Where do I go from here?
After giving the children bread, the beggar asks how they arrived. They do not know.
We know what happened: people fled their country, and the children were lost in the confusion. But the rav hears an eitzah in their answer. Sometimes a person reaches a place of sadness, failure, or confusion and cannot untangle every step that brought him there. At that moment, examining the whole history may only pull him deeper into it.
The immediate question can be simpler: “I am here. How can I move forward?” The rav connects this with the children’s smallness. In a state of katnus, when a person’s strength and perspective have contracted, the first task may be to leave the dark place. There will be time afterward to understand the path, identify the pitfalls, and avoid entering it again.
This distinction matters for teshuvah. During Selach lanu, someone may try to reconsider every aveirah in detail. Instead of strengthening regret, he begins remembering its pleasure. Thoughts that he meant to leave behind return in the middle of Shemoneh Esrei. What began as an attempt at teshuvah has brought him back into the experience of the sin.
The rav plays on aveirah and avar, the past: let what happened become something behind you. This is a homiletic association, rather than a claim about the word’s linguistic origin. His practical counsel is to begin moving again. He explicitly leaves room for later reflection, once a person is steadier. Taking responsibility includes learning what went wrong; it need not mean rehearsing every wrong moment while one is still overwhelmed.
The children now ask to go with the beggar. In the rav’s reading, the bread has given them some daas, a taste of a life beyond the forest. They can begin wanting more than another meal. They ask to leave the darkness with the person who brought them light.
His answer is painful: he does not want them to come with him.
A taste of light, followed by work
Why would the beggar give the children bread and then leave them? The rav reads this as a familiar experience in avodas Hashem. A person receives an unexpected opening: prayer comes alive, a teaching reaches him, or contact with a tzaddik gives him strength. He wants the experience to continue. Then the light recedes.
He recalls a teaching of the Baal Shem Tov that an initial gift can let a person taste what he will later have to work toward. The gift awakens desire. Its withdrawal creates room for the person’s own effort and for the kelim, the capacity to receive and keep what was first given freely.
The rav illustrates this with his own memory of walking through Machane Yehudah as a bachur. A seller offers a piece of halvah. It tastes good, and the customer wants another. Perhaps the seller gives a second sample. Eventually, though, the person who wants more has to enter the shop and pay.
The free piece had a purpose: now he knows what he wants. The modern market scene is the rav’s illustration of the spiritual teaching. It should not be turned into a historical incident about the Baal Shem Tov visiting that stall.
Similarly, the children have received bread before the beggar leaves. He has given them something with which to continue. The rav stresses this order. Leaving them without any sustenance or direction would be a different matter. The eitzah comes first; the children must then use it.
This helps explain a difficult conversation with a teacher. “Tell me what to do. Take me out of this situation.” A rav or mashpia can listen, discuss the problem, suggest an eitzah, and remain available. The person still has to do the avodah himself. Someone else cannot acquire his courage, build his home, or make his decisions in his place.
The rav says that he encounters this as a friend, without claiming the stature of a tzaddik. People want him to do the deciding for them. He can speak with them, but the lasting change will require their participation.
For years, parents, rebbeim, and a school system may carry someone forward. At twenty, twenty-five, thirty, or another point, he must begin making decisions that shape his own life: whom to marry, how to care for that marriage, how to raise and educate his children. Advice remains precious. It becomes his avodah when he acts on it.
The rav recalls Rabbi Elazar ben Durdaya in Avodah Zarah 17a. He appeals to the mountains and hills, heaven and earth, the sun and moon, and the stars. Finally he recognizes that the matter depends on him. The passage expresses the urgency of his own return. Here the rav uses it to explain why a person cannot delegate teshuvah; he is not prescribing the story’s death through intense weeping as a practice for the reader.
Compassion fitted to the person
Giving more is not always the same as giving what someone needs. Likutey Moharan II:7 begins with the connection between compassion and leadership. A leader must understand the recipient. The text gives the example of a four-day-old baby who needs milk. An adult’s food, however substantial, would be the wrong gift.
The rav makes the point with a contemporary comparison: an expensive steak and a small bottle of formula. The steak may cost fifty or seventy-five dollars, and the bottle very little. Its price does not make it suitable for the baby. The rav uses a somewhat older infant in his illustration; the printed source speaks of a four-day-old child. Both illustrations concern giving according to need, not a schedule for introducing food to infants.
The teaching continues into spiritual compassion. A Jew caught in aveiros is living far from the holiness and desire of his neshamah. The rav calls this the deepest rachmanus: seeing a holy soul living so far from who it truly is and wanting to bring it back. This is the spiritual priority he draws from the teaching, not indifference to someone’s bodily needs.
But overwhelming him with light can leave him unable to hold it. Proper rachmanus includes understanding what he can receive and what he must develop himself. In the rav’s interpretation, the beggar’s refusal gives the children room to build that capacity. He wants them to become people who can walk, choose, and eventually make a home.
The rav connects the seven beggars with the seven ushpizin: Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov, Moshe, Aharon, Yosef, and Dovid. The different encounters give the children different forms of daas. Later, after they have married, the beggars return during the wedding celebrations. What began as a blessing can then be given as a gift that the couple have become able to receive.
The wedding and the returning beggars are part of the story’s later course. The point here is the preparation for receiving: the children must build a life in which the gifts can remain.
The parent takes another step back
A matching Baal Shem Tov teaching is recorded in Kedushas Levi, Shemos, paragraph 27. A father teaches his child to walk. When the child has taken two or three steps toward him, the father moves a little farther away. As the child comes closer, he steps back again. His retreat draws out the child’s next steps.
The source connects this with the verse:
כִּי זֶה ׀ אלוקים אלוקינוּ עוֹלָם וָעֶד הוּא יְנַהֲגֵנוּ עַל־מֽוּת׃
For this is Hashem, our Elokim, forever and ever; He will lead us evermore. — Psalms 48:15
The verse’s final words have more than one traditional reading. The translation above follows the reading of enduring guidance; the teaching draws on a reading associated with youth, comparing the guidance to leading a young child. This is the source’s derash, alongside the verse’s broader assurance of enduring guidance.
It also connects the apparent distance with concealment:
אָכֵן אַתָּה א־ל מִסְתַּתֵּר אלוקי יִשְׂרָאֵל מוֹשִֽׁיעַ׃
Indeed, You are a hidden Kel, the Elokim of Israel, the Savior. — Isaiah 45:15
The child can feel that the father is moving away just when he wants to reach him. The father’s purpose is to bring him closer through steps he can now take himself. In Kedushas Levi’s explanation, a tzaddik may likewise feel that his present attainment is still incomplete. That sense of distance draws him toward a further closeness.
The rav adds learning to ride a bicycle or to swim. Eventually a parent wants the child to acquire his own balance and strength. Those illustrations assume the care and protection appropriate to the activity. They describe supported learning, not leaving a child unsafe in water or withholding necessary help from someone in distress.
The children in the story experience the withdrawal as painful. The rav does not deny that pain. He wants the learner to know that a quieter period after an opening need not mean that the earlier gift was false, or that all possibility of progress has disappeared. There may now be a step for him to take with what he has already received.