The Lost Princess: And Other Kabbalistic Tales of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

Sippurey Ma'asiyot, the book of fairy tale like stories written by R' Nachman of Breslov, is a unique book in Jewish literature. No other Hasidic Rebbe wrote a work of fictional stories, and certainly not ones like this. These stories are esoteric fairy tales with multiple levels of meaning. They are strange, mysterious, and often beautiful. R' Nachman was not a writer per say, however, and whereas his spiritual discourses (collected in Likutey Moharan) are works of incredible beauty and poetic-linguistic-exegetical genius, these stories are renowned for their symbolic and narrative content, but not, I would say, for their style. I'm mentioning this because I think readers will have a better chance of appreciating the stories if they come to them with the right expectations. They are not aesthetic entertainments or charming parables, but something stranger and deeper, to be approached with humility and patience.One more thing I'd like to say is that Aryeh Kaplan's compilation of commentaries in this book is a helpful starting place for thinking about the meanings of the tales, but they are not coherent explanations and are sometimes more confusing then helpful, in my humble opinion. So this book will not spoonfeed you Rebbe Nachman's stories, or explain them. but it will start you on the personal journey of understanding them, and its a good place to start.

A collection of short stories all should read!

this became one of my favorite books. Great length for reading stories when you don't have so much time...

Very nice and clear.

This volume has twelve of Rebbe Nachman's tales with elaborate notes by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan that explain the mystical references that he sees in the stories. See also my reviews of The Empty Chair and The Seven Beggars for other information about Rebbe Nachman and his teachings and for a discussion about the positive and negative reports about his tales.As written in the other reviews, people differ on whether or not Rebbe Nachman's tales are profound. In this volume, his disciple Rabbi Nathan, Rebbe Nachman's disciple, claims that this is a "holy book" in fact "Holy of Holies" and the stories in it contain "the secrets of the Torah. One should not think that these are simple stories." He writes that Rebbe Nachman told these tales "to teach us how to serve God." They contain "great secrets and moral guidance."What are these secrets? Rebbe Nachman believes that God is made up of ten parts that became disentangled and that humans have a duty to help put God together again, for God cannot do it alone. One of the ten divine pieces is feminine. "The Lost Princess" in the title tale is this tenth section that is disassociated from the other fragments, is lost, and needs to be found, and reassembled. Thus Rebbe Nachman's God is not the all-powerful monotheistic deity, but a Humpty Dumpty-type polytheistic being that needs to be put together again, who relies on humans to help in the assembly, who teaches that the messianic age will not occur until He is complete again.Whether you accept his mystical notions or not and whether you are convinced that Rebbe Nachman's tales are profound and contain the truth, you will enjoy them as interesting tales.