The King and the Prince
There is yet one more analogy from the human sphere that relates to a king and his son the crown prince. The king gives his only son, the heir to the crown; the best education money can buy. He hires the best tutors and gives his son everything that is needed to make him the best student he can be.
After a few years of exposing the prince to the best teachers and the most effective pedagogical techniques, the king does something that appears to run counter to his entire educational program for his son. The king sends him away to a faraway province that was known for its lack of education and very limited morals. The prince was shocked. His teachers were stunned. The entire palace community was in an uproar. Why was the king doing this to his beloved son?
After all these years of such a sheltered and insulated environment that the prince was in, the king was now going to expose his only son to the immoral ways of that society. After virtually guaranteeing that his son should be impervious to all the negative influences of the world around him, he was now going to make him so vulnerable. Why was the king doing this?
Why was he going to undo all of these years of the best intellectual and moral education available?!
We know that the king had not lost his mind and that he still wanted only the best for his heir to the throne. The king, however, realized that there was a limit how far his son’s education can go. To continue with the approach he had taken thus far would afford his son more knowledge, to be sure, but it would only constitute an incremental and quantitative increase. The king knew that his son possessed hidden capabilities that would never be realized if he would remain in the sheltered environment of the palace.
By sending his son to a place where the morals were weak, the king was providing him with temptation. This resistant force that he was not exposed to in the palace, would force the prince to reach more deeply into his soul’s reservoir of moral fortitude to counter the negative influences of his new surroundings.
And though the odds were that the prince would, on occasion, make the wrong moral choices, the king was confident that in the final analysis the prince will have realized a potential for growth that is incomparable to what he had experienced in his father’s secure environment. The prince returns to be with his father. He has grown from an immature precocious child to a mature young man, endowed with an inner strength that he could have never developed where he was previously.
At this point the analogy to the soul should be obvious. The king is G-d, the prince is our soul. The palace is Paradise, the teachers are angels or the deceased souls of the righteous. Now the soul is sent by G-d to a foreign land, the world of bodies and material pleasures. Bu doing so, the soul will be given the opportunity to grow in a real way, because only in such a hostile environment can the soul realize its true potential.
When the soul enters this world it is extremely troubled and unhappy. It does not want to descend. “all roads are fraught with danger,” is the talmudic expression that is used in Chassidic literature to describe the apprehension of the soul to embark on this journey into the unknown.
From the book Safe Kabbalah, Part Three: Journeys of the Soul by Rabbi Heschel Greenberg, published by the Jewish Discovery Center.
