Propped up in bed, Rabbi Yitzhak Kadourie, a man so venerable that nobody actually knows how old he is, warmly greeted Mr Eli Yishai, the leading politician from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.
Summoning Mr Yishai to his bedside yesterday, he cupped his hand over the young politician's head and issued a blessing. Then, for the benefit of the assembled reporters, he delivered his thoughts on the key political issue of the day: whether Shas should bolt Mr Ehud Barak's unsteady coalition.
"If the government doesn't help Orthodox people," he muttered, in the most complex Hebrew "it's not worth anything. But if it does help the faithful . . ."
Translated into Realpolitik, the rabbi's message meant that Mr Yishai could carry on trying to resolve the coalition crisis with Mr Barak, and if sufficient funds for the Shas school system could be extracted, the government might not fall after all.
And, faithful to his mentor, Mr Yishai did indeed dispatch one of his colleagues later yesterday to hold talks with one of Mr Barak's emissaries, to try and patch up the dispute that has been destabilising the government.
It's anyone's guess at this stage whether Shas, whose 17 Knesset members are crucial to Mr Barak's parliamentary majority, will have its funding requirements met, or will implement its threat to quit the coalition on Sunday, putting Israel on course for another general election barely a year after the one that brought Mr Barak to power.
But what is clear at this point is that Israel's "reformed" electoral system, changed four years ago, has rendered the country almost ungovernable, and handed an unconscionable amount of power to "sectoral" political groups, especially Shas.
These have grown in strength under the new system, at the expense of the two long-established mainstream parties, Labour and the Likud. Both the Likud's Mr Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 and Labour's Mr Ehud Barak last year found that to muster a majority they needed to weld half-a-dozen or more of these small parties into a coalition; small parties, with disparate interests, demanding disproportionate amounts of cash in return for their support.
Turning up the heat on Mr Barak last week, Shas backed the opposition on the preliminary reading of a bill to dissolve the Knesset. Mr Barak dearly wanted to throw Shas out of government as punishment. The party's four cabinet ministers, he declared last week, had "effectively dismissed themselves".
But the ministers haven't been sacked, because Mr Barak has no real alternative coalition, and he wants to avoid elections and keep peace talks with the Palestinians on track.
Indeed, the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, is due at the White House today for talks with President Clinton, ahead of a possible summit with Mr Barak. And Israeli and Palestinian teams are hard at work in the United States, trying to reach a peace treaty by September.
And so the Israeli Prime Minister's aides were negotiating with Shas again last night. And Rabbi Kadourie was waiting to pronounce judgment on the outcome.