Rabbi Zeira bought a field one morning in the marketplace. A fair price. A closed deal. He walked home satisfied.
Then he learned what he had not known when he made the purchase: Rabbi Gidel had been quietly negotiating for the same parcel of land for some time. Zeira had closed before Gidel could. It was legal. It was also, Zeira realized, a quiet theft of another sage's long-considered plan.
Zeira went to Gidel and offered him the field as a gift.
Gidel refused it. Accepting the field now, he reasoned, would make it look like he had complained or pressured a fellow sage. Better to remain empty-handed than to appear grasping.
So the field sat. Neither man would own it.
Among the people of the town, the parcel acquired a name. They called it Chakla d'Rabbanan — "The Field of the Rabbis." It became proverbial: a piece of land so carefully declined by two righteous men that no one else was willing to farm it either.
Gaster's Exempla #130 preserves the anecdote. Sometimes the most righteous purchase is one no one ends up keeping.