Simeon ben Kamhith was serving as High Priest. He had walked with a foreign king, and in the course of the conversation a drop of spittle from the king's mouth touched Simeon's garments, rendering him ritually defiled. It was the eve of Yom Kippur. The High Priest must be pure to enter the Holy of Holies. Simeon could not serve.
His brother Judah was pulled from the ranks of the priests and elevated in Simeon's place for the day. So their mother — a single woman in a single house — saw two of her sons serve as High Priest within twenty-four hours.
But that was only the beginning. She had seven sons, and every one of them served as High Priest in turn. Seven High Priests from one womb.
The Talmud asks: what merit earned her this? What did Kamhith — their mother — do that no other woman did?
The tradition preserved in Gaster's Exempla (no. 39, 1924) answers with one word: tzeniut. Modesty. Extreme modesty. The walls of her house had never seen her hair uncovered. The beams of her roof, the tradition says, had never looked upon her head. What she kept hidden in private, God honored in public. Seven times over, the veil she drew in private was converted into the high-priestly turban on the heads of her sons.
Private devotion, the rabbis taught, writes the public history of a family.