The Beggar's Purse

The Gerrer Rebbe used a mashal (parable) to explain the pasuk, "And I took you out from the suffering of Egypt and saved you from their slave labor." A king sighed over his son, the prince, who had no regard for money and spent it like water on lavish balls and affairs, fancy clothes, vain pursuits, gambling and any sport he wished. He kept running up debts until the king could no longer ignore his reckless, frivolous lifestyle. The king resolved to punish him in order to teach him the value of money and responsibility. "You are hereby banished from the palace," he said. "You may not take anything with you but the clothes on your back. Maybe then you will learn to value hard work and money." The prince found that none of his former friends wanted anything to do with him now that he was penniless. Eventually he took to begging along with the rest of the paupers and made his home among the hovels of the destitute. Many years later, the king sent his magistrate on a mission of reconciliation, for surely his son had learned his lesson. The official searched all sectors of the town until he was told to look among the hovels of the poor, and there he found the prince, dressed in tattered rags and nearly unrecognizable. "My dear prince, your father, the king, has sent me to find you," he said. The prince's dulled eyes gleamed with hope, and his voice shook as he struggled to remember his father and his former station. "Now I have been sent to ask you if there is anything, anything at all, that you wish and need," said the magistrate. Surely, he thought, the prince would ask to come out of exile, and then he would bring him new clothes, a wash and a coach home. But the pauper-prince answered, "What a great father. Anything at all, you say? Please bring me a new beggar's purse. Mine has seen better days, and with a new one I can collect alms more easily." We are no different from the pauper-prince, explained the Gerrer Rebbe. We too have been in exile for so long that we seem to forget our true origins and former station. So when we daven and ask Hashem for help, what do we ask for? Do we truly yearn for redemption, reconciliation and a return to our former stature, or are we satisfied with a mere beggar's purse? Hashem willing, the geulah will be here soon, and then we shall all see that there are much higher and loftier things to yearn for than a new beggar's purse.