A man hid his money in a hollow tree — and the story of what happened to that money became a parable about the cleverness of thieves and the greater cleverness of the righteous. The tale is preserved in the Niflaot collection and the Maase Buch.
The man chose the tree carefully. It was old, thick-trunked, with a hollow interior large enough to hold a substantial fortune. He stuffed the coins inside and covered the opening. No one would think to look inside a tree for treasure.
But a thief had been watching. When the man left, the thief retrieved the money. The next time the man came to check his savings, the tree was empty.
Devastated, the man went to a sage for advice. The sage devised a plan. "Go to the tree," he instructed, "and announce loudly, as if talking to yourself, that you have more money to add — twice the amount that was stolen. Say that you are bringing it tomorrow."
The man did as instructed. The thief, who was still watching, heard the announcement. He realized that if the man discovered his money was missing before depositing the new amount, he would never bring more. So the thief returned the stolen money to the tree, hoping to steal both the original and the new deposit the next day.
The man came the next morning, retrieved all his money, and never returned. The thief was left with an empty tree and the bitter knowledge that he had been outwitted.
The sages loved this story because it demonstrated a principle: wisdom defeats theft. The sage did not use force or magic. He used psychology — the thief's own greed became the mechanism of his defeat. In the battle between the righteous mind and the criminal mind, the righteous mind wins because it understands greed better than the greedy person does.