Baal HaSulam, “The Essence of Religion and its Purpose“: He has created the creatures only to bestow upon them. Thus we learn that He has only a desire to bestow goodness, and it is utterly impossible that any harmfulness might be in His domain, which could emit from Him. Hence we have defined Him as “The Absolute Good.”

It is hard to accept this. After all we are living in our egoistic desire which has serious complaints about the source, the Creator, nature, or other things. The world in which I feel myself summons many complaints. Internally I can’t accept the fact that everyone else doesn’t obey me. I can’t accept the fact that infinite pleasure doesn’t constantly fill me. I only encounter problems all the time, so how can I accept the fact that the One who runs the world is good and benevolent?

If I could create the world by myself, I would do it in a totally different way: Everything that is in it would only be to serve me. But the world is the opposite, everyone sees it right to complain about creation. So on what grounds can we speak about the Creator as the Absolute Good? On the basis that He is the first and primordial.

The desire to receive was created and is prompted by abundance, by bestowal. The abundance, the bestowal, doesn’t need any preliminary factor. Therefore the term “first” can be characterized by one world only: wholeness. In other words, the “first” cannot have any deficiencies, no matter what. The wholeness generates only one deficiency: to expand the wholeness. Here there is also a big problem: Where does the Creator get such a desire from? Does He really lack anything? Yes, He lacks bestowal, giving.

Can we see it as a deficiency? Unfortunately we can’t grasp these concepts now. They are perceived as lack of evidence, since we lack the feeling, the understanding, and the acceptance. There is nothing we can do here, since until we enter the spiritual world we will not know how to check and how to measure them, not to mention of how to feel them. It will always be a “lame” explanation, so we can accept it to a certain extent, but not completely. We can’t understand that the Creator is the Absolute Good, and we can’t reach that without the influence of the environment that can provide us with everything that we need including that.

So if we eventually perceive our source as the Absolute Good, we have to see that all the problems and the defects are in us. We still have to reach this conclusion, and then another question will come up, are we all corrupt? Or are all the defects in me while the others are in a state of wholeness like the Creator?

My examination becomes more clarified. When I admit that it is only me who is imperfect, I begin to clarify: Where exactly am I not whole, in which desires, which relationships? And is it only in relation to the world? Or is it in relation to myself as well, with the group, with the Creator? And so I advance and go deeper and deeper and my examination always reveals the imperfection compared to the whole.

The greatest division is that the Creator is whole and we are not. In the second stage, I draw the line between myself and the perfect reality. Then I perform the next examination, according to the revelation of the vessels.
[61859]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/27/11, “The Essence of Religion and Its Purpose”

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