What are the children asking for?
We return to the children in the forest, still far from home and in need of food.
They cry, a beggar arrives with sacks of bread, and he gives them food. This is where the preceding shiur stopped. The rav had intended to move quickly toward the sixth beggar, whose healing is connected with Tikkun HaKlali. He also anticipates a connection from the sixth beggar to the seventh, associated in his reading with Dovid and Mashiach. That connection remains a preview here. But he finds that the opening scene itself describes an avodah relevant to every listener. These stories are also our stories.
He notices something in the wording. The narrator says that the children have nothing to eat, describes their crying, and then says again that they cried because they had nothing to eat. Why repeat the hunger?
The rav offers a thought he had while reviewing the story that week. There are two things children in a forest might ask: “Give us bread,” or “Take us home.” They ask for food, and food comes. Yet being fed for another day is not the same as being reunited with those who love them.
He reads their smallness as more than their age. They can see the immediate problem but not yet the larger rescue they need. This is his interpretation of the repeated words, not an explicit judgment made by the narrator against hungry children. Their physical need is real.
In his reading, the forest is exile. Israel has left its home and is trying to survive far from it. The rav evokes the chaos of refugees fleeing with whatever they can carry to convey the scene; those references belong to the setting of the recording, rather than a new account of current events. The story itself leaves the country and the cause of the flight unnamed.
A person in exile may ask for a livelihood, a spouse, children, shalom bayis, or a house. Each need matters. But there is also a larger request: restore Malchus Shamayim, bring Mashiach, rebuild the Beis HaMikdash, and bring the people home. Bread sustains life in the forest; redemption means leaving the forest.
The head of the year
Rosh Hashanah gives the rav an example of that wider prayer. It is a day of judgment, when the coming year’s life is being decided. Yet its central prayers turn repeatedly toward Hashem’s kingship over the world. They teach the person to look toward the source of life rather than remain occupied only with this year’s private additions.
He invokes the Sfas Emes’s understanding of rosh: the head of the year, not merely its first moment. The head gives direction and life to the whole body. Sfas Emes, Rosh Hashanah 5653, similarly compares the day to the head from which the whole year receives its direction. If a person can reach toward that source, the request includes more than one particular difficulty.
The rav also recalls the Zohar’s sharp image of people calling “Give, give,” like barking dogs, while forgetting the Shechinah’s exile. The matching passage in Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 6, 22a, speaks specifically of Yom Kippur. The rav applies its warning to Rosh Hashanah: prayer can become entirely about acquisition while leaving its relationship and purpose out of view.
An additional clarification from the same Sfas Emes teaching is helpful. He observes that the Sages themselves instituted requests for life, food, and forgiveness. The criticism is directed at wanting only the receipt of one’s needs. The deeper request is to receive life while remaining attached to its source. This is source context, not a new prohibition against the personal prayer encouraged in the previous shiur.
The question is therefore not whether a person is allowed to need bread. It is whether bread is the whole of what he wants. Can the request for a livelihood also become a request to live in Hashem’s world as it is meant to be?
Including the pain of the Shechinah
There is a practical difficulty. A person may be overwhelmed by his own problem. Can he honestly say that he is praying only for the Shechinah?
The rav insists that one should not pretend. Hashem does not need an impressive spiritual claim that is untrue to what the person feels. If I am hurting, I can speak about that hurt. The beginning can be much smaller and more honest: my pain matters to You as well.
בְּֽכׇל־צָרָתָם ׀ (לא) [לוֹ] צָר וּמַלְאַךְ פָּנָיו הוֹשִׁיעָם בְּאַהֲבָתוֹ וּבְחֶמְלָתוֹ הוּא גְאָלָם וַֽיְנַטְּלֵם וַֽיְנַשְּׂאֵם כׇּל־יְמֵי עוֹלָֽם׃
In all their distress He was distressed, and the angel of His presence saved them. In His love and compassion He redeemed them; He lifted them and carried them all the days of old. — Isaiah 63:9
The teaching follows the verse’s keri, the traditional reading lo, “to Him,” in the phrase about distress. The written text has lo with an aleph, “not,” alongside that reading. The distinction matters; the rav is using the traditional reading of Divine participation in Israel’s distress, not overlooking the written form.
A person can say: “I am waiting for help, and I know that You are not indifferent to what I am suffering.” Physical, emotional, financial, or spiritual distress can all enter that conversation. The language of the Shechinah’s pain expresses Hashem’s closeness to His people; it does not describe a bodily injury in Him.
In that way, the person has not erased his private need. He has placed it within a relationship. His prayer now concerns more than whether he himself feels deserving. It asks that the Divine presence and honor be revealed where they are presently concealed.
The rav speaks strongly of the greater power and acceptance of such prayer. This describes the avodah he is recommending. It is not a method that obligates Hashem to deliver a particular result immediately, or proof that someone still waiting has prayed incorrectly.
He tells a story about the Rizhiner Rebbe, whose manner of life expressed malchus. In the traditional account he repeats, the Rebbe lived amid royal splendor while taking no inward pleasure in it. The rav recalls golden shoes without soles and bloody footprints in snow as an image of outward royalty joined to private self-denial. The exact historical account remains a reported tradition here, not a model for a reader to imitate physically.
He compares that self-denial with Rebbi Yehudah HaNasi. Kesubos 104a records that, at his death, Rebbi raised his ten fingers and declared his toil in Torah and lack of personal enjoyment. The comparison concerns service without self-indulgence, not the outward surroundings alone.
The Rizhiner is then imprisoned. In the rav’s telling, the government suspects his royal bearing and sees a possible challenge to its authority. The chassidim are devastated to see the Rebbe in prison clothing, crying in a filthy cell instead of sitting in his palace. They beg to know how to help.
His answer turns on a verse:
גַּם כִּֽי־אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת לֹא־אִירָא רָע כִּי־אַתָּה עִמָּדִי שִׁבְטְךָ וּמִשְׁעַנְתֶּךָ הֵמָּה יְנַֽחֲמֻֽנִי׃
Even when I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff comfort me. — Psalms 23:4
The plain meaning is comfort: I need not fear because You are with me. The reported teaching plays with the words differently. The Rebbe says that his own confinement is not what he fears; what grieves him is “You are with me,” the Shechinah present with him in such a place. The derash does not replace the verse’s plain meaning or suggest that Divine companionship is itself an evil.
The rav immediately lowers the demand for the listener. Most of us do feel our own distress, often more than anything else. The story shows a direction in which to grow. Even including a little awareness of the Shechinah in my own pain is a beginning.
Feeling at home while the home is still ruined
The rav recalls praying with a tzaddik whose Aleinu was especially prolonged. Other people might spend their greatest effort on an individual request. Here the focus was on the world recognizing Hashem’s kingship. Aleinu gives a person words with which to step outside his private difficulty.
He connects this to his own experience approaching the Kosel through the Old City. Walking toward the place of the Mikdash can produce two feelings at once. One is that of coming home: this is where I belong. The other is pain that the Beis HaMikdash has not been rebuilt and its place is not revealed in its proper holiness.
Pesachim 88a distinguishes the patriarchs’ descriptions of the site: Avraham calls it a mountain, Yitzchak a field, and Yaakov a house. The rav dwells on that last image. The place can be home to the Jew even while the Divine home remains in ruins.
He speaks with urgency about kriyah, tearing a garment in mourning at the sight of the churban. People ask him about borrowing a shirt or transferring ownership so that they need not tear their own. He urges them to enter the act of mourning instead of focusing only on how to avoid it. Perhaps the physical act will help the feeling become real.
The source for kriyah on seeing the ruined Mikdash is Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayim 561:2. The detailed circumstances of the obligation are a separate halachic subject; this passage is the rav’s appeal to take the mourning seriously, not a complete ruling for every visit, garment, or day.
His own needs are still present when he arrives at the Kosel. But he tries to see them within the larger need for home: Mashiach, the Mikdash and korbanos, the Kohen Gadol, Moshe Rabbeinu, true leaders, nevi’im, and the Urim VeTumim. These are elements of the restored holy life for which he longs, not a timetable or a plan supplied by the story.
Moshe’s hands and the copper serpent
Nefesh HaChayim, Gate II, chapter 11, develops two ways that prayer can turn toward Hashem’s honor and the Shechinah’s pain. The rav takes time over its explanation of Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:8.
The first example is the war against Amalek:
וְהָיָה כַּאֲשֶׁר יָרִים מֹשֶׁה יָדוֹ וְגָבַר יִשְׂרָאֵל וְכַאֲשֶׁר יָנִיחַ יָדוֹ וְגָבַר עֲמָלֵֽק׃
When Moshe raised his hand, Israel prevailed; when he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. — Exodus 17:11
The Mishnah asks whether Moshe’s hands themselves made or broke the war. They did not. When Israel looked upward and subjected their hearts to their Father in Heaven, they prevailed; otherwise they fell.
The rav briefly jokes about a Rebbe raising his hands at a tish and setting different sides of the crowd into motion. A visible gesture can move an audience, but the Mishnah is explaining something deeper than the hands’ physical movement.
Nefesh HaChayim reads “looking upward” as attention directed to the matter above, the honor of Hashem. Amalek’s attack challenged the awe surrounding Israel after the Exodus. The familiar Midrash, brought by Rashi on Devarim 25:18, compares it to someone jumping into a scalding bath and making it seem possible for others to enter. Israel’s prayer addresses the public chillul Hashem represented by the attack.
The second example is the copper serpent:
וַיֹּאמֶר ה׳ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה עֲשֵׂה לְךָ שָׂרָף וְשִׂים אֹתוֹ עַל־נֵס וְהָיָה כׇּל־הַנָּשׁוּךְ וְרָאָה אֹתוֹ וָחָֽי׃
Hashem said to Moshe: Make yourself a fiery serpent and place it on a pole; whoever is bitten and looks at it shall live. — Numbers 21:8
וַיַּעַשׂ מֹשֶׁה נְחַשׁ נְחֹשֶׁת וַיְשִׂמֵהוּ עַל־הַנֵּס וְהָיָה אִם־נָשַׁךְ הַנָּחָשׁ אֶת־אִישׁ וְהִבִּיט אֶל־נְחַשׁ הַנְּחֹשֶׁת וָחָֽי׃
Moshe made a copper serpent and placed it on a pole. If a serpent had bitten someone, when he looked toward the copper serpent, he lived. — Numbers 21:9
Again the Mishnah asks whether the object itself kills or gives life. Healing comes when Israel look upward and subject their hearts to Hashem; otherwise they waste away. That distinction is explicit in the primary Mishnah and verses: healing is tied to turning toward Hashem, and the two outcomes are different.
Nefesh HaChayim distinguishes this episode from Amalek. Even where no public desecration is visible, there can be the pain above associated with a person’s suffering and wrongdoing. Prayer can turn toward that pain as well. The person has not discovered an independent power in Moshe’s hands or the serpent. He is being directed back to Hashem.
As additional context, the same chapter cites Rabbi Meir’s teaching in Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5 that the Shechinah speaks of distress when a human being suffers. The passage even speaks about the suffering of the wicked. The closeness is not restricted to someone whose behavior has always been perfect.
The rav gives Moshe’s prayer after the spies as another example of concern for Hashem’s name:
וְהֵמַתָּה אֶת־הָעָם הַזֶּה כְּאִישׁ אֶחָד וְאָֽמְרוּ הַגּוֹיִם אֲשֶׁר־שָׁמְעוּ אֶֽת־שִׁמְעֲךָ לֵאמֹֽר׃
If You put this people to death as one man, then the nations who have heard Your fame will say: — Numbers 14:15
מִבִּלְתִּי יְכֹלֶת ה׳ לְהָבִיא אֶת־הָעָם הַזֶּה אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־נִשְׁבַּע לָהֶם וַיִּשְׁחָטֵם בַּמִּדְבָּֽר׃
Because Hashem was unable to bring this people into the land that He had sworn to them, He slaughtered them in the wilderness. — Numbers 14:16
Moshe asks what the nations will say if Israel are destroyed after the Exodus: they may take it as an inability to fulfill the promise. The response does not erase all consequences. The Torah distinguishes the condemned generation from the children who will enter:
בַּמִּדְבָּר הַזֶּה יִפְּלוּ פִגְרֵיכֶם וְכׇל־פְּקֻדֵיכֶם לְכׇל־מִסְפַּרְכֶם מִבֶּן עֶשְׂרִים שָׁנָה וָמָעְלָה אֲשֶׁר הֲלִֽינֹתֶם עָלָֽי׃
In this wilderness your bodies shall fall: all of you who were counted, according to your full number, from twenty years old and upward, who complained against Me. — Numbers 14:29
אִם־אַתֶּם תָּבֹאוּ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר נָשָׂאתִי אֶת־יָדִי לְשַׁכֵּן אֶתְכֶם בָּהּ כִּי אִם־כָּלֵב בֶּן־יְפֻנֶּה וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ בִּן־נֽוּן׃
You shall not enter the land in which I raised My hand to settle you, except for Kalev son of Yefunneh and Yehoshua son of Nun. — Numbers 14:30
וְטַפְּכֶם אֲשֶׁר אֲמַרְתֶּם לָבַז יִהְיֶה וְהֵבֵיאתִי אֹתָם וְיָֽדְעוּ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר מְאַסְתֶּם בָּֽהּ׃
Your children, whom you said would become prey, I will bring in; they shall know the land that you rejected. — Numbers 14:31
The age threshold is twenty, as the rav corrects himself in the course of speaking. Kalev and Yehoshua are the named exceptions. The episode shows prayer for Divine honor together with consequences and an unfolding answer, not a claim that every request cancels every decree in the way first imagined.
These two forms of prayer can accompany the approach to Tammuz, Av, and Tishah B’Av. We can ask for redemption because people are suffering from attacks, poverty, mental distress, and the long burden of exile. We can also ask that the Shechinah come home. The rav hopes for Tishah B’Av to become a Yom Tov rather than another day of mourning.
He tentatively associates another allusion with the Zohar:
לִישׁוּעָֽתְךָ קִוִּיתִי ה׳׃
For Your deliverance I have hoped, Hashem. — Genesis 49:18
The emphasis is on “Your deliverance.” In the rav’s reading, the hope extends beyond my rescue to the deliverance spoken of in relation to Hashem and His people. He offers the source attribution tentatively; the verse and the wider teaching about the Shechinah’s distress stand alongside that uncertainty.
Free food in the city of refuge
The rav offers another picture of becoming too satisfied with bread in exile. Mishnah Makkos 2:6 says that the mothers of the kohanim gedolim supplied food and clothing to those exiled to the cities of refuge, so they would not pray for their sons to die. The death of the Kohen Gadol was connected with the exile’s release.
Makkos 11a asks why such prayer or a curse could matter. The answer there concerns the Kohen Gadol’s responsibility to have prayed for his generation. Another version of the discussion describes the mothers encouraging prayer that their sons should not die. The spiritual lesson should not become an instruction to pray for someone’s death.
Why, the rav asks, would food make an exile stop longing to go free? Someone confined to one city cannot simply travel to a family simchah or resume ordinary life outside it. Surely a meal cannot replace freedom. The rav makes the absurdity vivid by imagining appealing food arriving every evening. That modern menu is his illustration, not a detail supplied by the Mishnah.
Yet we may do the same. Give me a suitable house, the shidduch, or a more comfortable income, and I can start to regard exile as satisfactory. The lesson is not to reject those gifts. It is to remain capable of wanting the larger rescue even when a smaller need has been met.
The laws governing exile, its boundaries, and the go’el hadam are a separate legal discussion. The rav alludes to the dispute over the avenger’s role to convey how confined the exile feels. The analogy gives no present-day permission to harm anyone.
He adds a gentler consequence for someone who has waited five or ten years for a personal yeshuah. A person can feel he is badgering Hashem by asking again. The rav explicitly rejects the idea that Hashem is tired of His child. Including the Shechinah in the request may help the person feel less alone and make it easier to continue speaking honestly.
A greater hope for the enemy
The rav recalls a teaching about wartime prayer: there is a greater hope than only the destruction of the enemy. What if the people opposed to Israel came to recognize Hashem and wished to help His people?
He makes the possibility concrete through the recording’s wartime setting. Instead of the hostile scientists and leaders merely being removed, imagine them acknowledging Hashem, recognizing Israel’s holy purpose, and turning their abilities toward help. That would be more than a temporary ceasefire. It would reflect the recognition of Hashem’s kingship for which the prayers ask.
He presents this as a teaching he recalls. It concerns the ultimate hope expressed in prayer, not a prediction about any contemporary official or a direction to abandon necessary protection.
He returns to the image of the tavern from an earlier shiur. A drink on the road may keep a person going, but it is not arrival at the destination. The children receive bread, run out, and need another gift. The rav wants the learner to remain hungry for home without becoming indifferent to the help received on the way.