A rich man, old and childless, prayed for years for a son. In his advanced age God granted him one. He named the boy Saul, after the first king of Israel, and lavished everything on him. The child grew up spoiled and wayward. By the time he was a young man he had broken every reasonable expectation his father had built.
One day, walking the road outside the city, Saul came upon a stranger. The stranger had a rope around his neck and was fixing the other end to the branch of a tree. The man had lost his fortune twice in his life, been reduced to begging, and had decided he could not take the loss a third time. Saul ran forward. He cut the rope. He caught the man as he fell. He listened to his story.
Then Saul did what his pampered life had never trained him to do. He gave the stranger money. Not a token amount, but enough to restart a life. He fed him, clothed him, walked him back to the city, and made sure he was on his feet before leaving.
That night the head of the yeshiva of the city, a great scholar who had never met Saul, had a dream. He saw his own crown lifted from his head and placed on the head of a young man he did not recognize. When he described the young man in the morning, the townspeople recognized Saul.
The dream did not mean the old scholar was about to lose his position. It meant that the reward destined for his own piety was being transferred in the heavenly books to this young man who had cut down a suicide on the road. One act of rescue had rewritten Saul's spiritual inheritance.
This story from Codex Gaster 185, preserved in The Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), carries an old rabbinic theology. One act of saving a life can reassign the crown. Heaven's ledger is more responsive than we think.