The Roman Emperor Antoninus — traditionally identified with one of the Antonine emperors of the second or third century CE — came to Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi, the redactor of the Mishnah, with a problem. The imperial treasury was running low. He needed money. He asked the Rabbi for advice.
Rabbi Yehudah did not answer him in words. He took the Emperor out into the garden. He walked up to an old tree in the middle of a row, pulled it up by the roots, and planted a young sapling in its place. Then he moved down the row and did it again. And again. He said nothing the whole time.
Antoninus watched. After a while, he understood. He went home and issued the orders: the old governors, grown comfortable on the bribes of their provinces and too settled to be useful, were dismissed. Fresh men were appointed in their places. The new appointees, hungry for position and eager to prove themselves, enforced the taxes the old ones had let lapse. The treasury refilled itself.
The exemplum, preserved as no. 149 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis, is one of dozens of quiet exchanges between Rabbi Yehudah and Antoninus scattered throughout the Talmud. Their friendship, preserved in Avodah Zarah 10b–11a, crossed the largest boundary of the ancient world — the boundary between the Empire and its subject people. What keeps the story interesting is the form of the advice. Rabbi Yehudah refused to give counsel in a room where walls had ears. He answered with a parable of a garden, and let the Emperor translate it himself. The Rabbis preserved this exchange because they loved the method. Sometimes the only way to give hard counsel to power is to hand the ruler a spade and let him plant the lesson with his own hands.