There was a man in a certain town who was always seen in tattered clothes. He sat on the synagogue floor among the poorest of the congregation. He ate what was given him. He accepted everyone's pity.
One day Rabbi Akiva came to the town to sell a pearl of surpassing value — a stone he was using to raise a great sum. He showed it in the marketplace. No one had the money to buy it. The wealthy merchants examined it, praised it, and walked away.
Then the ragged man of the synagogue approached. He asked the price. He counted it out, bought the pearl, and invited Akiva and his disciples to follow him to his house.
Akiva followed, uncertain what kind of hovel he would see. They arrived instead at a magnificent building. Servants stood at the gate. The ragged man stepped inside, changed his clothes, and sat down on a chair of gold. A lavish meal was set before them on silver trays.
Akiva could not contain his astonishment. "Why," he asked, "do you walk the streets in rags? Why sit among the beggars in the synagogue? You have all this."
The man answered: "Riches are not stable. Tomorrow I may lose everything. No man, therefore, should be proud. I prefer the station of the poor, so that if a change for the worse comes, I will not be dismayed. My soul lives already in the condition I might one day be forced into."
Akiva heard this and rose. He blessed the man — not for his charity, not for his beauty of appearance, but for his modesty and his wisdom. The rags, he understood, were a spiritual practice. Gaster's Exempla (no. 371, 1924; from Codex Gaster 130) preserves the story as a lesson in a counterintuitive truth: the safest way to hold wealth is to train yourself, every day, to live without it.