go straight to
Paradise. And because it is God who afflicts men with these things, we
cannot give them away to anyone else, but have to bear with them. Now,
such a misfortune as being rich, which is also a visitation of God, must
certainly be borne with like the rest.

"And, besides," he reflected further, "the fool who would take the
misfortune to himself, doesn't exist! What healthy man in his senses
would get into a sick-bed?"

He began to feel very sorry for Reb Eliezer ben Charsum with his
thousand towns and his thousand ships. "To think that such a saint, such
a Tano, one of the authors of the holy Mishnah, should incur such a
severe punishment!

"But he stood the trial! Despite this great misfortune, he remained a
saint and a Tano to the end, and the holy Gemoreh says particularly that
he thereby put to shame all the rich people, who go straight to
Gehenna."

Thus Reb Nochumtzi, the Pumpian Rav, sat over the Talmud and reflected
continually on the problem of great riches. He knew the world through
the Holy Scriptures, and was persuaded that riches were a terrible
misfortune, which had to be borne, because no one would consent to
taking it from another, and bearing it for him.

* * * * *

Again many years passed, and Reb Nochumtzi gradually came to see that
poverty also is a misfortune, and out of his own experience.

His Sabbath cloak began to look threadbare (the weekday one was already
patched on every side), he had six little children living, one or two of
the girls were grown up, and it was time to think of settling them, and
they hadn't a frock fit to put on. The five Polish gulden a week salary
was not enough to keep them in bread, and the wife, poor thing, wept the
whole day through: "Well, there, ich wie ich, it isn't for myself--but
the poor children are naked and barefoot."

At last they were even short of bread.

"Nochumtzi! Why don't you speak?" exclaimed his wife with tears in her
eyes. "Nochumtzi, can't you hear me? I tell you, we're starving! The
children are skin and bone, they haven't a shirt to their back, they can
hardly keep body and soul together. Think of a way out of it, invent
something to help us!"

And Reb Nochumtzi sat and considered.

He was considering the other misfortune--poverty.

"It is equally a misfortune to be really very poor."

And this also he found stated in the Holy Scriptures.

It was King Solomon, the famous sage, who pra