The rabbis preserved a small, cutting anecdote about a wealthy pagan whose appetite had outgrown his reason.
He sat down one evening at his fine marble dining table, which had been set with platters of delicacies from a dozen regions. Roasted meats, spiced wines, sweet breads. But the kitchen had failed to provide one particular variety of nut he had expected — a garnish, perhaps, or a favorite end-of-meal indulgence.
He stood up, seized the marble table, and smashed it to pieces.
The whole elaborate feast crashed to the floor. Meat and wine and bread and silver scattered across the room. All because one dish was missing.
The rabbis kept the story as a warning portrait. Here was a man who lived so entirely for sensual pleasure that the absence of a single refinement ruined the enjoyment of everything else in front of him. Twenty delicacies could not console him for one missing almond.
The Jewish counterposition is woven throughout the prayerbook. Before a meal, a Jew makes a blessing over bread — the simplest thing on the table. Before tasting fruit, a separate blessing. Each pleasure is named, thanked for, and received. The point of the system is to train the soul against exactly this heathen’s disease: the inability to taste what is present because one item is missing.
Gratitude, the rabbis knew, is not a weakness. It is the only remedy against a life that shatters itself over a bowl of absent nuts.