A parable about greed, as relayed by a 17th-century Jewish widow Gluckel to her children:
As it is told of Alexander the Macedon who, as everyone knows, travelled and conquered the whole wide world: Whereat he thought to himself, «I am such a mighty man and I have travelled so far, I must be near to the Garden of Eden.» For he stood by the river Gihon, which is one of the four rivers that flow from the Garden.
So he built himself stout ships, boarded them with all his men, and through his great wisdom reached the fork where you enter towards Eden. When he neared the Garden itself, a fire came and consumed all the ships and men, save Alexander’s own ship and its crew.
He now strode to the gate of the Garden and begged to enter, for he wanted to see all the wonders of the world. And a voice answered him and bade him depart, for through this gate «only the righteous may come in.»
After Alexander had pleaded some while in vain, he finally asked that something be tossed him from over the wall, that he might show it as a token to prove that he had at last reached the gate of Eden.
Whereat an eye fell at his feet. He picked it up, without well knowing what to do with it. And a voice told him to heap together all his gold and silver and other goodly possessions and pile them in one scale of a balance, and then lay the eye in the other scale, and the eye would outweigh all the rest.
King Alexander was, it is well known, a great philosopher and a wise man, as his teacher Aristotle had trained him to be, and he sought to master all manner of wisdom. He was loath to believe that a little thing like an eye could outweigh so much heavy gold and silver and other goodly possessions, and he set about to see if it were true.
He brought him a great and mighty pair of balances, and placed the eye in one of its enormous scales. And in the other he poured hundreds and hundreds of gold and silver coins, but the more he poured the higher rose the scale and the eye proved heavier and heavier. And in wonderment he asked the reason.
Then he was told to put the tiniest speck of earth over the eye. He did so, and at once the eye rose as though it weighed a feather, and the scale with the gold and silver came tumbling to the ground.
In greater wonderment than ever, he asked how this came about. And the voice replied:
«Hearken, Alexander! The eye of man, so long as he lives, is never full. The more a man has the more he wants. And therefore the eye outweighs all your silver and gold. «But once a man dies and a speck of earth is laid over his eye, the eye is satisfied.
«Behold, you may see it, Alexander, in your own life. You were not satisfied with your kingdom and needs must travel and conquer the whole world, till you have come to the place where are the servants and children of God.
«So long, then, as you live you will never be satisfied, and you will always want and take more and more, till you will go and die in a strange land, and not so long now either. «And once you are placed in the earth, you will be content with six feet of ground, you for whom the whole world was too small.
«Go at once, and speak nor ask no more, for you will not be answered.»
So Alexander sailed with his ship to the land of Hodu, where he presently met a terrible and bitter death. For he died of poisoning, as his teacher Aristotle tells us in his history.
A penny honestly earned is hard to part with. But man must learn to control his greed. For ’tis a universal proverb, «Stinginess never enriches and measured generosity never makes one poor.» To everything there is a time—a time to get money and a time to give.
The opening of Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, written in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
There is a word for happiness in Hebrew, simchah, that is often used to describe a festive occasion: a wedding, the birth of a child, a bar mitzvah, so on. The defining feature of true joy is that it is best shared; it is not diminished through division.
Happy Thanksgiving.