The rabbis taught a stark warning: reduce your tithes, and God will reduce your harvests. The Talmud and Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) preserve the story of a family that learned this lesson through bitter experience.
A man owned a field that produced a thousand measures of grain each year. He faithfully set aside a tenth — one hundred measures — as the tithe, giving it to the Levites and the poor as the Torah requires. His field continued to produce abundantly, year after year. The tithe was not a loss but an investment in divine blessing.
When the man died, his son inherited the field. The first year, the son gave the full tithe. But the second year, looking at the hundred measures sitting in the tithe pile, he thought: "That is a great deal of grain going to others. What if I kept more for myself?" He reduced the tithe to eighty measures.
The next harvest produced only eight hundred measures. He reduced the tithe again. The following year, the harvest shrank further. Year by year, as the son tightened his grip on what he thought was his, the field responded by producing less and less.
Eventually, the field that had once yielded a thousand measures produced only one hundred — exactly the amount the father used to give as tithe. The son's family and neighbors came to console him, dressed in white. "Console me?" the son cried. "You should be mourning!" They replied: "We are celebrating. Before, you were the owner and God was the collector of the tithe. Now God is the owner and you are the collector."
The lesson was unforgettable: you can give willingly and prosper, or you can withhold and watch God take what was always His.