Rabbi Tarfon was a wealthy sage who believed in personal tzedakah but preferred to hold his money close. Rabbi Akiva came to him one day and asked for a considerable sum, promising to use it to buy a town — a safe, sensible investment that would benefit both men. Tarfon, trusting Akiva as one of the great teachers of the age, handed over the money.
Time passed. Tarfon saw no deed of sale, no title, no tax record. He asked Akiva where his town was. Akiva led him to a cluster of schoolhouses that had recently opened for poor children, and to bread lines full of the hungry. "This," Akiva said, "is the town I bought with your money." The coin had gone not to landlords but to the poor.
Tarfon, as the story tells, did not feel cheated. He understood that Akiva had bought him a place in the world to come at the price of real estate in this one. From that day he gave freely, trusting Akiva's logic that the true deed of sale is inscribed in Heaven and the tenants are students and orphans.
Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis (1924, No. 108) preserves this exchange as a model for how charity is sometimes taught — not by sermons but by a quiet trick from a wiser friend. Akiva gave Tarfon an investment portfolio written in other people's lives.