Bar Kappara was walking along the seashore when he encountered the survivors of a shipwreck — strangers, soaked and shivering, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They had lost everything to the sea: their goods, their money, their provisions for the journey ahead.
Bar Kappara did not ask who they were or where they came from. He did not calculate whether helping them would benefit him. He simply gave. He fed them, clothed them, and provided them with whatever they needed to continue their journey.
The Midrash (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 11:1) records that one of the shipwrecked strangers later rose to a position of great power — some versions say he became a Roman official, others say a ruler of a distant city. When Bar Kappara's community later needed an advocate before the authorities, the man they had once rescued remembered the sage's kindness and repaid it many times over.
A related story tells of Rabbi Eliezer ben Shammua, who similarly helped a shipwrecked Edomite — a member of a nation not particularly friendly to the Jews. The Edomite later became Emperor, and when the Jews needed his protection, he granted it in memory of the sage who had fed him when he was starving on the beach.
The sages quoted the verse: "Cast your bread upon the waters, for you shall find it after many days" (Ecclesiastes 11:1). Charity given to a stranger on a beach may seem like bread thrown into the sea — wasted, lost, irretrievable. But the sea has a way of returning what is cast upon it. The bread comes back. The stranger remembers. And kindness shown in a moment of crisis echoes through decades.