Rabbi Nachman began this tale with a warning: "You might think I will tell you everything and that you will be able to understand." He would not. And they would not.
A king who had won many wars threw a grand banquet to celebrate his victories. There was music, comedy, and elaborate parodies of every nation's customs—their mannerisms, their dress, their speech. The performers mocked the Turks, the Europeans, and probably the Jews as well. The king followed along in a book that cataloged the customs of every nation in the world, checking the parodies against their sources.
While the king was poring over the book, he noticed something on the edge of the page: a spider, crawling toward a fly.
The spider crept closer. Just as it was about to reach the fly, the wind lifted the page. The spider lost its path and turned around, as if it had never been interested in the first place. The page settled. The spider approached again. Again the wind lifted the page. This happened several times—approach, interruption, retreat, approach again. Each time, the spider feigned indifference, as though it had no interest in the fly whatsoever.
Finally, the spider got one foot onto the page. The wind lifted it once more, but this time the spider held on. The page pressed down—and the spider was caught between one page and another. It crawled deeper and deeper into the book, burrowing between the pages, until nothing whatsoever was left of it. It had been swallowed by the text itself.
"And the fly—I will not tell you what happened to it," Rabbi Nachman said.
The king watched all of this with astonishment. He understood instinctively that this was not a random event. It was a vision, a message from another realm. His ministers noticed the king staring intently at the book and tried to see what he was looking at, but there was nothing visible—the spider had vanished into the pages, leaving no trace.
Rabbi Nachman announced that this story contained the account of his great journey to Navritch, Zaslav, Dubno, and Brody—a physical trip that carried deep spiritual significance. He offered no further explanation. The fly and the spider are forces in the upper worlds, locked in a pursuit that spans the entirety of creation. The wind that lifts the page is divine intervention, delaying the collision between predator and prey. The book is the book of creation itself, containing the identity and destiny of every nation. And the spider that climbs into the book and vanishes is consumed by the very text it was trying to cross—swallowed by the story of the world.
Rabbi Nachman refused to say more. He said only that the king understood, and left it there. The tale remains one of the most enigmatic in all of Chassidic literature—a story that declares its own incomprehensibility and dares the listener to accept it without resolution.