Rabbi Meir Rescued Beruriah's Captive Sister From Rome

Beruriah had already buried most of her family. The Romans had wrapped her father, Rabbi Hanina ben Teradyon, in the Torah scroll he had been teaching from and burned him alive with wet wool packed against his chest to keep him dying slowly. Her mother was executed separately. Then the soldiers took her sister captive and put her in a house of prostitution in the city.

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She did not come to Rabbi Meir to be comforted. She told her husband to go and bring her sister back.

The Test Before the Bribe

Meir took a sack of gold dinars and went to the city. Before he spent a coin he wanted to know what he was buying back. He came to the woman the way a customer would come, and made the offer a customer makes.

She told him she was unwell. He pressed. She refused again, in the same words, with no crack in them. She had been saying it to every man who walked through that door.

That was what he had come to learn. He stopped and went looking for the guard.

The Guard Wanted More Than Money

Meir held out the gold. Take half for the men above you, he said, and keep half for yourself.

The guard did not reach for it. "When my superiors find her gone, they will hang me."

"Then say this," Meir told him. "God of Meir, answer me. Say it, and you will be saved."

The guard looked at the sentence the way a man looks at a rope someone claims will hold. There were dogs in the yard that ate anything the soldiers pointed them at. Meir walked toward them. They came for him. He said the words, and the dogs stopped where they stood.

The guard took the money and opened the door, and Beruriah's sister walked out of the house on her own feet.

The Rope That Would Not Hold

The Romans counted their prisoners and found one missing, and it did not take them long to work out which man at which door. They arrested the guard, tried him, and brought him out to hang.

Standing under it, with nothing left to spend, he said the sentence he had been given. "God of Meir, answer me."

The rope broke. They tied another and it broke too. The officers stopped the execution and demanded to know what he had said, and the guard told them the whole thing, the sack of gold, the sage, the words. He kept the words. He became a Jew.

A Face Cut Into the City Gate

Rome now had a name for the man who had emptied one of its houses and made its gallows fail twice. Meir's likeness was carved where travelers entered the city, so that anyone who saw that face in a market or a doorway would know to bring the soldiers.

He was recognized. He ran, and men ran after him through streets he did not know, and he came out of it alive by a margin the tradition tells more than one way.

He did not go home. There was no home to go to that the empire could not reach, so he crossed east and stayed in Babylonia, and the great teacher of his generation finished his life outside the country whose academies had been built on his rulings.

What the Sentence Cost

Beruriah had her sister back. She had asked for one thing and gotten that one thing, and the bill came in afterward, the way bills do. The captive was rescued. The husband was gone.

The sentence stayed loose in the world. For centuries afterward Jews in trouble said the four words a Roman guard had been handed at a brothel door, and the sage who first said them died a long way from Tiberias, in a country he had gone to because a woman told him to go get her sister.