"I will tell you about being happy," Rabbi Nachman said. And then he told the strangest, most luminous story he ever told.
A king had an only son. He decided to transfer his kingdom to the prince during his own lifetime and threw a grand celebration. At the height of the festivities, the king pulled his son aside and said: "I can see in the stars that you will lose this kingdom. When that happens, do not be sad. If you can remain joyful, I will be happy. And if you cannot keep your joy even when you fall—then you were never fit to be king in the first place."
The prince took the throne. He loved wisdom, and he rewarded scholars lavishly. Soon every citizen pursued intellectual achievement—some for love of knowledge, others for the money and status it brought. The entire country became obsessed with philosophy. They thought so much that they thought their way out of faith. They reasoned themselves into atheism and then, having abandoned all moral foundations, descended into depravity.
The prince lost his kingdom, exactly as his father had predicted.
He fled into exile with a small group of loyal followers. They wandered through a great forest and encountered two children—orphans who had been separated from a larger group of refugees. These two lost children become the center of the story. For seven days, seven beggars appear to them—one each day. Each beggar has what appears to be a terrible disability: one is blind, one is deaf, one stutters, one has a crooked neck, one is a hunchback, one has no hands, one has no feet.
But each beggar's disability is actually his greatest gift. The blind beggar explains that he is not really blind—he simply does not look at this world because the entire world is not worth a single glance to him. The deaf beggar is not really deaf—he refuses to hear the screams of a world in pain because all sounds in this world are cries of want. Each deficiency conceals a perfection that operates on a level beyond ordinary perception.
This is Rabbi Nachman's masterwork—his thirteenth and final tale, left unfinished. Only six of the seven beggars tell their stories. The seventh beggar, the one with no feet, never appears. Rabbi Nachman died before he could complete the tale. In Breslov tradition, the seventh beggar will arrive with the coming of the Messiah. The story of ultimate joy remains, by design or by fate, forever incomplete.