Rabbi Beroka of Be Chozae had a gift. The prophet Elijah, the undying messenger, would sometimes appear to him in ordinary places — in a marketplace, among vendors and travelers — and speak with him.
One day they were standing together in the crowded market. Rabbi Beroka looked at the hundreds of people passing and asked, "Is any of these destined for the world to come?"
Elijah looked with him. Then he said: "No." A silence. Then: "Wait. That man, over there — yes. He alone, of all this multitude, will enter Gan Eden."
Beroka looked where Elijah pointed. He saw a man dressed in Roman fashion — dark clothes, no ritual fringes, nothing about him that marked him as a pious Jew. Beroka was stunned. He ran to the man and asked him what he did for a living.
The man answered plainly. "I am the keeper of the prison. When Jewish prisoners are brought in, I separate the men from the women so that no dishonor touches them. When the authorities plan some evil decree against the Jews, I find out, and I send word to your leaders in time for them to prepare, to petition, to save what can be saved."
"Why do you dress like a Roman?" Beroka asked.
"So that my colleagues will trust me. So that I will hear what is coming."
This quiet infiltrator, invisible to every pious Jew in the market, was the one soul Elijah said would enter the Garden. Gaster's Exempla (no. 405, 1924, drawn from Rabbi Nissim's Hibbur Yafeh me-ha-Yeshuah) preserves the story because it destabilizes our notion of who belongs in heaven. The man with no visible mitzvot was carrying, in his plain clothing, the most essential mitzvah of his generation: he was saving Jewish lives without ever being thanked.