During the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the storehouses had been burned by Jewish zealots to force the city to fight. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, walking through the streets afterward, saw the people of Jerusalem boiling straw in water and drinking it to stay alive.
"Woe is me for this calamity," he cried. "How can such a people, eating straw, strive against the might of Rome?"
He went to his nephew Ben Batiach, one of the chief zealots in the city, and asked permission to leave. Ben Batiach refused. "No living body may pass through the gates."
Yochanan answered without blinking. "Then take me out as a corpse."
Ben Batiach hesitated, and agreed. Two of Yochanan's students, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, laid him in a coffin, sealed the lid, and carried him out of Jerusalem on their shoulders. At the gate, the guards — under orders to prevent any living Jew from escaping — demanded to pierce the body with a spear to confirm the death. Ben Batiach had sent word ahead forbidding it, out of respect for the corpse. The coffin passed through.
Yochanan was carried straight to the camp of the Roman general Vespasian. The Talmud (Gittin 56a) records what happened next. Yochanan greeted Vespasian as emperor before he was emperor. A messenger arrived from Rome confirming the prophecy mid-conversation. Vespasian, stunned, granted Yochanan three requests. Yochanan did not ask for Jerusalem. He did not ask for the Temple. He asked: "Give me the academy at Yavneh and its sages. Spare the dynasty of Rabban Gamliel. And send a physician for Rabbi Tzadok, who has fasted for forty years."
Every one of those requests, preserved in the 1901 anthology Hebraic Literature, outlasted the siege. Jerusalem fell. The Temple burned. But the academy at Yavneh lived. The Mishnah was compiled there. Without that coffin, the rabbinic tradition we still read would have been consumed by the fire. One man, one clever stretcher, one short list of requests — and Jewish civilization bent around the ruin and kept walking.