Sara awoke with a scream. "No don't do it! Don't destroy my bedroom walls—I just got them painted... NOOOOOO!!"
Sara's mother rushed to her daughter's bedroom, but not before glancing at the clock on the wall: 4:12 am. Why on earth was her daughter screaming in the middle of the night?!
As soon as she opened the bedroom door, she realized her daughter was having a nightmare. "Shhh…Sara…it's just a dream. Don't worry, you're home, lying in your bed, shhh..."
"Oh Mummy!" Sara sobbed. "It was so real! Just like we learned in the weekly Torah reading class today! One of the walls of the house inside was covered in spots. It was terrible. Mr. Cohen from next door came and looked at it, and said the wall has to be knocked down!"
Her mother sat down next to her on the bed and began to stroke her hair. "Shhh darling…it's okay…that only happened thousands of years ago, that sort of thing does not happen nowadays…"
"Mummy! You don't understand," Sara cried. "We learned in class yesterday about a thing called tzara'at, spots and patches. It can come on someone's skin, or on their clothes, or on the walls of their house. One reason why it came was because of speaking badly about people, lashon hara. If the person didn't stop, it would get worse and worse. Even the walls of his house would become covered in spots. Then, he would have to destroy his home to get rid of them. Imagine, his very own home!"
Sara's mother looked at her daughter with a tired smile. "Sara, it seems that you only heard half of the story. Life sometimes does that—what appears to be so strange and even scary really ends up to a person's benefit."
Sara rubbed her eyes in confusion. "I don't get what you are trying to say…"
"Before the Jews came to settle in the Land of Israel, the Canaanites lived there. The Canaanites knew that the Jews would conquer the land, so they hid their jewels in the walls of their homes. Knocking down the walls was actually a way that the buried treasure would be discovered."
Despite the late hour Sara gave a huge grin. "My dream does not seem so scary anymore! I can just imagine—this poor man, feeling so bad about his sin, having to destroy his own home....Lo and behold, he finds treasures hidden inside the wall! What a great ending!"
Exhaustion was rapidly affecting Sara's mother, but not before she got her last word in. "You know Sara, the jewels hidden in the walls tell us something about people. Some people seem very negative, like a wall covered with spots. But in fact, there is always something positive and beautiful hidden inside them. The Torah is always hidden inside their soul—like the precious jewels."
Sara laughed. She looked up at the clock: 4:30 am. She had forgotten her bad dream. "I can imagine helping everyone uncovering their treasure inside—but just not at this early time in the morning!"
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