Pain As A Lever For Ascending

Question: Why has the Creator based our whole life on suffering? It says that only the heroes who had the patience, which means who held on, finally discover the Creator. It turns out that a person still suffers even after he comes to study.

Answer: A person doesn’t suffer less in ordinary life when he has to work. Every morning I see my neighbor, who is a professional and not a poor man, take his kid to kindergarten at six o’clock in the morning and then go to work. He comes home late in the evening and then goes out again, thus spending the whole day outside his home. How much time does he have to live? After all, he has to sleep, eat, and take a shower, how many hours are left? Isn’t that a life of suffering?

But since this kind of life is the norm, he doesn’t feel any suffering, he is even proud of it and feels that he is a success. He pays so dearly for this hard life, but on the whole what does he get? He works his whole life to suffer less, and he has offspring who will also lead the same life, if not worse, so what is the meaning of such a life?

A person who begins to study the wisdom of Kabbalah doesn’t suffer. He knows that he is correcting his soul. In his ordinary life he worked for some boss not even knowing why. He lived since he was afraid to die and so he paid in pain in order to sustain his life. By studying the wisdom of Kabbalah, a person doesn’t pay in pain but feels pain while correcting his soul. This pain is the feeling of the illness inside his soul that shows him exactly where it needs to be corrected. So this is beneficial pain since it reveals the place of corruption.

I have to be glad about this pain, as Baal HaSulam says: “I am glad about the wicked that are revealed” since now I finally know what needs to be corrected. People pay a lot of money in order to get the right diagnosis for their illness: They go to experts and are screened by special equipment since the most important thing is to know what I suffer from. Sometimes when you don’t feel pain it is even worse.

Here however I am shown the reason for my sufferings! In medicine the right diagnosis is considered 90% of a successful treatment, while in our case it is 100% since I know exactly what my evil is and immediately find a cure.

In our world you don’t know if you can find the right cure after a diagnosis, but in the spiritual world the diagnosis is an immediate guarantee for a cure. The same snake that is revealed turns into the cure, the “angel of death” becomes the “Holy angel.”

The moment we discover the pain, we find the cure for it in the pain itself. It says: “I have created the evil inclination, I have created the Torah as a spice since the Light in it reforms.” The same Light that reveals the snake turns it into a “Holy angel.

So for us pain is a sign of illness, we want the pain to be revealed so that it will be a lever for ascending, a leap to the spiritual level.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/06/13, Writings of Rabash