Why Do We Suffer?

Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”: 2) Indeed, if we set our hearts to answer but one very famous question, I am certain that all these questions and doubts will vanish from the horizon, and you will look unto their place to find them gone. This indignant question is a question that the whole world asks, namely, “What is the meaning of my life?” In other words, these numbered years of our life that cost us so heavily, and the numerous pains and torments that we suffer for them, to complete them to the fullest, who is it who enjoys them? Or even more precisely, whom do I delight?

Question: The meaning of life is to attain the Creator. If so, why do we suffer so much in our world? Why do we experience so much pain?

Answer: It is because we do not want to attain Him. We balk with all our limbs in order not to get closer to Him. After all, such nearing can cause great suffering.

The Creator is the quality of bestowal and love. We are an egoistic quality of reception, the quality of hatred, rejection of others. Therefore, when we start gradually coming closer to acquiring some of the Creator’s qualities—qualities of bestowal, love, empathy, and so on—we start feeling very bad. We immediately instinctively run back.

Remark: It seems to me that, on the contrary, a person suffers from the lack of reception and not because he is not as bestowing as the Creator is.

My Comment: I am talking not about people who instinctively act in our world, but about the ones who have heard what the wisdom of Kabbalah says and the way we can approach the state where we will be above egoism, which humiliates and limits us all the time.

Question: A person is a will to receive. The Creator causes him suffering by not letting him receive and creates a deficiency in him from which he begins to look for the meaning of life and finds the Creator. Can a person start thinking about the meaning of life when he feels good, is fulfilled, and enjoys himself?

Answer: No, he cannot.

Question: In one of the interviews, they asked you, “Does it mean that Kabbalah is only for losers?” Do normal people who have found themselves and have things to do not need Kabbalah?

Answer: They will be unable to do anything. They sold themselves to a good life. As for a person who feels suffering, to suffer does not mean that he has nothing to eat or he is poked from all sides. We are talking about the suffering when I want to know what I am living for. It is about the suffering on the level of “human,” not on the level of animal in us.

After all, suffering is felt on different levels: I can suffer because I am in pain or because I have a low salary.

Question: So, a person does not come to study Kabbalah because of bodily suffering?

Answer: No, he does not. And not because of the lack of means for living. Only because he has no purpose in life. That is, he has everything but that. Even if you take our generation, people today live in ten times better than a hundred or thousand years ago, but humanity feels unhappy.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/14/19

Related Material:
Meaning Of Life, Part 1
Is It Possible To Advance Without Suffering?
How Does One Become Free From Suffering?

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