Gaster's exemplum No. 333 tells a longer, stranger story of Mar Ukva — the same Babylonian exilarch celebrated for his secret charity — before he became the man of secret charity.
Mar Ukva had inherited great wealth from his parents. As a young man, he was not yet the righteous figure later tradition would remember. He was lewd; he took his female servants to his bed as if he owned their bodies along with his estate.
In his community was a beautiful young woman named Hannah, married to a merchant named Joseph. Mar Ukva saw her and became sick with desire. He could not eat; he could not sleep; his physicians declared that only seeing Hannah in private could restore him. And here the story pivots on one small economic disaster.
Joseph's business collapsed. He could not pay his debts. He was thrown into debtor's prison. Hannah had nowhere to turn for the ransom money — except, Mar Ukva's messengers whispered, to the wealthy man who had been asking for her.
She went. Both of them, the tradition says, resisted in that moment. Hannah came to get her husband freed; Mar Ukva, to his own astonishment, gave her the ransom without laying a hand on her. She returned home. Joseph was released. He never questioned her; he trusted her purity completely, and was right to.
Mar Ukva recovered. But something else happened. The Rosh Yeshivah, the head of the academy, saw him one day and noticed a halo of light surrounding his head. He asked what Mar Ukva had done to deserve such a sign; Mar Ukva told the story. From that day on, he turned his life around — secret charity, nightly care for the poor, every day a small reparation for the man he had once been.
He and the Rosh Yeshivah made a pact: whoever died first would visit the other in a dream. The Rosh Yeshivah died first. The Malakh HaMavet, the Angel of Death, struck him three times before his soul left — the old tradition's sign that death is resisted more than it is surrendered to.
The Rosh Yeshivah appeared to Mar Ukva in a vision and said, "Your seat in Gan Eden is three degrees above mine." Mar Ukva offered to descend a step, and the Rosh Yeshivah to rise a step, so they would be equal. In this version of the story, they both agreed.
The moral the rabbis preserved is complicated and honest. Even a man who began in sin — who took servants to his bed and coveted another man's wife — can, through one act of restraint and a lifetime of secret charity, out-rank his teacher in Olam Haba. Repentance is not polite. It can overturn the hierarchy of heaven itself.