At the very tail of Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis, tucked in among the short sayings that the editor gathered from the diverse Gaster manuscripts, comes a single sentence that carries more weight than its size. Do not refuse the smallest things, lest you remain poor.
The saying works on two levels at once. Read plainly, it is practical wisdom. A merchant who turns away small sales in the hope of only large ones will go hungry. A laborer who despises small wages will find himself unemployed. Wealth, as every rabbinic merchant knew, is built grain by grain. The Talmud in Shabbat 31b remarks that a person who accumulates by small steady increments becomes rich more surely than one who waits for a single enormous windfall. Kol ha-meqatrin, yitgadlu, the sages said. The ones who keep small and steady will grow great.
Read spiritually, however, the same saying cuts deeper. To refuse a small thing can mean refusing to say a small blessing on a piece of fruit. Refusing to give a single coin to a single beggar. Refusing to greet another Jew with shalom when passing on the street. Refusing to set aside five minutes of Torah study before sleep. In the rabbinic imagination, the world is built and kept aloft by exactly these small gestures. To refuse them, because they feel too minor to bother with, is to miss the actual mechanism of blessing.
And so the warning is inverted from how we first hear it. We imagine poverty to be the result of grand failures, lost fortunes, crushed harvests, banished businesses. The sages reply that poverty is much more often the result of daily contempt for small things: the small blessing not said, the small mitzvah waved away as beneath one's attention, the small coin held back from a hand that asked for it. Guard every small opening for good, and prosperity, in every sense, will find its way in. This exemplum, preserved as number 1 in the supplementary Diverse Sources of Gaster's 1924 collection, is the whole philosophy of tzedakah and daily piety in nine words.