Four men sat together one afternoon in the Galilee: Rabbi Yehudah ben Ilai, Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and a certain Yehudah ben Gerim. They fell into conversation about the Romans. Each of them took a different position.
Rabbi Yehudah praised the Romans. "Look at what they have built," he said. "Roads, bridges, marketplaces — everywhere you go, you see what they have accomplished." Rabbi Yose kept silent. Rabbi Shimon blamed the Romans openly. "Everything they built, they built for themselves. The marketplaces are for their profits. The bathhouses are for their pleasures. The bridges collect tolls." And Yehudah ben Gerim — who had no authority in the room — repeated the whole exchange to others afterward.
The report reached Rome. The Empire's response, preserved as exemplum no. 263 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis, fell on each of the three differently. Rabbi Yehudah, who had praised the Romans, was rewarded and raised to a position of honor. Rabbi Yose, who had kept silent, was exiled to Sepphoris. And Rabbi Shimon — the one who had spoken the truth — was sentenced to death and had to flee for his life.
Rabbi Shimon and his son Eleazar hid in a cave for thirteen years. They buried themselves up to their necks in sand each day, studying Torah without pause, emerging only to put on clothes when it was time to pray. They lived on the fruit of a carob tree that miraculously sprang up at the mouth of the cave and on the water of a spring that appeared beside it. The Talmud (Shabbat 33b) records the cave years as the time when Shimon bar Yochai received the deepest mystical secrets — the foundation that would later be attributed to him as the alleged author of the Zohar.
When Shimon finally emerged, thirteen years later, his father-in-law Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair found him covered in scars and wounds from the sand and the study. He wept, tended him, and slowly restored him to health. The story makes an uncomfortable point. The three Rabbis said the same thing in different registers. Only the one who told the truth had to hide. And only the one who had to hide came back changed — with something the other two never got.