In the coastal city of Ashkelon, two men died on the same day. One was Baya, the local tax collector, a figure the community despised. The other was a gentle Torah scholar. Both processions set off for the graveyard, but halfway there bandits attacked the road. The mourners scattered. Only one disciple remained beside the body of his teacher.
When the bandits moved on, the community returned and, in the confusion, buried the tax collector with great honor, mistaking his body for the scholar's. The disciple protested that they had buried the wrong man, but the elders would not listen. The scholar was buried quietly, almost forgotten.
That night the scholar appeared to his disciple in a dream. He showed the young man the Garden of Eden and the glory he had been given. The disciple asked why, if his teacher now enjoyed such reward, he had been buried so poorly on earth. The teacher answered that he had once failed to protest when scholars were insulted in his presence. That single silence had earned him his poor funeral.
"And the tax collector?" the disciple asked.
"The tax collector," the scholar answered, "had his reward in this world for one act of kindness. Food had been prepared for the king's visit, the king never came, and Baya distributed the feast to the poor. His grand burial was the payment for that meal. But I saw him in Gehinnom, an iron bar driven through his skull for his wicked work in life." The scholar then told the disciple that he himself would be released from the delay in his reward only on the death of Shimon ben Shetach, who would take his place in the punishment, because Shimon, though head of the Sanhedrin, had tolerated a nest of witches in Ashkelon and failed to root them out.
The disciple brought the dream to Shimon. Shimon took the warning seriously. He gathered sixty students, and on a rainy day, when the witches would not expect interference, they entered the witches' house by a stratagem. Each student lifted a witch off the ground, breaking the connection with the earth that fueled her keshaphim, and the whole coven was taken and hanged in a single hour.
Later, false witnesses out of revenge accused Shimon's own son of a capital crime. Though the falsity of the testimony was eventually proved, Shimon, bound by the rigor of the law he had taught, allowed the sentence to be carried out before retraction could save the boy. He paid for his scholarship with his son (Gaster, Exempla No. 332).
The story holds four justices in tension at once. A tax collector rewarded for a single good deed. A scholar punished for a single silence. A judge who rooted out witches but lost his own child. And a dream that re-sorted the whole world's accounts. The sages tell it to remind us that the ledger above is not the ledger below, and that one dream can balance both.