Quick Answer
Thirteen stories, told aloud by a dying man between 1806 and 1810, written down by the one disciple who understood what he was doing. They look like folk tales and behave like nothing else. One ends by refusing to tell you how it ended. The last one is missing its final day, and the tradition says that day arrives with the Messiah.
Key Takeaways
- They were spoken, not written. Everything survives because Nathan of Nemirov wrote down what he heard.
- The Lost Princess withholds its own ending, and the withholding is the teaching rather than a defect.
- Nachman's real subject is doubt, which is why a Hasidic master from 1810 reads as contemporary.
- Hitbodedut is the transferable part. An hour of unstructured speech, alone, in your own language.
- Do not trust any single decoding. Four schools have four keys and the stories outlast all of them.
🕑 16 min read
What This Book Is
Between 1806 and 1810, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov told thirteen stories. He told them aloud, in Yiddish, to a small group of followers, usually without warning and often in the middle of doing something else. He did not write them down.
His disciple Nathan of Nemirov did, and published them in 1815, five years after Nachman's death, with a Hebrew version and the original Yiddish on facing pages. The collection is called Sippurei Ma'asiyot, the telling of tales.
On the surface they are folk tales. Kings, lost daughters, forests, beggars, princes exchanged in the cradle. Underneath they behave in a way no folk tale does. Symmetries do not resolve. Quests fail on technicalities. A story will stop and refuse to continue. Characters are described in ways that make sense only if you already suspect they are something other than characters.
Nachman said, of the tales, that he had put things into them which even the people repeating them would not perceive. Whatever you conclude about that claim, the stories behave as though it were true.
On the spelling: the town is Bratslav in Ukrainian and Breslov in the Hasidic pronunciation, and both appear on book covers. Nachman is also written Nahman and Nachman of Bratslav. They are the same man and the same movement.
The Man Who Told Them
Nachman was born in 1772 in Medzhybizh, in what is now Ukraine, in the house where his great-grandfather the Baal Shem Tov had lived. Being descended from the founder of Hasidism is a considerable inheritance and he treated it as one.
He was a difficult, extreme and unusually self-aware man. He fasted and afflicted himself as a boy, then later warned his followers against exactly that. He travelled to the Land of Israel in 1798 in circumstances that nearly killed him. He conducted a bitter and public quarrel with other Hasidic leaders. He had a persistent conviction of his own significance that sits alongside long recorded periods of feeling entirely abandoned.
He contracted tuberculosis and died in October 1810, aged thirty-eight. He chose to be buried in Uman, in the graveyard of the Jews massacred there in 1768, and said explicitly that he wanted to lie among those dead.
What makes him readable outside his own world is the subject he kept returning to. Most religious literature is written from the far side of belief. Nachman writes from inside the difficulty of it: the days when nothing works, when prayer is mechanical, when the arguments against everything you hold seem better than the arguments for it. He treats that condition as normal rather than as failure, which almost nobody in his period did.
The Scribe Without Whom Nothing Survives
Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, called Reb Noson, met Nachman in 1802 and spent the remaining eight years of his master's life writing down everything he could.
This is not a minor supporting role. Nachman published almost nothing himself and burned at least one manuscript. What exists of him exists because one man decided that the correct response to hearing something extraordinary was to go home and write it out that night while it was still exact.
Reb Noson also did the harder thing afterwards. When Nachman died with no successor, it was Noson who organised the books, established the annual gathering, wrote the prayers derived from the teachings, and held together a movement that by every ordinary expectation should have dispersed within a decade.
Readers of any transmitted tradition should notice how much rests on this kind of person, and how rarely they are named.
The Lost Princess
The first tale, told in 1806, sets the pattern.
A king has six sons and one daughter. He loves her greatly. One day, angry, he says to her, may the evil one take you. That night she is gone.
The king's viceroy asks permission to search and sets out. He wanders for years. Eventually he finds her, in a palace, and she tells him what he must do to free her: a year of preparation, of longing, of fasting on the final day, and no wine. He does the year. On the last day he sees an apple tree, eats, and falls asleep. He wakes and she is gone, and she has left word that he must do it again.
He does it again. This time it is a wine spring on the final day. He drinks, sleeps for seventy years, and wakes to find her gone once more, and a message that this time she is somewhere far harder to reach.
He continues. He crosses a mountain of gold and a fortress of pearl. And then Nachman ends the story by saying that the viceroy did get her out, and that how he got her out he did not tell.
That ending is the single most instructive thing in the collection. A story about a search that fails twice through the smallest possible lapse, and then succeeds by a means the teller declines to describe. Every reading of it, kabbalistic or psychological or literary, has to account for the withholding, and the withholding is not decorative. Nachman is saying that the last stage cannot be conveyed in the form the rest of the story took.
The Seven Beggars
The last tale, told in the spring of 1810 with a few months left to live, is the longest and the strangest.
Two small children are lost in a forest. Over seven days, seven beggars come to them and feed them. Each beggar has an apparent affliction. The first is blind, the second deaf, the third has a stammer, the fourth a crooked neck, the fifth is a hunchback, the sixth has no hands, the seventh no legs. Each says that he blesses the children to be as he is.
Years later the children, now grown and married to each other, are celebrating their wedding, and on each of seven days a beggar arrives to give his gift, which is a story about himself. The blind beggar is not blind; he sees so completely that the entire world is as nothing to his eye, and he is the oldest being alive. The deaf beggar hears nothing because there is no deficient sound in the world he attends to. The stammerer is the finest speaker alive and simply does not utter anything that is not essential. Each defect turns out to be a perfection so complete it looks from outside like an absence.
The seventh beggar, the one with no legs, does not come. Nachman stopped there.
Breslov tradition holds that the seventh day will be told when the Messiah arrives. Whether the omission was intended or forced by his illness is not recoverable. As a piece of construction it is remarkable either way: six variations on the theme that what looks like lack is fullness, and then a seventh that is genuinely absent, so that the reader is left holding the actual thing the tale has been describing.
The Clever Man and the Simple Man
If the first two tales are the profound ones, this is the useful one.
Two boys grow up together. One is clever and becomes learned, travels, masters trades and philosophy, and finds that nothing satisfies him because he can always see what is wrong with it. The other is simple, becomes a cobbler, makes bad shoes, and is delighted with everything. His bread is a feast. His plain coat is a fur coat because he says it is. His wife plays along.
The clever man ends up destitute, unable to commit to anything, and eventually is unable to believe in anything at all, including things standing in front of him. The simple man ends up honoured and prosperous, and is unbothered by that too.
The story is not an argument against intelligence, and reading it that way misses what Nachman is doing. The clever man's problem is that his cleverness has become a permanent posture of assessment, so that nothing can ever simply be received. The simple man's gift is not stupidity; it is the ability to accept what is actually in front of him as being what it is. That distinction is worth more than most of what has been written about it since.
Why Stories Instead of Teaching
Nachman gave a reason and it is worth taking seriously.
He said that people had fallen asleep, and that a straightforward teaching would not wake a sleeper. He said the great truths had, in the state of the world he was living in, descended into the form of story, because that was the route still open. And he said that stories work on a person who is not attending, which direct instruction does not.
Underneath this is an older Jewish position that the deepest material cannot be stated plainly without being falsified or without harming the unprepared, which runs from the rabbinic restrictions on teaching the chariot vision through to the Zohar and the whole Lurianic tradition Nachman inherited.
What is distinctive is the choice of vehicle. Not allegory, where each element has a fixed referent, but narrative that refuses stable decoding. The tales resist the very operation their commentators perform on them.
The Vacated Space
The theological engine behind all of this is a doctrine Nachman took from Isaac Luria and pushed further than anyone before him.
Lurianic kabbalah holds that in order for a world to exist, the infinite, the Ein Sof, withdrew from a point, creating a vacated space, the chalal hapanui, in which creation could occur. The obvious problem follows immediately. If God withdrew from that space, God is absent from it. If God is not absent from it, nothing was vacated.
Nachman's response is the most striking thing in his theology. He does not resolve the paradox. He says it cannot be resolved, that it generates questions which genuinely have no answers available within thought, and that anyone who tries to reason their way across will not arrive. What crosses it is silence, faith, and song, in that order of difficulty.
He also distinguishes between two kinds of doubt: the questions that arise from ordinary confusion, which can be answered, and the questions that arise from the vacated space, which cannot, and which a person should recognise and stop wrestling with. Whether or not you hold the metaphysics, that is a serviceable practical distinction.
The test he proposes: when you are stuck on a question, ask whether an answer would actually satisfy you or whether you would immediately produce the next version of the same question. If the second, you are in the vacated space, and more thinking is the wrong instrument. Nachman's prescription at that point is not better argument. It is to go outside and speak aloud, or to sing.
The One Practice
Everything above is interpretation. This part is instruction, and it is the reason Nachman has readers who have no interest in Hasidism at all.
Hitbodedut means self-seclusion. The practice is an hour a day, alone, speaking aloud to God in your ordinary spoken language, about whatever is actually going on. Not liturgy. Not Hebrew unless Hebrew is your language. Ideally outdoors, ideally at night, ideally in a field or somewhere nobody will hear you.
Nachman is specific about the difficulties. He says that if you have nothing to say, say that. He says that if the hour is spent repeating one sentence, the hour counts. He says that a person may go days or weeks without anything happening and should continue. He explicitly does not require the practitioner to feel anything.
What makes it unusual among contemplative disciplines is that it is verbal and unstructured. Most traditions move toward silence or toward a fixed formula. This one asks you to talk, out loud, without preparation, for an hour, and treats the talking as the work. Anyone who has tried it discovers within twenty minutes that they have run out of the things they thought they wanted to say, and that what comes after that is the point.
Compared with the structured concentration practices of the Jewish meditative tradition Aryeh Kaplan documented, hitbodedut is almost aggressively informal, and that is deliberate.
The Movement With No Living Rebbe
Nachman died without appointing a successor, and none was ever appointed. In a world where a Hasidic court is organised entirely around a living rebbe, this was close to incomprehensible, and rival groups called Breslovers the dead Hasidim.
The movement survived anyway, around the books, the practice, and the grave at Uman. It was suppressed under Soviet rule, maintained underground, and has grown very substantially since. The annual Rosh Hashanah gathering at Uman now draws tens of thousands of people from around the world.
Modern Breslov is not uniform. There are longstanding disputes between established communities and newer popular movements, including the faction identified by a particular chanted formula, and there is real friction over the Uman pilgrimage, over outreach methods, and over who speaks for Nachman. Anyone approaching the tradition should know it is contested rather than monolithic.
What Buber Did to Them
Most Western readers met these stories through Martin Buber, whose Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman appeared in German in 1906 and was widely read.
Buber's versions are free retellings rather than translations. He reshaped, condensed, heightened and rewrote, aiming at the spirit of the material as he understood it and producing something considerably more elegant than his source.
The scholarly reaction, developed over decades and most forcefully by Gershom Scholem, was that Buber's treatment of Hasidic material generally detached it from its religious, legal and communal setting, turning a demanding devotional tradition into a literary and existential one that suited European readers. Buber's Nachman is a Romantic figure. The actual Nachman was a Hasidic rebbe with strict views about observance, about his own status, and about his opponents.
The retellings are worth reading as literature and as a document of how Hasidism entered Western thought. They should not be your only encounter with the tales.
Which Translation to Read
Aryeh Kaplan's Rabbi Nachman's Stories, published by the Breslov Research Institute, gives the tales with traditional commentary running alongside, identifying the kabbalistic references and the internal cross-connections. This is the practitioner's edition and it is the fullest.
Adin Steinsaltz's version, which the linked edition below reprints, is the most readable in English and comes with interpretive essays. Steinsaltz was one of the great modern expositors of Jewish texts and his framing is literary and psychological rather than technical.
Arnold Band's volume in the Classics of Western Spirituality series is the scholarly translation, with critical introduction and notes, and it is the one to use if you want the text without a commentarial tradition steering you.
Alongside any of them, Arthur Green's Tormented Master is the standard biography and remains the best account of who Nachman actually was, written with sympathy and without piety.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are drawn to teaching stories generally, and particularly if you know the Sufi version of the form. The Conference of the Birds works on comparable principles and the comparison illuminates both.
Read it if you have a working relationship with doubt. Nachman is the most useful religious writer on the experience of not being able to believe, and he is useful precisely because he refuses to treat it as a problem to be fixed.
Read it if you are interested in kabbalah and want to see what happens when its structures, the sefirot and the Tree of Life, stop being diagrams and turn into stories.
Do not read it expecting resolution. Do not read a commentary before you have read the tales, because a key handed to you in advance will close the thing it claims to open. And do not read only Buber, for the reasons above.
There is a reason these stories have outlasted their community's boundaries, and it is not their symbolism. It is that Nachman built into them an honest account of failure. The viceroy searches for years and loses her twice over an apple and a cup of wine. Not over a great betrayal, over ordinary tiredness at the end of a long effort. Anyone who has tried to sustain a practice, a discipline, or a change of life knows exactly that failure, and knows how little of the literature addresses it. Nachman addresses almost nothing else.
Thirteen stories, one missing ending, and a seventh day nobody has heard.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak. The linked edition is Adin Steinsaltz's; Aryeh Kaplan's is the one to buy if you want the traditional commentary.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the Tales of Rabbi Nachman?
Thirteen stories told orally by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov between 1806 and 1810, recorded by his disciple Nathan of Nemirov and published in 1815 with Hebrew and Yiddish on facing pages. They read like folk tales, they are not folk tales, and the tradition treats them as the most concentrated form of his teaching.
Who was Rabbi Nachman?
A Hasidic master, born in 1772, a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov who founded Hasidism. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-eight in Uman, Ukraine, in 1810. His teaching is unusually preoccupied with doubt, depression and the difficulty of belief, which is why it travels well outside its own community.
Why did he tell stories instead of teaching directly?
He said that people had fallen asleep, and that a direct teaching would not wake them. On his account the highest truths had descended into narrative form because that route was still open when the others had closed. He also said the stories carry lights that the tellers themselves do not perceive.
What is The Lost Princess about?
The first tale, told in 1806. A king in anger tells his daughter to go to the evil one, and she vanishes. His viceroy spends years searching, finds her twice, and twice fails at the last moment through a small lapse. Nachman ends by saying the viceroy did get her out, and that how he did it was not told.
What is the story of the Seven Beggars?
The last and longest tale, told in 1810 shortly before his death. Two lost children are fed by seven beggars, each apparently disabled, and each returns at their wedding to reveal that his defect is in fact a supreme perfection. The seventh beggar has no legs, and his story was never told.
Why is the seventh beggar's story missing?
Nachman stopped, and he died shortly afterwards. Breslov tradition holds that the seventh day will be told when the Messiah comes. Whether the omission was deliberate or a consequence of his illness cannot be settled, and the tale works as literature either way.
What is the vacated space?
The chalal hapanui, Nachman's version of the Lurianic idea that God withdrew to make room for creation. He argued that the resulting emptiness produces questions that genuinely have no answers, that trying to reason your way out of them is a mistake, and that they are crossed by silence, faith and song rather than by argument.
What is hitbodedut?
Nachman's central practice: an hour a day of solitary, unstructured, spoken prayer in your own everyday language, ideally outdoors and at night. No liturgy, no formula, no requirement to feel anything. It is the most practical and most portable thing he taught.
Why is Breslov called the dead Hasidim?
Because no successor rebbe was appointed after Nachman died, which is unusual among Hasidic groups and drew the nickname from rival courts. The movement continued around his books, his teaching and his grave, and it is now large and international.
What did Martin Buber do to the tales?
He published free German retellings in 1906 that introduced them to European readers and shaped how they were understood for decades. Scholars including Gershom Scholem later criticised Buber's treatment of Hasidic material for aestheticising it and detaching it from its religious and legal setting.
Which translation should I read?
Aryeh Kaplan's Rabbi Nachman's Stories carries the traditional commentary and is the practitioner's edition. Adin Steinsaltz's version is the most readable literary treatment. Arnold Band's Classics of Western Spirituality volume is the scholarly one with critical apparatus.
Can the tales be decoded?
Every school has tried and each produces a different key. The kabbalistic commentaries map figures onto the sefirot, psychological readings map them onto the self, literary readings resist mapping altogether. The stories accommodate all of it and are exhausted by none of it, which is probably the point.
Go outside and talk
You do not need the theology, the commentary or the pilgrimage to use the one thing Nachman actually prescribed. Go somewhere nobody can hear you, and speak out loud, in your own words, for an hour, about what is genuinely going on. You will run dry in twenty minutes. Keep going anyway. What arrives after you have exhausted the prepared material is the reason he asked for an hour instead of ten minutes, and it costs nothing to find out whether he was right.
Sources & References
- Nachman of Breslov. Sippurei Ma'asiyot, recorded by Nathan of Nemirov, first published 1815.
- Kaplan, A., trans. Rabbi Nachman's Stories. Breslov Research Institute.
- Steinsaltz, A. The Tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav.
- Band, A. J., trans. (1978). Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales. Paulist Press, Classics of Western Spirituality.
- Green, A. (1979). Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav.
- Buber, M. (1906). Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, the free German retellings.
- Scholem, G. Critical assessments of Buber's interpretation of Hasidism.
- Nathan of Nemirov. Likutey Moharan, the collected teachings, and the biographical records of Nachman's life.