The Great Wealthy Man

I also heard from the aforementioned man, who heard in the name of our holy Rebbe, that he told a parable concerning the need to speak with people about fear of Heaven. This is it:

Once there was a very wealthy man who possessed many thousands and tens of thousands. This wealthy man issued an announcement and said: Anyone who needs to borrow money should come to him, and he would lend it. Naturally, many people eagerly came; many people came and borrowed money from him. The wealthy man kept a ledger of all of them.

One day he took the ledger in hand and began to review it. He saw that he had issued a very great sum of money in loans, yet no one took it to heart to come and return and repay what he had borrowed from him. Naturally, this troubled him and caused him anguish.

Among those borrowers was one man who had also borrowed from the wealthy man. He lost the money in a business venture until he had nothing with which to repay his debt, and this caused him great suffering. That is, the man suffered greatly because he could not repay his debt. He resolved that, at the very least, he must meet the wealthy man face to face and pour out his whole heart, explaining that he was helpless in the matter. He came to the wealthy man and began to pour out his heart before him: how he had received money from him as a loan, the time for repayment had arrived, and he had no way to pay because he had lost the money. He had no idea what counsel to take or what to do about it.

The wealthy man answered him: “What do I care about the money that you owe me? What is such a small sum that you owe me—whether you repay it or the opposite—compared with the total sum of the loans, which amounts to thousands and tens of thousands? Therefore, I want you to go to all my borrowers, press them for payment, and remind them that they owe me so much money. Why are they not repaying me? Even if they do not repay and settle everything, but each one gives and repays a little of his debt, it will still amount to thousands of times the sum of your entire debt and loan.” The meaning of the parable is self-evident. Understand it.

The transcriber says: I later heard that some say this parable was told by Rabbi Yitzchak, of blessed memory, son-in-law of the Maggid of Tiraovitze.