This story, drawn from the Exempla of the Rabbis, recounts a frightening episode in the life of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos, one of the great sages of the generation after the Temple’s destruction. He was arrested and charged with heresy by the Roman authorities, a capital accusation. Brought before the governor, the Hegemon, Rabbi Eliezer answered with a single carefully chosen phrase: “The judge knows the truth.”
In his own heart he meant the true Judge above, God, who knows the innocence of his servant. But the Roman magistrate heard the words as a flattering tribute to his own fairness, taking them as praise of his judicial integrity. Pleased, the Hegemon released him, and Rabbi Eliezer escaped punishment through the double meaning of his reply.
Yet the tradition does not end with relief; it asks why so righteous a sage was caught in such peril in the first place. The answer it gives is sobering. Once, Rabbi Eliezer had heard and accepted an attractive interpretation of the Torah from Jacob of Kefar-Sekhanya, a teaching that had been transmitted in the name of a certain sectarian teacher outside the rabbinic fold. Because he had taken pleasure in words of teaching that flowed from a heretical source, he was made to taste the danger of heresy himself. The lesson the sages draw is that even a fleeting embrace of a teaching from the wrong quarter leaves a mark, and a scholar must guard with care the channels through which he receives words of Torah.