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There is a story in Mesilat Yesharim about a princess whose father was a king. The king was trying to marry her off, and was interviewing people. After a long time, he finally said: "Let the next man who walks in the door be your husband”, and she agreed. And the next one to walk in was a peasant, the gardener from the estates of the king, but nonetheless they had to get married. He was ecstatic and she was devastated. But this was the situation. They got married, and the gardener prepared the house, putting straw on the benches where they were going to sleep, yet she was still not happy. The next day he brought her amazing potatoes and are the best tomatoes from the best of the fields, yet she still wasn't happy, so she came back to her father and asked: "How can I explain to him that I am from the palace of the king? He can't offer me what I need because he has no concept that it exists."
This is the story of the soul and the body. The soul is the princess, refined and royal, yearning for closeness to the King. The body is the peasant, offering us pleasures of success, wealth, power, food—its version of potatoes and tomatoes. Yet the soul turns to G-d and says: “This body cannot give me what I long for, because it has no concept of what I truly need.”
Most of us forget that we are the princess. We live as though we are the peasant, chasing after more and more of what the body craves. No matter how much we collect, it’s never enough—because the soul was raised in the palace, and it cannot be satisfied with peasant’s food.
This is an important message to bring into Yom Kippur. When we fast, we silence the body’s voice. We remind ourselves: I am not the peasant, I am the princess. On this day, we do not feed the body’s hunger; we feed the soul’s. We return to the King, and in His palace, the princess finally finds what she has been longing for all along.