On Mercy for the Weak While You Are Strong

A famine struck Damascus so severe that friends forgot the meaning of love. The sky turned so stingy toward the earth that crops and palm trees never wet a lip. The ancient springs all dried away; no water was left but the tears of orphans. If smoke rose from any chimney at all, it was nothing but the sigh of a widow. I saw the trees pale as a beggar, their strong branches gone weak and helpless. No green on the mountains, no growth in the gardens; locusts had eaten the orchards, and people ate the locusts. In that state, a friend came up to me, reduced to nothing but skin on bone. Though he had once been rich and comfortable, a man of rank and gold and wealth. I said to him: my good and gentle friend, tell me, what hardship has fallen on you? He snapped at me: where is your sense? When you already know, to ask is a mistake. Can't you see the hardship has reached its peak, that misery has reached its very end? No rain comes down from the sky, and no smoke of pleading rises up. I said to him: but you have nothing to fear; poison kills only where there is no antidote. If others perish from having nothing, you still have plenty; what does a duck care about a flood? The learned man looked at me, hurt, the way a wise man looks at a fool. He said: even if a man stands safe on the shore, my friend, he finds no rest while his friends are drowning. My face is not pale from my own poverty; the grief of the poor has turned my face pale. A wise man never wants to see a wound, neither on another's body nor on his own. I am among the first of the healthy whose body shakes at the sight of a wound. The comfort of the healthy man is spoiled when he lies beside someone frail and sick. When I see that the wretched poor go hungry, every bite in my mouth is poison and pain. If someone's friends are locked in prison, how can he enjoy his ease in a garden?