A wise man lay dying. He called his children together and gave them a strange final instruction: water the trees. You can do other work too, but you must always water the trees.
He left behind one son who could not walk. The boy could stand, but he could not take a single step. His brothers supported him, giving him more than he needed, so he saved money bit by bit until he had enough to start a small business. He hired a carriage, a driver, and an assistant, and set off for the trade city of Leipzig.
On the road, his assistant urged him to stop at an inn for the night. The son refused. They pressed deeper into a forest and were ambushed by thieves—bandits who had been recruited during a famine by a cunning man who told the hungry and desperate, "Come with me into the forest. We will rob the merchants on the trade roads." The thieves had a system: the recruiter went to cities during famines, picked out the smartest young men, and brought them into the woods to form a gang. The desperate became predators.
The thieves took everything. The driver and assistant ran. The son—who could not run, could not even walk—was left alone in the forest, helpless beside the overturned carriage. He survived on roots and berries, dragging himself through the undergrowth day after day.
Then he discovered something that defied explanation: a mountain made entirely of diamonds. Merchants who passed told him in astonishment that they had traveled these roads for decades and never seen such a thing. The mountain had simply appeared. It was visible only to him—the man who had lost everything and could go nowhere.
In Rabbi Nachman's telling, this is the tale of the soul that cannot walk—the soul trapped in a body that limits its movement through the world. The father's dying wish to water the trees is the command to nurture spiritual growth, drawn from the Kabbalistic image of the sefirot (the divine emanations) as a tree. The son's disability is not punishment but condition: every soul enters this world with constraints it did not choose.
The diamond mountain that appears to him and no one else is the treasure that only those who have been stripped of everything—wealth, mobility, companions—can perceive. The thieves who robbed him came from hunger. The diamond mountain came from loss. The path to revelation runs through devastation. And the treasures of the spirit appear precisely where the body has failed, where the material world has taken everything it can take, and the soul is finally forced to see with its own eyes.