There was once an innkeeper who ran his business as a trap. Each night, deep in the small hours, he would wake his guests with false alarms — shouts of fire, of thieves, of soldiers — and drive them out of the inn in their nightclothes and onto the dark road. Bandits waited on that road. They robbed the fleeing guests and later split the spoils with the innkeeper.
Rabbi Meir, traveling with his brother Tov, stopped at the inn one evening. In the middle of the night the innkeeper began his usual routine — fire outside, quick, flee, flee! — and the other guests began to bolt into the dark.
Rabbi Meir did not move.
The innkeeper pressed him. “Everyone is leaving! You must go!”
Meir shook his head calmly. “I am waiting for my brother Tov. He will arrive in the morning. I will not leave without him.”
The innkeeper could not force the rabbi out without exposing the scheme. Dawn came, and Meir stepped into the light untouched, to meet his brother on the road.
The rabbis preserved the story as a small parable about panic. The man who refuses to run when the crowd runs, who waits for his brother, who trusts that the emergency is engineered — that man survives the night. The name Tov means good. Wait for the good to arrive before you abandon the shelter you are already in.