The Blind Man and the Spell Sown in Seeds

A merchant on the road was joined by an innkeeper who asked to travel with him. As they walked, they passed a blind man by the roadside. The merchant stopped, opened his purse, and gave the blind man a coin. The innkeeper shrugged and kept walking. "I don't know him," he said. "Why would I give?"

Further along, the angel of death met them both on the road. His face was set. He had come for one of them that day.

He looked at the merchant and spared him fifty years — because of the charity he had just given.

He looked at the innkeeper and let him live too, for a different reason. "Let him survive," the angel said, "so that he may tell this story and give glory to God."

The sages drew the lesson sharply. If one act of charity bought fifty years, how much more is added to a life by the habit of giving?

A second story comes paired with it. Rabbi Gamliel, Rabbi Eliezer, and Rabbi Joshua were traveling and received hospitality from a man who, at every dish of the meal, first carried the plate into an adjoining room before returning it to the table. They asked whether he was practicing some form of sorcery on the food.

The man explained. In that inner room lived his father, who had sworn an oath never to leave the house until he had met some of the sages of Israel. Every dish was being blessed by him before the family ate. When told he was speaking to Gamliel, Eliezer, and Joshua, the father wept and asked their help. His son had been married twelve years and had no child — bewitched, the family believed, by a jealous woman.

Rabbi Joshua asked for black seed. He sowed the seeds in the courtyard. They sprouted instantly. He pulled out the stalks, and a witch emerged from the soil. He gripped her by the hair and ordered her to break the spell. She confessed she had cast it into the depths of the sea. Joshua called forth the demon of the sea, who cast up the spell from the waters. A year later a child was born to the household, and the child was Rabbi Judah ben Bathyra.

Gaster's Exempla #387–388 preserves both stories. Charity buys years. And a spell cast into the sea can still be pulled out by a sage with the right seeds in his pocket.