When Nero first entered the Holy Land, he did not arrive as a conqueror sure of his victory. He arrived as a diviner uncertain of his fate.
He took up his bow and shot an arrow eastward. It fell on Jerusalem. He turned and shot westward. It fell on Jerusalem. North, south — every arrow bent toward the same city, as though the compass itself were weighted with prophecy.
Uneasy, Nero stopped a Jewish boy in the road and asked him to recite whatever he had learned that day. The boy answered with a verse from Ezekiel: I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel (Ezekiel 25:14). In rabbinic shorthand, Edom meant Rome.
Nero understood at once. The Holy One had decided to destroy His own Temple. But the foreign king who wielded the axe would not go unpunished. God would avenge the Temple on the agent who ruined it.
Nero turned around. He did not sack Jerusalem. He fled his empire, the Talmud (Gittin 56a) reports, and became a Jewish proselyte. From his descendants, the tradition claims, came Rabbi Meir himself.
The storytellers preferred a deserter to a destroyer at the head of their own lineage.