is true."
"Why do you do that, rabbi?" asked the man, very respectfully.
"To pray is a blessing," said the rabbi, surprised that anyone would ask. "God has given us the blessing of religion, which includes prayer, and the sabbath, and so on. Why would I not accept such wonderful blessings from God?"
The man and the woman were silent for a moment, thinking about the truth and wisdom of what the rabbi had just said. At last the man spoke again.
"But rabbi," he said, "when you are particularly busy, when you have too much to do and not enough time to do it in, when you are feeling frazzled and overworked, surely then you do not pray for an hour on busy day like that?"
"Oh, no," said the rabbi, "on those days, I pray for two hours."
Licensed 2006 by Daniel Harper under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/). No commercial uses, attribution required, no derivative works.