Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua ben Ilem were walking toward Jerusalem on pilgrimage when they saw something few human eyes ever see: an angel, flying low over the road, carrying a shirt of pure luminous light.
The rabbis called up to the angel. "For whom is that garment?"
The angel answered, "For Joseph the Gardener, who lives in Askalon."
After the festival in Jerusalem, the two sages traveled to Askalon to find this Joseph and see what kind of man deserved such a shirt. They found him: a simple gardener, tending his small plot, dividing his produce each day with the poor of the town.
The rabbis told him about the vision. They mentioned something strange — the angel's shirt, they had noticed, was nearly finished but had one seam incomplete.
Joseph nodded sadly. He explained. He had been wealthy once, born to a prosperous father, but he had squandered the inheritance in his youth. All that remained was this garden. He lived simply and gave half his produce to the poor — and that giving, he hoped, was slowly repairing the damage of his earlier life. The missing seam, perhaps, was the last gap he had not yet filled.
His wife overheard the conversation. Quietly, without telling her husband first, she went to him afterward and proposed something astonishing. "Sell me," she said. "Sell me as a bondservant. Use the money to give more charity — enough to complete the seam of your shirt."
Joseph resisted. She insisted. Eventually he agreed, on the condition that she would return to him when she could. He sold her and distributed the money. She went into service with a cruel shepherd who mistreated her.
Years later, Joseph went in disguise to test her faithfulness. He presented himself as a stranger and offered to sleep with her. She refused with fury. When she was sure she had passed the test, he revealed himself, and a bat kol from heaven announced, "Your shirt is complete — and a more beautiful one is being prepared for your wife. Go to such-and-such a place, and there you will find a treasure your father hid long ago."
Joseph went. He found the buried treasure exactly where the voice had said. He used it to ransom his wife from the cruel shepherd. They returned home together, and they resumed their small, quiet work of feeding the poor for the rest of their lives (Gaster, Exempla No. 410; Hibbur Yafeh of Rabbi Nissim Gaon, 11th century).
The story is a parable of two thresholds. The first threshold: Joseph had almost completed his tikkun — his repair — on his own, but the last seam required his wife's sacrifice. Marriage, the rabbis are teaching, is a shared account. The second threshold: once both spouses had passed their test of fidelity, the buried wealth of his father — that same inheritance he had squandered — returned to him, cleansed, in a form he was now worthy to hold.
Wealth given away in the right way always comes back. Sometimes it comes back as a shirt of light. Sometimes it comes back as a buried treasure. Sometimes it comes back as a wife who trusted you even when you pretended to be a stranger.