Jewish parable of greed Is a great example of how greed deprives a person of everything. You can talk a lot about this vice, but let everyone extract the moral for himself.
And we move on to the parable.
How much he wants
There was a man in the town who loved to study the Torah. He had his own business, his wife helped him, and everything went like clockwork. But one day he went broke. To feed his beloved wife and children, he went to a distant city and became a teacher in a cheder. He taught children Hebrew.
At the end of the year, he received the money he earned - one hundred gold coins - and wanted to send them to his beloved wife, but at that time there was no mail yet.
To send money from one city to another, you had to transfer it with someone who went there, paying, of course, for the service.
Just through the city where the Torah scholar taught children, a peddler of small goods passed, and the teacher asked him:
- Where are you going?
The peddler named different cities, among which was the one where the teacher's family lived. The teacher asked to give his wife one hundred gold coins. The peddler refused, but the teacher began to persuade him:
- Good lord, my poor wife is in dire need, cannot feed her children. If you take the trouble to donate this money, you can give her as much of a hundred gold coins as you want.
The greedy peddler agreed, believing that he would be able to fool the Torah teacher.
“Okay,” he said, “only on condition: write to your wife with your own hand that I can give her as much of this money as I want.
The poor teacher had no choice, and he wrote to his wife this letter:
"I am sending one hundred gold coins on the condition that this peddler of small goods will give you as many of them as he wants."
Arriving in the town, the peddler called the teacher's wife, handed her a letter and said:
“Here's a letter from your husband, and here's money. By our agreement, I must give you as many of them as I want. So I give you one coin, and I'll keep ninety-nine for myself.
The poor woman asked for pity on her, but the peddler had a heart of stone. He remained deaf to her plea and insisted that her husband had agreed to such a condition, so he, the peddler, had every right to give her as much as he wanted. So he gives away one coin of his own free will.
The teacher's wife took the peddler to the chief rabbi of the town, which was famous for his intelligence and resourcefulness.
The rabbi listened carefully to both sides and began to persuade the peddler to act according to the laws of mercy and justice, but he did not want to know anything. Suddenly a thought struck the rabbi.
“Show me the letter,” he said.
He read it for a long time and carefully, then looked sternly at the peddler and asked:
- How much of this money do you want to take for yourself?
“I already said,” said the greedy peddler, “ninety-nine coins.
The rabbi stood up and said angrily:
- If so, then you must give them, according to the agreement, to this woman, and take only one coin for yourself.
- Justice! Where's the justice? I demand justice! Shouted the peddler.
“To be fair, you have to fulfill the agreement,” said the rabbi. - Here it is written in black and white: "Dear wife, the peddler will give you as much of this money as he wants." How much do you want? Ninety-nine coins? So give them back.
Montesquieu said: "When virtue disappears, ambition captures everyone capable of it, and greed captures everyone without exception."; and the Apostle Paul once wrote: "The root of all evil is the love of money".
