It is true that he sat all day in his room, that he had never in all his life been so much as "four ells" outside the town, that it had never so much as occurred to him to drive about a little in any direction, for, after all, whither should he drive? And why drive anywhither? And yet he knew the world, like any other learned man, a disciple of the wise. Everything is in the Torah, and out of the Torah, out of the Gemoreh, and out of all the other sacred books, Reb Nochumtzi had learned to know the world also. He knew that "Reuben's ox gores Simeon's cow," that "a spark from a smith's hammer can burn a wagon-load of hay," that "Reb Eliezer ben Charsum had a thousand towns on land and a thousand ships on the sea." Ha, that was a fortune! He must have been nearly as rich as Rothschild (they knew about Rothschild even in Pumpian!). "Yes, he was a rich Tano and no mistake!" he reflected, and was straightway sunk in the consideration of the subject of rich and poor.
He knew from the holy books that to be rich is a pure misfortune. King Solomon, who was certainly a great sage, prayed to God: Resh wo-Osher al-titten li!—"Give me neither poverty nor riches!" He said that "riches are stored to the hurt of their owner," and in the holy Gemoreh there is a passage which says, "Poverty becomes a Jew as scarlet reins become a white horse," and once a sage had been in Heaven for a short time and had come back again, and he said that he had seen poor people there occupying the principal seats in the Garden of Eden, and the rich pushed right away, back into a corner by the door. And as for the books of exhortation, there are things written that make you shudder in every limb. The punishments meted out to the rich by God in that world, the world of truth, are no joke. For what bit of merit they have, God rewards them in this poor world, the world of vanity, while yonder, in the world of truth, they arrive stript and naked, without so much as a taste of Kingdom-come!
"Consequently, the question is," thought Reb Nochumtzi, "why should they, the rich, want to keep this misfortune? Of what use is this misfortune to them? Who so mad as to take such a piece of misfortune into his house and keep it there? How can anyone take the world-to-come in both hands and lose it for the sake of such vanities?"
He thought and thought, and thought it over again:
"What is a poor creature to do when God sends him the misfortune of riches? He would certainly wish to get rid of them, only who would take his misfortune to please him? Who would free another from a curse and take it upon himself?
"But, after all ... ha?" the Evil Spirit muttered inside him.
"What a fool you are!" thought Reb Nochumtzi again. "If" (and he described a half-circle downward in the air with his thumb), "if troubles come to us, such as an illness (may the Merciful protect us!), or some other misfortune of the kind, it is expressly stated in the Sacred Writings that it is an expiation for sin, a torment sent into the world, so that we may be purified by it, and made fit to 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."