⭐⭐⭐ לא בשמים היא — it is not in heavenלא בשמים היא

Bava Metzia 59b — the oven of Akhnai. R. Eliezer, alone against the Sages, calls on the world to prove him right. A carob tree is uprooted; the Sages say a carob proves nothing. A stream flows backwards; a stream proves nothing. The walls of the study house lean in. And then a heavenly voice declares that the law is as R. Eliezer says.

R. Yehoshua stands and answers the voice: "It is not in heaven" (Deut. 30:12) — the Torah was already given at Sinai, and it says incline after the majority. Revelation does not get a vote in its own interpretation.

And the coda is the most extraordinary line in the passage. R. Natan later meets Elijah and asks what the Holy One did at that moment. Elijah answers: He smiled, and said "My children have defeated Me. My children have defeated Me."

⭐⭐⭐ Note what is being celebrated. Not that the Sages were right — the story never says they were. That the text, once handed over, belongs to the people reading it, and that its Author is pleased to be overruled by His own procedure.

⚠ And the story does not end kindly. R. Eliezer is excommunicated by the same majority, and the page counts the cost of that in detail. The tradition preserves the price of its own principle in the same passage as the principle.