A Parable of Barriers

Akiva Weisinger

Somewhere in a small village in the old country of Eastern Europe, in a time before our own, the Ba’al Shem Tov rises from his seat to face the assembled crowd, who have come to him to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in his presence. The shofar is about to be blown, but he wishes to speak first. The crowd, abuzz with anticipation as the Baal Shem Tov ascends to the bima, is quieted immediately with a calm wave of his hand.

And The Baal Shem Tov begins.

There was once a King.

Who wished to be seen.

But did not want to be seen.

So he sat himself in a palace, and set up barriers around himself.

First he made walls, impenetrably thick, with brick piled upon brick until their height reached into the heavens, encircling his palace, and next to each wall was a moat, with still, black water hiding bottomless depths, and then another wall, even higher and wider and thicker than the last , and another moat, even deeper and darker, until the king had surrounded himself with fifty walls and fifty moats, each more daunting than the one before it.

And outside those walls was a wall of fire, which crackled with the intensity of a thousand hearths, whose blazing heat was felt from great distances, which burned anyone who ventured nearer than the distance an ox can plow from sunrise to sunset.

And outside that wall of fire were all manner of terrible creatures, bears, lions, tigers,  snakes, ogres, a griffin, an orangutan, a cyclops, even some creatures whose very appearance defies comprehension or even description, who have no name for they were too fearsome for even Adam to have given them one,  all vicious and rogue, who would go into a mad frenzy upon the scent of any flesh that was foolish enough to venture near.

And outside that terrible menagerie of beasts was a full of army of soldiers, the eyes of each one cold as steel but with a white-hot flame of awful hatred burning inside, their weapons polished and glinting in the sun, their cannons arrayed in rows, pointed menacingly at those who would dare intrude.

So badly did the King who wished to be seen not want to be seen.

But these barriers were made entirely of illusions.

So greatly did the king who did not want to be seen wish to be seen.

And an announcement went out throughout the land.

All those who wish to see the King, may do so.

For the King wishes to be seen.

But only once they pass through the barriers that surround the palace.

For the king does not want to be seen.

And the King sat in His palace and waited to see who would see through His illusions.

Some people came to the capital which contained the palace in order to see the king.

And when they encountered the barriers, inevitably they turned away.

Some saw the army surrounding the gates, its fearsome swell upon the land stretched out before them, the men armed with muskets and bayonets, the cavalry seated upon horses made of steel who stamped their hooves and created earthquakes, who neighed and snorted out fire, the infantry firing cannons that roared and shook the earth like a terrible storm, as loud as a clap of thunder but as horrible as a dying scream, and turned back and fled.

Others got past the army (how they did it is not told), but then encountered the animals, their teeth bared, fangs dripping with blood, eyes full of hunger and cruelty, yearning to tear into flesh, and turned back and fled.

Others got past the army (how they did it is not told) and the animals (how they did it is not told) and faced the wall of fire, felt its heat scorching their flesh, the hairs upon their arms curling up and burning away, their cheeks reddening, sweat beading up on their forehead, and they turned back and fled.

Others got past the army (how they did it is not told) and the animals (how they did it is not told) and the wall of fire (how they did it is not told) and then gazed upon the wall, its bricks stacked on each other on and on till they reached upwards as far as the eye could see, with a moat that you seemed to drown in by gazing into, trying in vain to see the bottom, and if they got past that wall, they faced another wall and another moat, followed by another wall and another moat, and on and on and on and on, and so they all eventually turned back and fled.

And none reached the palace.

Thus did the King who wished to be seen avoid being seen.

Thus did the King who wished to be seen maintain his illusions.

But one day a wise man came who wished to see the King.

And he looked at the armies and their thousands of myriads of men and their mounts and cannons and weapons, he took in the sight of the terrible hundreds of predatory and carnivorous animals, he gazed upon the wall of fire, and he surveyed the many walls and moats that surrounded the palace of the King who wished to be seen.

And, mustering up all his courage (so fearsome were the barriers erected by the king who did not want to be seen), and employing all his wisdom (so great was his desire to see the King who wished to be seen), he declared:

“O King who wishes to be seen! I see your armies, your animals, your fire, your walls, and your moats – and I do not understand. Why would a King who wishes to be seen erect such barriers? Does the king not want to be seen?”

And nothing happened.

And so he continued.

“After all, none of this makes any sense. Who has ever heard of an army of thousands that guards a palace? Who is paying their salaries to sit there doing nothing? If they’re here, who’s defending the kingdom? And what’s with the horses made of steel that breathe fire? I don’t think we even have that technology!

And the animals? They’re all carnivorous, so what are they eating every day? Is anyone feeding these animals? If not, how are they surviving? Whose tax dollars are paying for this?

And don’t get me started on the wall of fire. I don’t even know how that’s possible, much less cost-effective. At minimum, that’s a lot of fuel that could be used for more pressing needs.

And the fifty walls and fifty moats? How long did they spend on building this, where did they get all the materials, how much did they cost, how many workers were necessary to build this, how did we pay their salaries and again, how many of my tax dollars were spent on all this?

And besides all of that, are you telling me that the king has made a situation in which the only humans he interacts with have to travel through this whole barrier situation? How is this conducive to a functional state and economy? None of this makes any sense!”

And still nothing happened.

The wise man had a thought.

‘You know, if I didn’t know any better I would say that none of these barriers are real, that they’re all some kind of illusion.’

And still nothing happened.

And then the wise man, in despair, knowing that his life spent acquiring wisdom had been in vain if he could not see the King, cried out.

“I still don’t understand why a King who wishes to be seen doesn’t want to be seen!”

And at that, the barriers vanished in the blink of an eye, and the King appeared, and the wise man saw him, for the barriers that had divided them were mere illusions from a king who did not want to be seen, because the King wished to be seen.

“My faithful servant,” intoned the King, “you have correctly divined that all of the barriers I erected between us were mere illusions. In fact, this is a parable for man’s relationship with God that was told by the founder of Hasidism, Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, which survives in multiple versions told by a number of his students, including R. Ya’akov Yosef of Polonoye and R. Moshe Chaim Efraim of Sudilkov, and which was retold by successive generations, including R. Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir and Rebbe Nachman of Breslov,^[1] the point of which is that once one knows that the world is an illusion and “there is no place free from Him,” one can realize there is in fact no distance between us and God, despite how things might appear.”

“I see,” said the wise man. “But I still don’t understand. Did you want to be seen or not?”

The King didn’t respond.

“And if this is a parable,” asked the wise man, “do either of us exist?”

The king didn’t respond.

His story concluded, the Ba’al Shem Tov continues.

“The barriers are not real, not just because they are illusions, but because the story is not real. It is just a parable I told you, standing here in front of you, on this Rosh Hashanah morning before we blow the shofar, an imaginative story that I came up with to illustrate a theological point I wished to make. After all, who has ever heard of someone being able to create an army out of illusions, or produce walls through sleight of hand? Who can summon animals that vanish in the blink of an eye, or kindle fire that burns but is mere phantasm?

“But within the world of the story I told you the barriers seem real, because that’s what we’re told of them. That they seem real. And we take that for granted, we suspend our disbelief. We accept the unreal as real. Until someone questions it, points out the reality we’re accepting without questioning it. And we realize that even when we know they’re not real, we’ve accepted them as having reality, and we have failed to question the elements that signal to us their unreality.

“And it is those fictional elements, those little bits of unreality, those things that don’t make sense, that point to the existence of an Author of this story. And that Author wishes to be seen. Because all that we accept as real in this world are the fictions spun by this Author, and one who is able to realize that they are fictional is thereby able to see the king who does not want to be seen, because the fact that they are mere illusions tells us that the King wishes to be seen. And despite all the illusions in front of me, despite the distance I may feel between myself and the King because of all the barriers He has erected between us, for the king does not want to be seen,  I know that those barriers are just illusions, and that in truth, there is no distance at all, because all the barriers are fictional elements in a story of a King who wishes to be seen.”

“After all, who’s to say that I am real, and not the creation of someone’s pen, working hundreds of years after me, putting words in my mouth based on fragmented written traditions from multiple people remembering their own versions of one parable told on one Rosh Hashanah, punched up with conjecture and imagination, using me as a mouthpiece for his own ideas? Kh’fil mikh kile m’hut mir veyrter arahngelaygt in moul…. already I feel as if I speak only the words that someone else is writing for me…Who…WHO?!…Who is the one speaking to you right now? Is it me, the Ba’al Shem Tov, or someone – perhaps something- else? And does that Author not want to be seen?

“When will we see that all of this world, the language we use to describe it, the stories we tell about it, all of our notions of separation from the Infinite,  are just Parables of Barriers, illusions that hide the true face of the King who wishes to be seen, barriers that will vanish in the blink of an eye once we realize their unreality, once we grasp that all of us are mere characters in that parable, and that the king who does not want to be seen is himself another barrier, another illusion, another character in the Parable of Barriers?  What do we need to do to wake ourselves up to the fact that we have accepted the illusions as real, and that all of our reality is just the work of an Author who wants us to see the King?”

The midday sun filters through the grimy windows of the shtiebl, and in the bronze glow of its half-light, the cry of the shofar shatters the silence.^[2]

^[1] See Tsippi Kauffman, In All Your Ways Know Him: The Concept of God & Avoda Be-Gashmiyut in the Early Stages of Hasidism (Hebrew) (Bar Ilan University Press, 2007), 103-111. .

^[2] With Debts Accrued To

R. Moshe Chaim Efraim of Sudilkov, R. Yaakov Yosef of Polonoye, Dr. Tsippi Kauffman (and Chesky Kopel for directing me to her book), Jorge Luis Borges (particularly “The Circular Ruins” and “The Two Kings and The Two Labyrinths”), Umberto Eco, Franz Kafka, everyone in the TorahLab, my eighth grade class (Bornblum Class of 2026 and Jacob Morris), Isaac Gantwerk Mayer (for the Yiddish). And, yes, the movie you’re thinking of.