Question: There is confusion between what is called love and our sensations. You said that you relate to your students with love, but this is not always what we feel.

Answer: When you have children, I am sure you will love them, but I am also sure that sometimes they will receive punishment from you. Tell me, how is that possible?

You always relate to a person with love, but your momentary attitude toward them is determined by what they do compared to what they should do. Then, despite loving them, you may strike them as if you hate them.

Do you really hate them? You hate their external form that does not correspond to the level they should be at. You hate their lack of correction, not them. In order to pull them out of it, you punish them precisely to the extent necessary for them to free themselves from that deficiency.

The punishment lies in revealing suffering in them, which shows them that they must extract this deficiency themselves. The suffering they feel becomes their salvation, their fuel, a precise indication of what they must now uproot from within them.

If you do not do this correctly, they will not understand why you punish them or what you want from them. Then they begin to hate you. But if the punishment is directed precisely against the evil within them and they understand that through this punishment they can free themselves from it, uproot it, cut it off, and discard it, they will be grateful to you. But this is the ideal case.

This is how we come to understand the Creator’s attitude toward us. He causes us harm, creates negative qualities within us, and then punishes us, but in a targeted way, so that we rid ourselves of those negative qualities.

You may ask: what is the benefit of this? The Creator appears harsh, He punishes, points to where the evil is, and this punishment ultimately frees us from it. And who am I in all this? The one who is present, with whom all these events occur? Why do I need this?

It is so that I change my attitude toward this process. In this way, I study the actions of the Creator, who created the evil and now assigns punishment against it. That is, He shows me His attitude toward evil and thereby brings me to the side of good. Thus, I acquire His mind.

Can I learn this without punishment? Only if I try to look at this entire process happening within me in the same way that He does.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/15/26, Rabash, “What It Means that the Generations of the Righteous are Good Deeds, in the Work”

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