Children Who Buried Their Drunk Father in a Cemetery

Midrash Aggadah Gaster, Exempla of the Rabbis No. 305 (Codex Gaster 185, 1924)

Curated by The Jewish Mythology Team · Published January 23, 2025

A father drank too much. His children, embarrassed, tried an extreme intervention. They refused to give him wine. They cut off the household supply. And when he kept finding it anyway, they took drastic action: they carried him out to the cemetery and left him there, hoping the silence of the tombs and the sobriety forced by having no access would finally cure him.

They underestimated thieves.

In an empty cave of that same cemetery, a gang of wine-thieves had recently stashed jars of stolen wine. The old man, wandering, found the cave. He drank himself into the stupor his children had worked so hard to prevent.

The children came back the next morning and found him drunker than before. They carried him home, defeated.

Gaster's Exempla (No. 305, 1924) ends with three wry exclamation marks: Even the cemetery was of no avail!!! The story is a folk comedy about the stubbornness of addiction — but beneath it sits a harder teaching. Changing a person by changing their environment is not enough. A drunkard will find wine in a tomb. The cure has to come from inside the drunk, not from the outside world shrinking around him.

Themes

Parables Family Repentance Ethics

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