Rabbah bar Nahmani, the great head of the academy at Pumbeditha in the early fourth century, was accused by the government of a crime invented out of jealousy — that he was keeping people from their work and holding them in the village for two months during the agricultural off-season, when in fact they had come to study Torah.
Rabbah fled into the wilderness to escape arrest. As he wandered between towns, he sat down under a tree to study a difficult passage. He was deep in the sugya when the Angel of Death drew near, because in heaven his voice was wanted for a debate about ritual purity that the sages above could not resolve without him.
Rabbah's soul left his body there under the tree, and his body lay unnoticed on the ground. But the sky remembered him. A great flock of birds gathered from every direction and hovered in a thick ring, their wings overlapping to cast a deep shadow over the place where he lay, shielding his body from the sun. The Pumbeditha disciples, searching the desert for their master, saw the strange dark cloud of circling birds and hurried toward it, and there beneath the canopy of wings they found his body.
They mourned him for three days in the town. On the third day a letter fell from heaven, and on it was written: Whoever returns to his house shall be excommunicated. So the community extended the mourning to seven days. Then a second letter fell: Go home. On the day of his death a great tempest blew through the valley.
He died young, the sages note, and he died poor. But even his body, left in the open, was tended by heaven.
(From The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster, 1924, no. 220, based on Bava Metzia 86a.)