Rabbi Nehemia was a man of simple tastes. He ate plain food, lived modestly, and saw no reason to indulge in luxuries. One day, he invited a well-known gourmand — a man famous for his appetite, a person who spent his life eating rich foods, heavy meats, elaborate dishes soaked in oil and spices — to share a meal with him.
The meal Rabbi Nehemia served was lentils. A simple pot of brown lentils, the food of the poor, the food of mourners, the most basic sustenance available. For Rabbi Nehemia, this was an ordinary dinner. For his guest, it was a death sentence.
The gourmand ate the lentils. And he died.
His body, so thoroughly accustomed to rich and elaborate food, could not process the sudden shift to coarse simplicity. The lentils — harmless to anyone who had ever known hunger or modest living — destroyed a man whose entire constitution had been built on excess. What should have been nourishment became poison, not because the food was bad, but because the eater was too corrupted by luxury to survive it.
The Exempla of the Rabbis preserves this tale as a parable about the dangers of over-indulgence. The gourmand was not killed by lentils. He was killed by every meal that came before the lentils — every feast that made simple food lethal to him. A body that can no longer tolerate plainness has become its own trap. The sages saw in this a broader warning: a life built entirely on comfort becomes so fragile that even the smallest deprivation can shatter it.