A woman in a certain town had a reputation for extraordinary piety. She visited every household in which a woman had gone into labor. She prayed by the bedside. She comforted the mother. She stayed until the baby was delivered, though more often than not, the baby came very slowly or not at all. People began to whisper that her prayers were not working.
One day she visited a home where a young boy was left alone in a back room. He heard a strange noise coming from a cask in the corner. He lifted the lid. Inside the cask he found a cluster of kishufim, witchcraft spells, each tied to a specific name, each restraining a woman in childbirth somewhere in the town. He understood at once. When the boy broke the spells open, every woman in labor in that town was delivered. The community drove the witch out. Her prayers had been the spell that prevented the birth, and her presence at the bedside had only been her waiting to see her handiwork at its cruelest.
The Exempla pairs this story with another. A pious man was told in a dream that his companion in Paradise would be Nanas the butcher. The pious man went to find Nanas, sure there must be some great secret merit. Nanas said he gave away half his income to charity. The pious man was not satisfied. At last Nanas remembered one incident. Long ago he had ransomed a young captive girl, raised her in his house, and betrothed her to his son. At the wedding feast, a young man among the guests wept without stopping. Nanas asked why. The young man confessed that the girl had been engaged to him before she was captured. Nanas immediately canceled his own son's wedding, married the girl to her true betrothed, gave them rich gifts, and sent them home. That was the deed, drawn from the collection of Rabbi Nissim of Kairouan's Hibbur Yafeh, that had bought him a place in Paradise. A witch's piety and a butcher's generosity, seen side by side, teach the same lesson. The scale knows the difference.