The question that remains unanswered
There is another way to read the children’s wonder. At this point in the story, no explanation is given for how the blind beggar knows the road. They have a question, and they must continue living without its answer.
The rav turns to Likutey Moharan II:52. That teaching says that questions about tzaddikim are inevitable, just as questions about Hashem are inevitable. Hashem’s greatness exceeds human understanding. If His conduct were limited to what our minds require and can fully grasp, that would make His understanding like ours.
The rav states a necessary qualification about human beings. This begins with someone genuinely established as a tzaddik. He is not talking about a person committing aveiros or doing terrible things. An objection may be a real refutation of a person’s claim to righteousness. Unanswered questions do not establish that someone is holy, and this teaching gives no protection to wrongdoing.
His point concerns the next situation: there are good grounds for trusting the person, yet one action remains beyond the observer’s understanding. Does that one unanswered question require discarding everything known about him? The rav says that he can acknowledge his limited knowledge and remain with the question.
He applies this much more strongly to emunah in Hashem. He speaks about the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust, including children, and the killings on Simchas Torah. These are immense questions. He rejects the claim that someone in our world possesses a sufficient explanation for them.
Yet he does not stop at “I do not know.” Beginning with his prior belief that Hashem is tov u’meitiv, good and doing good, he holds that even what appears utterly terrible belongs to a Divine understanding in which it is somehow good. He says frankly that he cannot grasp how. The greater the question, the greater the distance it reveals between his understanding and Hashem’s.
This is the rav’s strong statement of faith from within that starting belief. It does not supply a human account of why those people suffered, absolve their murderers, or require a person in grief to say that the suffering feels good. His insistence that he has no explanation must remain together with his conviction that Hashem does.
He recalls a saying attributed to the Kotzker: he would not want to serve a Creator whom he could fully understand. If all of Divine conduct fit his own mind, he would have reduced the Creator to his own scale. The precise early source of the saying remains an attribution, while the underlying argument is explicit in Likutey Moharan II:52.
The rav illustrates the difference in scale through a child learning arithmetic. A child who knows addition and subtraction might find eight times four difficult. A much more advanced equation would be further beyond her. If she already trusts that someone knows its answer, its difficulty can deepen her respect for that person’s knowledge.
The comparison concerns the limits of the observer’s understanding. It is not an equation that explains murder or loss. The rav’s argument begins with trust in Hashem; it does not pretend that an analogy has solved the tragedy.
One Shabbos in a much longer story
The rav repeats a mashal in the name of the Chofetz Chaim. A visitor enters a shul for one Shabbos and watches the aliyos. Why did the rav not receive shishi? Why was the prominent donor at the front passed over? Why did an unfamiliar person at the back receive an aliyah?
The gabbai explains that the visitor has seen only one week. The rav usually receives shishi. This week there is a bar mitzvah, an aufruf, and someone whose family has had a baby. One person was given an aliyah because his father could not be honored the previous week. Another sponsored the kiddush. A donor had asked that his honor be given to someone else.
Each detail belongs to a wider sequence of people, obligations, requests, and past weeks. A visitor who saw more of that sequence would understand more of the choices. The mashal is a reported teaching; its list of examples does not establish a new set of halachic priorities for allocating aliyos.
The rav compares a human lifetime of seventy, eighty, ninety, or a hundred years with the much longer history into which it falls. We enter partway through. We cannot demand that the part before us display every connection from the beginning to the end.
He closes with another reported derash about the suffering of the martyrs. Here several primary accounts need to be kept distinct. Berachos 61b tells of Rabbi Akiva’s death under iron combs and the angels’ question about his reward. Menachos 29b tells of Moshe seeing Rabbi Akiva’s end and hearing that this is how it arose in Divine thought. The words about returning the world to water and tohu va’vohu occur in the piyut Eleh Ezkerah, after the account of Rabbi Yishmael’s suffering. They are not all one Gemara about a single exchange.
The rav’s remembered derash brings those images together. He hears the return to the beginning as more than a threat: to understand a moment that seems intolerable, one would need to see the whole story from its beginning. The earlier printed attribution of that derash remains unidentified here. Its place in the shiur is clear: it extends the mashal of arriving for only one Shabbos.
The Torah’s opening image supplies the phrase:
וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם וְרוּחַ אלוקים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּֽיִם׃
The earth was unformed and empty, with darkness over the surface of the deep, and a wind from Hashem sweeping over the surface of the waters. — Genesis 1:2
The derash imagines being brought back to that beginning and then accompanied through the entire unfolding history. The rav does not claim to have taken that journey or to know its explanations. He asks the listener to acknowledge how little of the whole is available to him now.
What this recording leaves for later
At both the beginning and the end, the rav intends to reach the sixth beggar, the beggar without hands. He previews four aspects of that figure’s work: retrieving the poisoned arrows, tzedakah, the ten winds, and the ten pulses. He says that Reb Noson explains their connection with Tikkun HaKlali and healing the princess at length.
This recording does not deliver that promised explanation. Its substance remains the children’s encounter with the first beggar, the meaning of spiritual seeing and hearing, learning to act with the help one has received, and continuing while some questions remain open. The detailed sixth-day teaching must not be invented to give the series an ending it has not yet supplied.
For now, the child has tasted the bread. The next step is one he must learn to take himself.