Once upon a time there lived a scholar who did nothing all his life but study from morning to evening, and then died very young. His wife took his tallit and tefillin and went to the college to see the rabbis.

She said to them: "It is written in the holy Torah, 'This is thy life and the length of thy days' (Deut. 30.20), i. e. the Torah is thy life and prolongs thy days. Now, my husband did nothing but study day and night. Why then did he die so young?"

There was none in the college who could give her an answer. In sooth they did not know the reason why he died so young.

Not long afterwards a scholar came to her on a visit, and she told him the same story. He asked her certain questions, to which she replied most indignantly that there could have been no grounds of suspicion in her husband's behavior. And yet, when pressed with questions she admitted that in his relations with her he had transgressed certain limits laid down by the Law.

When the scholar heard this, he said: "Blessed be He who has taken him away so young, for he should have known that the minutest prescriptions of the Law on such matters ought to have been observed by a man who had devoted his life to the study of the Torah."

In this translation some of the details have been omitted or toned down for esthetic reasons.