Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon was one of the Ten Martyrs executed during the Hadrianic persecutions in the second century CE. Rome had decreed that teaching Torah in public was a capital offense. Chanina continued to teach, gathering his students in open assembly with a Torah scroll in his arms.
When the Romans came for him, they bound him to a stake and wrapped the Sefer Torah around his body. They lit the pyre. To prolong his suffering, they placed wet wool over his heart, so that the flames would consume him slowly and keep the heart cool enough to delay death. The Rabbi's students stood at the edge of the fire. They asked him what he saw.
"I see the parchment burning," he answered, "but the letters are flying up into the air." The scrolls could be destroyed, but the Torah itself, the living teaching, could not. His students begged him to open his mouth so the flames would reach his lungs and end his agony. He refused. "It is better that He who gave me my soul should take it."
The Roman executioner, moved by what he was watching, asked Chanina, "If I increase the flame and remove the wet wool from your heart, will you bring me into the world to come?" The Rabbi promised him that he would. The executioner pulled away the wool and stoked the fire. Chanina's soul departed. Then the executioner himself leaped into the flames and died beside him, a proselyte in his final moment. A heavenly voice cried out, "Chanina ben Teradyon and the executioner are ready for the world to come."
Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis (1924, No. 289) preserves the martyrdom that Jewish tradition has retold every Yom Kippur afternoon for nearly two thousand years. The Roman empire burned a scroll and gained a convert from its own garrison — and lost whatever argument it thought the fire was making.