What the king wanted his son to remember
The king’s warning now meets the son’s actual struggle: can he hold on to joy after losing the throne?
The rav returns to that warning because the prince is about to forget it. It is also the preparation for understanding why song matters in Tikkun HaKlali. Reb Noson connects its ten kinds of song with the healing performed by the sixth beggar, the beggar without hands, in Likutey Halachos, Hilchos Tola’im 4. The rav plans to reach that story and then learn Reb Noson’s explanation. This shiur reaches the children’s first encounter with a beggar; it does not yet tell the healing story.
The warning does not make failure desirable. It recognizes that a human being will face falls and must know how to rise:
כִּי שֶׁבַע ׀ יִפּוֹל צַדִּיק וָקָם וּרְשָׁעִים יִכָּשְׁלוּ בְרָעָֽה׃
For a righteous person falls seven times and rises, but the wicked stumble in adversity. — Proverbs 24:16
The rav reads this as a pattern of falling and getting up, rather than proof that a fall cancels the person’s identity. Sinai and the later Golden Calf illustrate the same difficulty on the scale of the people. The greatness of receiving Torah did not remove the possibility of failing afterward.
He recalls a striking Midrashic image: at Sinai, one eye was turned toward Hashem while the other was already looking toward the calf. The verse behind that image is:
לִבַּבְתִּנִי אֲחֹתִי כַלָּה לִבַּבְתִּנִי (באחד) [בְּאַחַת] מֵעֵינַיִךְ בְּאַחַד עֲנָק מִצַּוְּרֹנָֽיִךְ׃
You have captured my heart, my sister, my bride; you have captured my heart with one of your eyes, with one strand of your necklace. — Song of Songs 4:9
Sichos HaRan 123 explicitly transmits this interpretation in the name of Midrash. Rebbe Nachman uses it to teach that even a brief approach to Hashem is precious, despite a later retreat. That is the source through which the image is confirmed here; it should not be confused with the different interpretations in the ordinary Shir HaShirim Rabbah 4:9 passage. The image describes the coexistence of genuine closeness and the possibility of betrayal. It is not a reason to treat the closeness as fraudulent or the betrayal as harmless.
The royal identity discussed in the previous shiur must therefore survive a loss of its outward signs. Shlomo could retain kingship even when his rule had shrunk to his staff. A person who acquired a position through money or force may lose what made him powerful. A son cannot stop having a father. The rav uses royal birth as his image for the Jewish soul’s relationship with Hashem, not as a claim that money, political power, or an impressive appearance proves holiness.
He briefly struggles to remember a modern British royal example: someone who wished to leave royal life. The person’s identity and circumstances remain uncertain in the telling. The point of the comparison is simply that leaving a role does not rewrite one’s birth. The spiritual lesson does not depend on settling that modern biography.
The rav also describes encouraging someone suffering from anxiety to read the story before bed. He speaks strongly of the stories’ power to heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and sees the coming discussion of the sixth beggar as a teaching about healing Israel. This is his spiritual confidence and reported guidance. It does not establish a medical cure or promise that a distressed reader will recover simply by reading the story.
A kingdom that knows everything except how to fight
The new king loves wisdom. Anyone who brings him an insight becomes important to him. If the visitor wants money, the king pays; if he wants honor, the king honors him. Wisdom becomes the country’s currency. People learn that intelligence is how to rise, so the whole country begins pursuing it.
The rav contrasts this with story 12, the Baal Tefillah. In that story, a particular country measures everyone’s worth by money. Here, the prized possession is knowledge. Yet the motives are not necessarily higher: people seek knowledge because it will bring the wealth or importance they want.
The country becomes extraordinarily learned. Even its least accomplished person would count as a great scholar elsewhere. But the people have forgotten the tactics of war. Their knowledge has not prepared them to protect themselves.
The rav hears a spiritual warning in that literal detail of the story. A person can acquire information, status, or even Torah learning and lose sight of the daily struggle with the yetzer hara. He reads the Torah’s command about war as an additional image of that inner struggle:
כִּֽי־תֵצֵא לַמִּלְחָמָה עַל־אֹיְבֶיךָ וּנְתָנוֹ ה׳ אלוקיךָ בְּיָדֶךָ וְשָׁבִיתָ שִׁבְיֽוֹ׃
When you go out to war against your enemies, and Hashem, your Elokim, delivers them into your hand, and you take their captives. — Deuteronomy 21:10
The verse’s plain subject is war against an enemy. Applying it to the yetzer hara is the homiletic reading used in the shiur. The question is whether learning is helping a person serve Hashem, or has become a means of gaining money, position, and victory over others.
רֵאשִׁית חׇכְמָה ׀ יִרְאַת ה׳ שֵׂכֶל טוֹב לְכׇל־עֹֽשֵׂיהֶם תְּהִלָּתוֹ עֹמֶדֶת לָעַֽד׃
The beginning of wisdom is fear of Hashem; good understanding belongs to all who practice it. His praise endures forever. — Psalms 111:10
Fear of Hashem gives wisdom its direction. The rav warns about cleverness used to advance an agenda, including using Torah against tzaddikim and talmidei chachamim. He names no particular contemporary person here. The warning should remain a demand to examine the use of one’s own learning, rather than an editorial accusation against an unnamed opponent.
The royal scholars eventually become heretics and draw the prince after them. The story makes an important distinction: the rest of the citizens do not follow them into heresy. They cannot enter the subtle philosophical reasoning that has carried the scholars away. Although the rav at first speaks broadly about the country being drawn into failure, he then explicitly explains this distinction. We should retain it: the scholars and prince fall; the ordinary citizens do not all do so.
The contrast with the Chacham and the Tam, story 9, sharpens the point. The simple man becomes a governor and then a minister. He learns wisdom and languages, yet continues to act with honesty and simplicity. The king values the combination. In story 13, the prince loses that anchoring simplicity as his sophistication grows. The lesson is not that acquiring knowledge is itself forbidden or that ignorance alone is virtue. The Tam can learn without surrendering the truthfulness by which he serves.
The rav also contrasts Yaakov’s simplicity with Esav’s cleverness. This is his teaching contrast, not a new literal translation of the Torah’s descriptions. Wisdom becomes dangerous when a person imagines that being clever places him beyond the need for yiras Shamayim.
The good that still calls to him
The prince has fallen far. Nevertheless, the story says that he was born with good and possessed good, upright character traits. Because of that good, he sometimes remembers where he is in the world and what he is doing.
The rav applies those words to every Jew. The holy point within the soul is not merely a reward for previous achievements. A person may have lost the expression of that good, forgotten his purpose, or acted terribly against it. The good itself still gives him somewhere from which to return.
Yevamos 79a describes three marks of Israel: compassion, a sense of shame, and acts of kindness. The rav brings them as signs of the goodness with which a person begins. That does not turn every actual deed into a good deed or establish that every individual always displays all three traits. It gives the person a responsibility to live from the good that belongs within him.
He also points to the daily blessing shelo asani goy. Within the avodah of this shiur, gratitude for being part of Israel gives a person a point of joy before he starts counting his accomplishments. This is also the explicit guidance of Likutey Moharan II:10: find a good point, and at least rejoice in belonging to Israel and having received Torah.
Royal birth explains why a person cannot simply erase that connection. Even someone trying to bury it beneath other pursuits may find it returning as an uncomfortable question. The rav speaks of people who have left observance and of people struggling with addiction: there can be a moment when the activity stops and the person asks, “What am I doing here?” He reads that awakening as the soul speaking. This is a spiritual account of a possible inner struggle, not a claim that an outside observer knows every person’s motives, doubts, or suffering.
The question is short: Heichan ani ba’olam? Where am I in the world?
In the first story, the Lost Princess, the king’s deputy asks those words when he wakes after a long sleep. He had set out to find the princess and lost precious time. On waking, he needs to remember his task and where he stands in relation to it. The rav reads the search for the princess as a search for the lost soul and the revelation of holiness. Here, the prince’s inherited goodness produces a similar awakening: how did I come so far from the life I am meant to live?
The rav mentions a niggun built around these words. The question itself is what matters for the practice he is teaching. It interrupts the assumption that the current habit is the whole of who I am.
Why the same regret keeps returning
The prince sighs over his condition. But as soon as he begins using his philosophical reasoning again, the heretical ideas regain their strength. This happens repeatedly. Awakening, sighing, renewed reasoning, renewed distance: he goes around the same circle.
Sichos HaRan 10 explains a related pattern. Wicked people are full of regrets but may not recognize the regrets for what they are. When good starts to stir, evil fights back more fiercely, just as one opponent increases his effort when the other grows stronger. Becoming more entangled after an awakening does not prove that the awakening contained no good. It may be the opposition to that good.
The teaching also applies to a person sincerely trying to enter avodas Hashem. Increased resistance can accompany increased effort. The source calls for understanding this and fighting wisely; it does not promise that a single feeling of regret ends the struggle.
The rav calls the prince’s repeated tossing back and forth a kind of kaf hakela, the hollow of a sling, experienced in this world. He draws on the traditional description of the soul being flung about. Tanya, chapter 8, discusses kaf hakela in connection with purification after idle or forbidden speech. Shabbos 152b gives the more explicit image of angels at the ends of the world casting souls from one to the other. That Gemara confirms the traditional image; it does not establish the exact Baal HaTanya passage recalled by the rav. His present application is an image of the distressing alternation between guilt and renewed failure.
The prince’s mistake, in the rav’s reading, is that he has forgotten his father’s instruction. When he remembers his purpose, he treats that remembrance only as another reason to condemn himself. He could instead recognize something precious: even here, I remembered that I am the king’s son. Even here, the good in me spoke.
The sigh is not the enemy. Letting the sigh harden into despair is what prevents movement. The rav urges the person to value the awakening, even to rejoice and dance because it happened, and then use that strength to leave the place of failure.
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 forth in peace; the mountains and hills shall break into song before you, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. — Isaiah 55:12
Likutey Moharan II:10 reads the opening words actively: through joy, a person goes out. Joy frees the mind so that it can settle itself and consider life’s purpose. It is not merely a prize received after escape. Finding the good point supplies the freedom needed to begin escaping.