Rav Kahana was a scholar, but he was poor, and poor scholars in Babylonia often had to work as peddlers to survive. He earned his bread by selling women's baskets door to door.
One day a wealthy noblewoman came to the door and invited him inside. She was not interested in baskets. Rav Kahana realized what she wanted and pleaded with her to let him leave. He would return, he said. He needed only a moment to prepare himself.
Instead, he climbed to the roof of her house and threw himself off.
Before he struck the ground, Elijah caught him in midair. The prophet carried him, gently but with evident irritation, and set him down unharmed. "You have made me travel four hundred miles," Elijah said, "to save you from a self-destruction that was not required of you" (Kiddushin 40a).
Rav Kahana was ashamed. He explained what had driven him. It was poverty, he said. Poverty had made the temptation feel like a trap with no other exit. It was not that he wanted to sin. It was that he could not imagine another way out.
Elijah understood. He reached into his garment and drew out a vessel full of gold denarii, placed it in the rabbi's hand, and departed.
The story refuses easy piety. It does not say, "Be stronger than your desires." It says that a man too poor to live is a man too poor to be holy, and that sometimes heaven's answer to temptation is not a sermon but a purse.