Rabbi Rabina, a fifth-century Babylonian Sage, once learned from Rabbi Tabut (also called Tabyome) that there was a place on earth where truth was not an ethical preference but a literal physical law. The name of the town was Kushta — Aramaic for "truth." Nobody there had ever told a lie.
The consequence was that no one in that town ever died before their time. The bargain of perfect honesty, the tradition says, bought the community a kind of protection against premature death.
The Sage Who Moved There
Rabbi Tabut, impressed by the town's reputation, moved there. He married a local woman and had children. For years he lived in Kushta, keeping every word he spoke exactly true.
One day a neighbor came to his door asking for his wife. She was, at that moment, washing her hair and could not come out. Rabbi Tabut — out of a reflex of ordinary social courtesy, the kind that functions as lubrication in every other town on earth — told the neighbor that his wife was not at home.
The Child Who Paid
Not long after, one of his children fell ill and died. Then another.
Rabbi Tabut understood. He went to the elders of Kushta and asked whether lies had ever been told there before. They told him, gently, that no one had ever lied in their town — and that the moment he did, he had brought death into a household that had never known it prematurely.
They banished him.
The Gaster exempla, drawing from Sanhedrin 97a, preserves this as one of the most severe teachings about truth in the whole rabbinic corpus. A small social lie, in an ordinary town, costs almost nothing. In Kushta, it cost a child. The story does not argue that every community should be Kushta. It argues that somewhere, in some part of the world, there is a place where the Torah's commandment "keep far from a false matter" (Exodus 23:7) is enforced not by the Sages but by the soil itself.