The BEST: The Little Prince’s Journey of Idealism, Repentance and the Soul
The BEST comes to our readers this week in an expanded format, with a special entry in advance of Shabbat Shuva and Yom Kippur, on important religious themes in the classic novel The Little Prince (an item previously explored in The BEST). We hope this serves as a demonstration of the power of encountering culture (“the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase) and its spiritual profit to a serious reader.
“The Little Prince” (Russian edition)
In the mid-1990s, I spent many afternoons at my grandparents’ apartment in Tel Aviv–Givatayim, where I would usually go after school. I remember sitting cross-legged on the cool tiled floor, listening as my grandmother read aloud from her worn Soviet edition of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in Russian. Spellbound, I would sketch my own illustrations as she spoke, trying to capture the magic with my markers. Even at nine years old, I sensed the book’s gravity. With tears welling in my eyes, I knew that what I was hearing was both fragile and of the utmost importance. I felt the Little Prince’s devotion to his rose, the pilot’s tender bond with the Little Prince, and the precious relationships that animated the book. Through its strange dialogues, I glimpsed something that seemed to reach beyond ordinary human experience.
Since then, I have returned to the book in English, Hebrew, and French. Rendered into nearly every language on earth, The Little Prince is the second-most translated book in the world, surpassed only by the Bible. What secret gives this small tale its enduring power?
Beneath its storybook surface – a pilot stranded in the desert, a wandering little prince, and a fox that asks to be tamed – the narrative unfolds as a modern allegory about the meaning of life in a disenchanted age. In its pages we find portraits of modern life, love, and loss, a critique of materialism and superficiality, a philosophy of responsibility in love and friendship, a confrontation with mortality, and an exploration of the struggle to preserve hope in a world that appears devoid of transcendence.
Generations of readers have recognized these universal themes. Yet I want to suggest something further: The Little Prince also traces a distinctly Jewish spiritual journey, the journey of teshuva. Teshuva is often translated as repentance, but more deeply it implies return – a return to a state of wholeness. Read in this light, The Little Prince becomes an allegory of the soul’s passage through earthly life, undertaken to learn, teach, and heal what has been broken and, ultimately, to return to a place of spiritual connection.
The Problem with Grown-Ups
The novel begins with the narrator’s childhood memory of having drawn a picture of an elephant swallowed whole by a boa constrictor. To every adult, the image resembled only a plain hat. They could not imagine the elephant hidden inside the snake’s belly until he drew a second picture with the animal inside clearly visible. No adult could see what seemed so obvious to the child.
The narrator moves to the story of his transition into adulthood. Discouraged from his dream of becoming an artist, he opts for a “respectable” profession. Yet the restlessness and adventurousness in his heart draw him to the risky occupation of postal aviator. Despite being well adapted to adult life, he remains alienated from the world of polite conversation, empty and lonely, longing for a friend who can see as he does – with the eyes of a child.
This longing appears satisfied when he crash-lands in the Sahara, far from human settlements, and sees the Little Prince. At first a mirage, the Little Prince becomes vividly real and asks the narrator to draw him a sheep.
After several failed sketches, the pilot remembers his childhood drawing of the boa constrictor and tries something different: a simple box with a perfect sheep hidden inside. To his surprise, the Little Prince immediately sees it. It is indeed the sheep he wanted.
The Crashed Pilot and The Sheep in the Box. Illustrations by the author aged 9, circa 1995.
This exchange points to a mutual affinity for imaginative idealism – the first point of relation between the Little Prince and the pilot. Like Plato’s forms, or like the God who is real yet beyond representation, there exists a realm of truths that are real but invisible. One can only grasp them with a non-physical kind of cognition. Only a mind uncorrupted by superficial appearances – one that is wholehearted, truthful, and noble – can perceive such things: an idea, an invisible perfect sheep inside a box. In that first encounter, the pilot realizes that he has come face to face with a soul.
Yet the Little Prince is not a static symbol of purity. Like the pilot, he is a restless traveler, moving from planet to planet and meeting one “grown-up” after another, observing and learning. Each grown-up character lives in isolation, embodying a distorted way of life. There is the king who insists on ruling but has no subjects – authority without substance. There is the vain man who craves admiration, reducing everyone he meets to a mirror of his ego. The drunkard is trapped in a vicious cycle, drinking to forget his shame and ashamed because he drinks. The businessman endlessly counts the stars, claiming to own them yet deriving no meaning from them and feeling no awe at their beauty and grandeur.
The King, The Vain Man, and The Drunkard
Through these encounters, the Little Prince sees the tragedy of grown-ups: they live unconscious lives in which imagination, awe, and connection have been replaced with possession, achievement, power, and a slew of toxic inclinations. They have lost touch with their souls.
The Little Prince then meets the lamplighter, whose only task is to light and extinguish his lamp as days and nights rush past. He follows orders with diligence yet admits, “It’s a terrible job that I have.” He too has lost touch with the meaning of his work. Still, he fulfills his duty faithfully.
This same allegory was interestingly evoked in a Hasidic story reported in the name of Rabbi Sholom DovBer of Lubavitch, who compares the hasid to a lamplighter: a man walking the streets with a flame at the end of a pole, going from lamp to lamp to kindle each one, knowing the flame is not his own. He fulfills his duty faithfully and travels even to the farthest reaches of the planet to light the lamp of faith for others.
The Lamplighter
Read today, Saint-Exupéry’s lamplighter evokes for me the image of the religious individual devoted to a life of observance, yet one who has lost touch with the soul through repetition, routine, and the superficiality of social life. Yet it is precisely because his commitment to service is ultimately selfless and grounded in devotion that the lamplighter has a better chance than all the other grown-ups to redeem the spark of connection.
This is why the Little Prince favors the lamplighter above all: “At least his work has some meaning. When he lights his lamp, it’s as if he’s bringing one more star to life. He is the only one who does not think solely of himself. That man is the only one I might have made my friend.”
Traveling from planet to planet, the Little Prince undergoes a process of heshbon ha-nefesh – a personal self-accounting. Through these archetypal portrayals, the readers too are pushed to reflect on their own lives and ask: Have we become like the businessman, losing touch with the value of our work? Or like the lamplighter, performing religious duties while our hearts remain estranged from the flame? Are we in touch with the soul?
The last encounter is with the geographer – a rigorous scientist who records mountains, seas, and rivers but dismisses flowers because they are “ephemeral.” “What does ephemeral mean?” asks the Little Prince. “It means threatened by imminent disappearance,” replies the geographer. The geographer’s dismissal of the Little Prince’s rose becomes a turning point. The Little Prince is suddenly reminded of the purpose of his entire journey as the narrative returns to the story of the rose he left behind.
In this encounter, too, lies a profound lesson about human life. The geographer’s cold gaze embodies the materialist paradigm that has shaped our world for two centuries, a vision that strips the human story of transcendence and leaves us in a universe indifferent to our existence. Why, then, should our fleeting lives matter? Why should a passing moment in time carry any weight?
This question runs through much of Western fiction, from Tolstoy to Oscar Wilde, often ending in despair or nihilism and softened only by hedonism or self-deception. Saint-Exupéry, however, reverses the perspective by seeing the ephemeral as a vessel of the sacred. It is precisely the fragility of our life and relationships which give them sublime worth – as the Little Prince intuits. This insight points to a foundational teaching of Jewish mysticism: that God – though He encompasses all things infinite and eternal – nevertheless longs for His presence to shine in the lower worlds precisely through the ephemeral: a single human life, an act of virtue, a sacred moment in time.
The Rose
At the heart of The Little Prince lies an allegorical love story between the Little Prince and his rose.
Before her arrival, the Little Prince lived a calm, somewhat monotonous life on his planet. He dutifully tended to baobab sprouts, like bad habits that must be nipped before they overwhelm one’s existence. He was disciplined, unperturbed, and when sadness came, he found solace in watching sunsets – sometimes dozens in a single day.
Then came a strange seed that blossomed into a breathtaking rose. Beautiful and impressive, she was also vain, coquettish, secretive, and full of bravado that concealed her deep, passionate love for the Little Prince. He thought of countless ways to protect her – placing her under a glass dome, shielding her from drafts – and sometimes she played with his worry, using it in mischievous or manipulative ways. The simple-hearted Little Prince does not know how to respond and is hurt by her seeming lack of gratitude and care. Disappointed, he plots his escape.
The Rose
Tragically, on the morning of his departure, the rose’s bravado finally fades. She reveals the generosity and selflessness of her love:
The flower coughed, though not because she had a cold.
“I’ve been silly. I ask your forgiveness. Of course, I love you,” she told him. “It was my fault you never knew it. But you were just as silly as I was. Try to be happy … put that glass thing down. I don’t want it anymore.”
“But the wind….”
“My cold isn’t so bad … the night air will do me good. I’m a flower.”
In that moment, the rose sheds her defenses. Fearing neither the cold, the night, nor her own loneliness, she no longer seeks his protection. Did she even need it to begin with? Did she feign physical fragility only to conceal a deeper vulnerability that is within? Only now, when loss is imminent, does she reveal her strength by setting him free.
In a few terse lines, Saint-Exupéry captures the emotional complexity of human love. The relationship is potent yet fractured. It depicts two individuals who are deeply connected and yet love seems “too much” for both of them, overflowing the vessels meant to contain it.
The rift between the Little Prince and his flower echoes the Lurianic tragedy of the Shattering of the Vessels. The story tells of God’s desire to bestow light upon creation, which flowed into vessels of being, which were unable to contain the intensity and shattered. The broken shards scattered sparks of holiness into the world, awaiting redemption and yearning to be made whole again.
The Little Prince, too, is a broken vessel who could not bear the intensity of his rose’s love and shattered, abandoning her and fleeing to earth. Like the human soul, he “falls” to redeem the sparks of his sacred but broken love. He must first descend to ascend, gradually gaining the maturity needed for repair.
Autobiographical details, together with his other fictional works, confirm that Saint-Exupéry’s brief life and writings were deeply shaped by his own rose – his Salvadoran wife, Consuelo – with whom he longed to reconcile yet never fully managed. Fear of vulnerability, fear of commitment, and the inability to make space for another contributed to conflict and flight. Yet the relationship retained enormous power and value in his imagination.
Although the story of the Little Prince and the rose is about romantic love, its childlike allegory isolates the essence of human love in such pristine purity that it serves as a secondary allegory for the human relationship with God: the yearning of the soul to gather scattered sparks and repair the broken source.
For both the Little Prince and the human soul, however, the journey toward tikkun is long and arduous. The reader is left to wonder – will the Little Prince return to his rose and reconcile? Is she still waiting for him? Or was her abandonment a fatal wound, already beyond repair?
The Lessons of the Fox
One of the deepest ruptures in the Little Prince’s bond with his rose occurs on earth, when he discovers a rose garden. To his dismay, each flower looks exactly like his own. She had told him she was the only one of her kind in the universe – and yet here are five thousand more! Had she deliberately lied to him? Or was she simply that vain in thinking that there are no others like her? The Little Prince imagines her reaction were she to learn the truth, picturing her annoyed, feigning illness, or even letting herself die rather than face his disappointment.
Crying and lonely after this disillusionment, the Little Prince meets the fox and asks to be his friend. But the fox insists that friendship requires taming.
“What does ‘tame’ mean?” asks the Little Prince.
“It’s something too often neglected. It means to create ties.”
The fox explains to the Little Prince that meaning in relationships is forged through consistency and ritual: if the Little Prince comes at four in the afternoon, he will begin to feel joy and anticipation at three. The closer it gets to the appointed hour, the greater the excitement, the more his heart will prepare. Without such rites, there is no rhythm, no anticipation, no depth of relationship.
The lesson is simple yet profound: love and friendship – whether among human beings or in the relationship between humanity and God – are built through consistency and the honoring of ritual. In Jewish life, this truth is reflected in the daily rhythm of prayer, in the cycle of Shabbat and festivals, in the consistency of intellectual engagement with the Torah, and in the mitzvot that sanctify ordinary acts. These practices are not empty routines but ways of preparing the heart, of showing up faithfully, and of safeguarding the vulnerability of the relationship. Taming requires the kind of care that ultimately transforms obligation into love.
The fox then reveals his first secret: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
To choose connection with another conscious being is to accept responsibility for them – a responsibility never to abandon lightly. This is the radical ethic at the heart of the book: care for the heart of another, if freely taken on, can become binding forever. If you have affected the heart of someone else, the responsibility goes both ways. However, this kind of involvement also puts you at risk of vulnerability and tears – but that seems to be the price of meaning.
It is the fox who, with this insight, helps the Little Prince out of the maze of the rose garden, teaching him what makes his rose unique.
“For me, you’re only a little boy like a hundred thousand other boys, and I have no need of you. And you have no need of me. But if you tame me, we will need each other. You will be the only boy in the world for me. I will be the only fox in the world for you. […] Look at the wheat fields. They mean nothing to me now. But you have hair the color of gold, and once you tame me, the wheat will remind me of you. I will love the sound of the wind in the wheat.”
“I’m beginning to understand,” the Little Prince said. “There is a flower … I think she tamed me…”
Then the fox reveals another secret: personal connection transforms the way we see the world around us.
“Go look at the roses again,” says the fox. “You will understand that yours is the only rose in the world. One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eye.”
All the other roses may look identical to his rose, but what makes the Little Prince’s rose unique is the bond between them – the time spent together, the love exchanged, the connection forged between souls. These are the things that make her irreplaceable. “You are lovely, but you’re empty,” he tells the other roses. “I couldn’t die for you.”
Confronting Mortality and the Concealment of Transcendence
The Well
Wandering through the empty desert, exhausted and running out of water, the Little Prince teaches us his final lesson: the confrontation with mortality.
The pilot is preoccupied with thirst and survival, yet the Little Prince remains unperturbed. Like a sage near death, he speaks of meaning and beauty: “The stars are beautiful because of a flower you don’t see,” he says, and, “what makes the desert beautiful is that it hides a well.” As they walk, the invisible well seems to materialize, and together they are nourished by a hidden oasis.
There, in the deep Sahara beneath the stars, moments of illumination descend on the pilot in quick succession. He recalls his childhood faith in a legend that his house concealed a treasure. He thinks of the Little Prince’s flower concealed somewhere on a distant planet, the sheep hidden in the box, and the elephant inside the boa constrictor that only a child could imagine. What is essential is invisible to the eyes – one sees clearly only with the heart. Looking at the sleeping Little Prince, the pilot repeats to himself: “What I am looking at is only a shell. What is most important is invisible.”
He has discovered faith in a transcendent soul – invisible to the eyes, yet more real than anything else in the world.
This idea, that the essence of things is hidden from ordinary vision echoes the Jewish teaching of tzimtzum, divine concealment through contraction. In Lurianic Kabbalah, this describes a world in which God deliberately conceals His transcendence. Tzimtzum creates space for evil and even meaninglessness, yet in the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov it becomes the very root of faith. Even amidst the greatest concealment, God’s presence is never fully absent. The sage, the tzaddik, and the one who sees with the eyes of a child, can glimpse – even through the heavy veil of concealment – signs of God’s hidden presence.
Just as the desert hides a secret well, and the body hides the invisible soul, so does the world conceal God’s transcendence. One cannot prove it, but one can see it with the heart – with the eyes of faith.
And yet concealment can be overwhelming. The pilot soon learns that the Little Prince has made an agreement with the snake – an archetype of the deceiver – who has promised to bite him and help him “return to his planet.” The pilot hesitates, suspecting treachery, but the Little Prince reassures him that this is the only way. He is convinced that his journey is complete, that he must return to his rose, but he cannot bring his body with him – “it is too heavy.”
Here the book poses the ultimate question: Is death part of the plan or merely an accident of existence? The snake appears as an angel of death, but is he evil? The Little Prince seems to accept death as a transition, just as the soul accepts its descent into the world with a mission and a span of time.
Was the Little Prince naïve to let himself be bitten by the snake – naïve to choose mortality voluntarily – or did his uncorrupted gaze grasp a truth beyond reason? Where the empirical gaze sees only death, the eyes of faith see a journey home. The Little Prince’s body disappears in the sand, leaving no trace of evidence either way. The narrator cannot be certain, he is plagued by doubts, and yet he chooses hope. To learn from the Little Prince, to honor what he has taught, means to trust that what is essential is invisible to the eyes and that one must see with the heart.
The Little Prince and the Snake
The parting of the pilot and Little Prince is both beautiful and painful – and each time I reach it, I cannot help but cry, touched by the catharsis of the moment. The fox was right: “One risks tears by allowing oneself to be tamed.” And yet, I know – as the novel insists – that the risk is worth it. The connections and bonds of love transform reality into an animated, magical landscape. For the fox, the wheat fields are no longer ordinary – they shine with the golden glow of the Little Prince’s hair. For the pilot, the stars are no longer technical points of flight – they are five hundred million little bells ringing with the Little Prince’s laughter. One of them is the home of the Little Prince. Nothing in the universe can ever be the same.
Since I first encountered the book as a nine-year-old child, three decades ago, its lessons have not left me. They continue to shape how I think about life, love, friendship, and the human bond with God. Now, with children of my own, I often stop to ask myself if I am like the grown-ups, caught in circles of habit? Do I live with conscious intent? Is my soul connected to the rites of faith I have chosen? Am I vain like the rose, guarding myself with thorns and at risk of alienating those I love most? Or am I the Little Prince, wandering from place to place, learning my lessons and teaching others as part of a greater journey?
For me, The Little Prince has been a companion on the lifelong journey of teshuva, reminding me to resist the superficiality of the materialist glance, to take responsibility for those I have tamed, and to hold fast to a faith that lies beyond reason.
For those tasked with the labor of teshuva, these lessons resonate deeply with the work of return. The soul, like the Little Prince, descends into a fractured world, learns through missteps and encounters, and longs to repair what was broken. Along the way, it discovers that what is concealed is not lost, that our ephemeral lives are sacred, and that even in a world of deep concealment, connection can still grant us fleeting glimpses of the transcendent.
Marina Zilbergerts, author of The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature (Indiana University Press), is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa.