It's Not in Heaven The Torah Within

Sometimes we can learn more from the misreading of a story than we can from the story itself. So it is with the oft-told Yiddish tale about Azyk, the son of Reb Yekl of Cracow. Azyk dreamed one night that he saw a great treasure hidden under the Praga side of the Warsaw bridge. So he woke up early the next morning and went to Warsaw. When he got to the bridge, he wanted to go to the spot where he had dreamed the treasure was hidden, but there was a watchman standing guard there. Azyk paced back and forth on the bridge all day long and into the night, but the watchman never budged. In fact he finally became aware of Azyk and his pacing, so he approached him and asked him what he was doing there. Azyk told him the truth. He had come to the Warsaw bridge because he had dreamed the night before that a treasure was hidden there. That’s funny, the watchman said, I dreamed of a great treasure last night too, only this one was hidden in the oven of a house belonging to a man named Azyk, the son of Reb Yekl of Cracow. Astonished, Azyk turned right around and went home, and sure enough, when he opened his oven door, he found a great treasure there and became a very rich man.

But in recent years this story has been told ­– and more important, mistold – to make a very particular point. In all the versions of this story I have heard [recently] … the treasure was hidden not in Azyk’s oven but rather beneath his house, and these versions of the story usually end with Azyk digging up the buried treasure. There is a reason for this recasting of the story; it is usually told as an object lesson for the many Jews who have turned to other religions – to Buddhism, to Hinduism, and others – for spiritual gratification. The story is invoked to say to them, Look, you have a great treasure buried beneath your own house. You’ve followed your dream of spiritual riches far and wide – all the way to the Warsaw bridge – but the treasure has been hidden beneath your own house all this time. Why travel elsewhere? Why travel far and wide, when all you have to do is dig up the treasure that has been beneath your own house all the while?

But in the original version of the story, the treasure is not buried beneath the house. It is not a secret. It is hidden in the oven, in the kitchen, in the most frequently used room in the house. It is hidden in plain sight. It doesn’t need to be dug up at all. All one has to do is go to the most obvious, least exotic place in the house and simply open the door. In my opinion this story reflects our spiritual reality much more precisely than the altered version.