Bar Kappara was walking along the seashore when he saw a naked man washed up in the tide. The man was called an Antipatos — a title of rank in the imperial bureaucracy — and he had lost everything: ship, clothes, dignity. He looked half dead.
Bar Kappara did not ask whose side the man had been on. He took him home. He fed him. He clothed him. When the man could stand again, Bar Kappara pressed five selaim into his hand for the road. The Antipatos disappeared into the rest of his life without a word of thanks.
Years passed. The Roman government began one of its periodic persecutions of the Jewish community, and Bar Kappara was chosen to go and plead the case in the imperial court. He took one hundred dinars with him as a necessary bribe — the rabbis noted dryly that in those days the Roman state did nothing without a fee.
He arrived to find that the ruler now in charge was the same Antipatos he had rescued. Bar Kappara did not recognize him under the imperial robes. But the ruler recognized him. "You gave me five selaim on the beach," the man said. "Here are one hundred dinars — I give them back, exactly the amount you brought to bribe me." He then granted Bar Kappara's petition on behalf of the Jewish community for free.
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 300, ends with the verse Ecclesiastes 11:1: Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days. Five coins placed into the hand of a naked stranger, found twenty years later in the form of an entire people saved from persecution. Jewish charity runs on that arithmetic.