Rabbi Eleazar ben Shimon, son of the great Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, was appointed by the Roman government as an official — a kind of investigator authorized to catch thieves. He was exceptionally good at it. He would sit at the drinking booths and watch who came in. A man who looked tired at midday, he reasoned, had either spent the night in study or spent it in mischief. Since Torah scholars did not usually loiter at taverns, the tired ones must be the thieves. He caught them, again and again.

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korcha rebuked him bitterly. "Vinegar son of wine — why are you handing your own people over to Rome?"

Eleazar answered, "I am only weeding the vineyard."

Yehoshua shot back, "Let the Master of the vineyard look after the thorns Himself."

Once Eleazar caught a man who had merely spoken to him with insolence, arrested him on suspicion, and afterward reproached himself for delivering up what might have been an innocent soul. But at the execution the man confessed to a heinous crime — and Eleazar, his conscience clearing, went on. The prophet Elijah, however, appeared to Eleazar one day and warned him: "Your father fled to a cave in Asia to escape the Romans. You shall flee to Laodicea."

Eleazar was, the Talmud (Bava Metzia 84a) tells us, a giant of a man. He invited suffering upon himself for love of God, bearing pain without a murmur. After his death his wife, unwilling to part with his body, hid it in the loft of their house. The Rabbi had told her his flesh would remain uncorrupted. And it did. Litigants kept coming to his house to ask his rulings, and a voice from the loft answered them — his body still deciding the law after his soul had gone.

The sages, warned in a dream, came to take him for proper burial. The townspeople would not allow it — while the body remained, no wild beasts came near the village. The Rabbis took the body by ruse and carried it to where his father was buried. A serpent was coiled around his father's tomb. They said, "Serpent, let the son come to the father," and the serpent uncoiled. They laid father and son side by side.

Exemplum no. 95 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis preserves the whole strange cycle. Afterward, it tells us, Rabbi Yehudah wanted to marry Eleazar's widow. She refused. "My husband was greater than you in scholarship and deeds. He invited suffering for love of God. You suffer only as punishment, because once a calf led to slaughter ran into your lap and you said, For this you were created, and pushed it away." The line is merciless and clarifying. Suffering alone does not make a person holy. What makes a person holy is what they do with the suffering that finds them anyway.