Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh and Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania were once traveling together by ship on a long voyage. Gamliel was the head of the Sanhedrin, the recognized leader of Palestinian Jewry in the decades after the destruction of the Temple. Rabbi Joshua was his great intellectual rival and friend.
On the voyage, Rabbi Joshua turned out to be the better astronomer. He had studied the motion of the stars carefully and could predict how much further they had to sail by calculating the ship's position from the heavens. When Gamliel, who was relying on simpler markers, asked how long until landfall, Joshua told him with precision, and was right.
There were two young scholars aboard the same ship, Elazar ha-Sama and Yochanan ben Gudgeda. These two were, the text notes, even more learned than Rabbi Joshua in star-lore. They could track the ship's position more accurately than he could. But they were also dirt poor. Their clothes were thin, their food ran out, and they were starving.
Gamliel saw this and felt ashamed. Two men with knowledge greater than the leaders of the generation, going hungry on his own ship. When he returned home, he arranged high positions for both of them, so they would never starve again. The very nickname ha-Sama attached to Elazar, the ashamed, came from Gamliel's shame at having neglected such scholars until that voyage, though another tradition links it to Elazar himself feeling ashamed at his poverty.
This episode from Horayot 10a, preserved in The Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), carries a quiet warning for every community. The greatest minds in your midst may be starving three benches away. A leader's job is to notice before the voyage ends.