The ten forms of song and the life of the person
Torah 24 now connects simcha with healing. Its language is very strong: it traces all illness to a disturbance of simcha and calls joy a great healing. It explains this through the ten forms of song and ten forms of pulse that receive vitality from them.
These are the ten forms of neginah that we have been learning about in connection with Tikkun HaKlali. The teaching places the words about the ten-stringed instrument alongside the words about joy in Hashem's deeds:
עֲֽלֵי־עָשׂוֹר וַעֲלֵי־נָבֶל עֲלֵי הִגָּיוֹן בְּכִנּֽוֹר׃
Upon a ten-stringed instrument and upon a harp, with melody upon a lyre. (Tehillim 92:4)
כִּי שִׂמַּחְתַּנִי ה׳ בְּפׇעֳלֶךָ בְּֽמַעֲשֵׂי יָדֶיךָ אֲרַנֵּֽן׃
For You have gladdened me, Hashem, through Your deeds; I sing joyfully at the works of Your hands. (Tehillim 92:5)
In this account, the ten forms of song give life to the ten forms of pulse. A disturbance in song and simcha affects those channels of vitality; restoring joy belongs to their repair. The rav explains the chain forcefully: disturbed simcha means disturbed neginah, then disturbed pulses, then physical illness; in the other direction, simcha is a great refuah. He places emotional suffering within that account as well. These are the claims he is making, even though their universal medical application is not established by the passage. The teaching includes bodily illness in its account, as well as the inner heaviness that we can readily associate with a lack of simcha.
The heart helps us picture this connection. The pulse is connected with the beating of the heart and the movement of blood through the body. A related discussion in Likutey Moharan II:2:2 describes distress as gathering at the heart. It pictures the blood coming to the heart as people in a town gather around a wise person for counsel during trouble. When the distress passes, the blood resumes its orderly movement. This is the teaching's way of joining the person's inward distress with the life of the body.
There is a further connection, introduced here for later study, between the ten fingers, the ten forms of song and the healing of the princess in the story of the Seven Beggars. The rav describes the ten pulses as rooted in the fingers and joins this with the ten fingers in the princess's healing. The detailed correspondence of each finger is not yet explained or independently verified here. They belong to the fuller discussion of Tikkun HaKlali ahead.
Editorial clarification: This is Rebbe Nachman's spiritual account, expressed in the medical language used in the teaching. Preserving its universal wording does not establish that every illness is medically caused by a person's sadness, that sickness identifies a moral failure, or that becoming happy guarantees recovery. The ten forms of pulse should not be presented as a modern anatomical count. Those would be additional claims, requiring evidence the Torah passage does not supply.
Why the examples need care
The connection between an inner burden and a bodily experience is familiar. A boy in ninth or tenth grade says he does not feel well enough to go to school. Before dismissing him as making excuses, it matters to understand what is happening. He may be frightened of a test or distressed because he is being bullied. His bodily discomfort can be real even when worry is involved.
The example asks us to take that child seriously. We have not understood his difficulty merely by deciding that the problem is in his head. We need to hear what is weighing on him. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry likewise describes physical complaints that can accompany anxiety about school, with several possible underlying causes. It does not follow that every child's illness comes from school anxiety, or that the answer to bullying is simply to tell the child to be happy.
Hospital clowns provide another example. Trained people visit patients, sing, make jokes and dress in funny ways. Their purpose is to bring some laughter into a frightening or painful setting. Here, lightheartedness is being used with care for someone who is suffering. The rav goes further: he says that a patient who is downhearted will have a harder and longer physical recovery, and takes hospital-clown work as evidence that joy helps the body heal. His argument includes physical recovery, not only making the hospital stay more pleasant.
Editorial clinical check: In the oral explanation, this example is extended to a broad claim about physical recovery. That claim needs to be kept separate from what has actually been established. A controlled study of children before surgery found reduced anxiety with clown-doctor visits. That supports the narrower point about helping a child through distress; it does not prove that all physical illness comes from sadness or that laughter by itself cures it. (Vagnoli and colleagues, Pediatrics 2005)
The rav also gives a personal recollection about his wife visiting a friend who practiced what he understood to be cranial therapy. She had a bad cold that had persisted for weeks. In his account, the practitioner felt a pulse, identified a point, applied pressure, and the cold completely went away. He repeatedly says that he does not know enough about the practice and thinks this may be how it works. The recollection and those qualifications belong to him, not to the editor.
Editorial clarification: This recollection is preserved as a reported experience, with the speaker's uncertainty. It does not establish what caused the improvement or verify a treatment. The exact practice is unclear. A 2024 systematic review of craniosacral therapy found no benefit in the conditions it assessed; that cannot determine what happened in this individual recollection or prove that the treatment described was the same practice. (Ceballos-Laita and colleagues) The comparison with the pulses in Torah 24 remains unproved. The passing Shabbos detail in the recording also supplies no practical ruling about receiving treatment on Shabbos.
Older physicians used the pulse in examining a patient, long before modern scans were available. The shiur also refers to traditions about tzaddikim discerning a person's condition through the face, hands or pulse. The exact Arizal passage for that further claim remains to be located. The rav describes this as discerning a spiritual damage through the bodily sign, within a view in which the body's limbs and sinews are rooted in the nefesh. That reported ability should not be confused with evidence that a contemporary practitioner has it, or with a general claim that pulse examination can replace imaging.
The avodah being developed here concerns the life and direction of the whole person. If a person has used part of his body in a way that has taken him away from its purpose, the work of tikkun restores that use toward avodas Hashem. In this language, the misuse is called a sickness and the repair a healing. Tikkun HaKlali belongs to that restoration through the ten forms of song. This spiritual use of illness and healing should remain distinguishable from a diagnosis of bodily disease.
At the head of the circle
Taanis 31a describes the future machol that Hashem will make for the tzaddikim. The Yerushalmi uses a related expression: Hashem will become rosh chulah, the head of the dance, for the tzaddikim.
The wording is found in Yerushalmi Megillah 2:4:5 and Vayikra Rabbah 11:9. Torah 24 cites a Yerushalmi Sukkah reference; the matching passage checked here is in Megillah. The Korban HaEdah there explains the phrase simply: He will begin the dance.
A circle has no first point in the way a straight line does. Here, its head means the One Who initiates it. We have seen someone begin a dance and bring a reluctant friend into it. In this future picture, Hashem Himself begins the simcha and draws the tzaddikim into it.
Torah 24 then draws attention to the letters of chulah, the dance, and choleh, a sick person. The image of the head of the dance meets another teaching: the Shechinah is above the head of a sick person's bed.
Nedarim 40a connects that teaching with the words:
ה׳ יִסְעָדֶנּוּ עַל־עֶרֶשׂ דְּוָי כׇּל־מִשְׁכָּבוֹ הָפַכְתָּ בְחׇלְיֽוֹ׃
Hashem will sustain him upon a bed of illness; You have turned his whole bed in his sickness. (Tehillim 41:4)
We meet a related explanation when Yaakov bows toward the head of his bed:
וַיֹּאמֶר הִשָּֽׁבְעָה לִי וַיִּשָּׁבַע לוֹ וַיִּשְׁתַּחוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל עַל־רֹאשׁ הַמִּטָּֽה׃
He said, “Swear to me,” and he swore to him; then Israel bowed toward the head of the bed. (Bereishis 47:31)
Rashi explains the bow toward the head of the bed through the presence of the Shechinah above the head of the sick person.
The person who is ill has not fallen outside Hashem's care. In Rebbe Nachman's explanation, the Shechinah sustains his life. The future image brings that Divine presence at the sickbed together with Hashem at the head of the circle. What is now a place of sickness becomes part of the completed joy and healing of the future.
This is how the same written letters can point in opposite directions. Choleh names the person who is ill; chulah names the dance. Hashem, Who sustains the person in his illness, is also the One Who initiates the joy into which he is being brought.
Editorial source clarification: The oral discussion also quotes “there is no suffering without sin.” Shabbos 55a records that position in the name of Rav Ami, but 55b explicitly refutes it and concludes that there can be suffering without sin. The Gemara therefore does not support using another person's illness as proof of wrongdoing. The future healing described here must not be turned into that accusation.
From nega to oneg
Sefer Yetzirah 2:4 places oneg, delight, at the height of good and nega, affliction, at the depth of evil. The same three letters appear in a different order: ayin, nun and gimmel.
The discussion uses that picture to introduce the idea of changing the arrangement through which something is experienced. It also mentions traditions about tzaddikim making such transformations through combinations of letters, including in reading kvitlach. The rav presents these as real capacities of tzaddikim: reading the letters and altering their combination can turn nega into oneg. Their exact documentary sources remain unresolved; the short passage in Sefer Yetzirah verifies the letter comparison itself, not the entire kvittel mechanism.
With choleh and chulah, even rearranging the letters is unnecessary. The change lies in the way they are read. The inward application is to make a movement from the heaviness that has closed a person in toward participation in simcha. Dancing gives that movement a bodily expression.
The person who feels distant can look toward the One at the head of the circle. Hashem is present even where the person feels weak. That awareness can give him a beginning: a little movement, a little song, a willingness to join instead of remaining entirely on the side.
The verse used here for going out through joy is:
כִּֽי־בְשִׂמְחָה תֵצֵאוּ וּבְשָׁלוֹם תּוּבָלוּן הֶהָרִים וְהַגְּבָעוֹת יִפְצְחוּ לִפְנֵיכֶם רִנָּה וְכׇל־עֲצֵי הַשָּׂדֶה יִמְחֲאוּ־כָֽף׃
For you shall go out with joy and be led in peace; the mountains and hills shall break into joyful song before you, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. (Yeshayahu 55:12)
Its plain meaning is the promised departure with joy and peace. The application here hears in it the possibility of emerging from what has held a person back through simcha. That application does not make it a promise of an immediate physical cure.
The future healing is also compared with the wholeness described at Matan Torah. Rashi comments on the people seeing the voices:
וְכׇל־הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת־הַקּוֹלֹת וְאֶת־הַלַּפִּידִם וְאֵת קוֹל הַשֹּׁפָר וְאֶת־הָהָר עָשֵׁן וַיַּרְא הָעָם וַיָּנֻעוּ וַיַּֽעַמְדוּ מֵֽרָחֹֽק׃
All the people saw the sounds, the flames, the sound of the shofar and the smoking mountain; the people saw, trembled and stood at a distance. (Shemos 20:15)
Rashi, citing the Mechilta, derives from the account that no one there was blind, mute or deaf. The teaching here places that description of wholeness alongside the joy of receiving the Torah. The historical derash and the future hope are being brought into the discussion of simcha; they do not establish a general rule for diagnosing present illness.
Why this takes active work
The Torah says about the celebration of Sukkos:
שִׁבְעַת יָמִים תָּחֹג לַה׳ אלוקיךָ בַּמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר־יִבְחַר ה׳ כִּי יְבָרֶכְךָ ה׳ אלוקיךָ בְּכֹל תְּבוּאָֽתְךָ וּבְכֹל מַעֲשֵׂה יָדֶיךָ וְהָיִיתָ אַךְ שָׂמֵֽחַ׃
For seven days you shall celebrate a festival to Hashem your Elokim in the place that Hashem will choose, for Hashem your Elokim will bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, and you shall be only joyful. (Devarim 16:15)
Torah 24 takes up the aspiration to be ach sameach, only joyful, in the ongoing avodah of a person's life. The words tamid do not make the work easy. They explain why it needs to be renewed.
Ki teva haadam, the nature of a person. Rebbe Nachman says that the troubles and events of life pull a person toward atzvus and marah shechorah. Every person has suffering. Some temperaments lean more readily toward joy and some toward heaviness, but no one can assume that the work will always take care of itself.
There is something relieving in taking those words seriously. Feeling pulled down does not mean I have discovered an unprecedented defect in myself. I am meeting a resistance that this Torah expects me to meet. The response is to work with it, rather than to spend the whole day accusing myself of having encountered it.
The image of earth helps describe that pull. In the Tanya's account of the elements, atzlus and atzvus belong to the element of earth, a heaviness that draws downward. Alongside it, the rav contrasts adam as related to adamah, the ground, with the allusion adameh to resemblance to the One above: a person can turn upward toward Hashem. The exact sefer behind his pairing remains unidentified. These are images for avodah. They do not require everyone to have the same temperament or explain every psychological condition.
Rebbe Nachman urges a person to make himself happy in whatever ways he can, even through milei dishtusa, lighthearted or apparently silly things. The phrase can sound like a small afterthought. It is introduced here as a serious eitzah: sometimes the part of me that refuses to join will respond to a little playfulness before it responds to another argument.
The fuller explanation of that eitzah, its sources, and its connection with Purim belongs to the next stage of the learning. The references here to costumes and drinking are previews of that discussion, not a practical ruling about intoxication.
There is also a qualification within Torah 24 itself. Rebbe Nachman calls a broken heart very good and gives it a particular time for speaking before Hashem. His concern is that a broken heart can slide into dark heaviness if it occupies the whole day. Simcha does not eliminate honest teshuvah or the time for pouring out a painful heart.