There is an old Hebrew story about a poor Rabbi named Rabbi Eizik who lived in Krakow. One night he dreamed that an angel ordered him to look for a buried treasure under a bridge leading to the King’s palace in Prague. This dream reappeared thrice– and after the third time, Rabbi Eizik set out for Prague, determined to find the treasure.
When he arrived there, he was dismayed to bridge guarded by soldiers day and night. There was no question of setting out to dig for the treasure– he would be arrested immediately.
He waited near the bridge, forlorn, walking up and down from sunrise to sunset. When night fell, the captain of the guards came to him and asked kindly, “What is bothering you my friend? Can I be of any help to you at all?”
Rabbi Eizik was so emboldened by the captain’s kindness and courtesy, that he blurted out the story of his dream, which had brought him all the way from Krakow to Prague.
The captain laughed aloud, but not unsympathetically. “So, my friend,” he said, “to follow your dream, you have worn out all that shoe leather and come all the way to Prague. Why, if I had so much faith in my dreams, I would have gone to Krakow to look for the buried treasure under the kitchen stove of a Jew named Rabbi Eizik. Wouldn’t I have been a fool?”
Rabbi Eizik thanked the man for his kindness and travelled back home. He started digging for the treasure under his kitchen stove– and sure enough, he found it lying there!
With the money, he built a house of worship, where he thanked the Lord every day for helping him to understand that his treasure was not out there in some distant place– but where he himself was.
Marcel Proust, the distinguished French writer, tells us: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Many of us hunger for something far away and yet to be, while everything we need actually resides within us!
(Dada J.P. Vaswani is humanitarian, philosopher, educator, acclaimed writer, powerful orator, messiah of ahimsa, and non-sectarian spiritual leader.)
