Rabbi Elazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon, once vindictively caused a man to be put to death, merely because he had spoken of him as Vinegar the son of Wine, a round-about way of reproaching him that he was the bad son of a good father, though it turned out afterward that the condemned man deserved death for a crime that he was not known to be guilty of at the time of his execution; yet the mind of the Rabbi was ill at ease, and he voluntarily did penance by subjecting himself in a peculiar fashion to great bodily suffering.
Sixty woolen cloths were regularly spread under him every night, and these were found soaked in the morning with his profuse perspiration. The result of this was greater and greater bodily prostration, which his wife strove, as related above, day after day to repair, detaining him from college, lest the debates there should prove too much for his weakened frame. When his wife found that he persisted in courting these sufferings, and that her tender care, as well as her own patrimony, were being lavished on him in vain, she tired of her assiduity, and left him to his fate.
And now, waited on by some sailors, who believed they owed to him deliverance from a watery grave, he was free to do as he liked. One da}', being ministered to by them after a night's perspiration of the kind referred to, he went straight to college, and there decided sixty doubtful cases against the unanimous dissent of the assembly. Providential circumstances, which happened afterward, both proved that he was right in his judgment and that his wife was wrong in suffering her fondness for him to stand in the way of the performance of his public duties.