A king fell gravely ill, and none of his physicians could cure him. They tried every medicine, every herb, every treatment known to the medical science of the age. Nothing worked. The king grew weaker by the day.
Then a poor man — a nobody, a peasant from a distant village — arrived at the palace gates with a single citron. "This will cure the king," he said. The courtiers laughed. How could a simple fruit accomplish what the greatest doctors had failed to do?
But the king was desperate. He took the citron, ate it, and recovered. The cure was instant and complete. The fruit that a poor man had grown in his own garden succeeded where all the wealth of the royal treasury had failed.
The Midrash (Leviticus Rabbah 37:2) uses this story to teach about the relationship between humility and healing. The king's physicians had tried elaborate, expensive remedies because they assumed that a great disease required a great cure. The poor man knew better. Sometimes the simplest remedy is the most powerful — because it comes not from human ingenuity but from God's earth.
The citron — the etrog — carried additional symbolism for Jewish readers. It is one of the four species taken on Sukkot, a fruit that the sages said represents the heart. The poor man cured the king's body with a fruit that represents the heart — suggesting that what the king truly lacked was not a medicine but a connection to the simple, earthy goodness that wealth and power had obscured.
The sages taught: do not despise the small gift. The citron from a poor man's garden may be worth more than all the gold in the royal treasury.