Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. I promise to answer them. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

What Is The Basis Of The Wisdom Of Kabbalah?

In this introduction, I would like to clarify matters that are seemingly simple [they appear to us as such]. Matters that everyone fumbles with, and for which much ink has been spilled [in every generation], attempting to clarify. Yet we have not reached a concrete and sufficient knowledge of them. And here are the questions:

1. What is our essence?
2. What is our role in the long chain of reality, of which we are but small links?
3. When we examine ourselves, we find that we [the created beings] are as corrupted and as low as can be. And when we examine the operator who has made us [the Creator who is perfect and absolute as those who have revealed Him claim], we are compelled to be at the highest degree, for there is none so praiseworthy as Him. For it is necessary that only perfect operations will stem from a perfect operator.[For the action’s result and quality testify to its maker.]
4. Our mind necessitates that He is utterly benevolent, beyond compare. [If He includes everything in Himself and is the basis of life, then He must be perfect] How, then, did He create so many creatures [all of them!] that suffer and agonize all through their lives? Is it not the way of the good to do good, or at least not to harm so [fill their existence with evil]?
5. How is it possible that the infinite, that has neither beginning nor end, will produce finite, mortal, and transient creatures? [The creation of a finite creature suggests the existence of the quality of finiteness in the Creator].

– Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 1

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: Kabbalists On The Purpose Of Creation, Part 13
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Kabbalah Moments: “Purpose of Suffering”

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