How To Reduce Suffering

Rabash, “Love of Friends” Article No. 6: The most important thing is to always remember the purpose of creation, which is known to be “to do good to His creations.” Thus, if He wants to give them delight and pleasure, why are these three above matters—faith, fear and “Love thy friend”? It means that they need only qualify their vessels to be able to receive the delight and pleasure that the Creator wishes to give to the creatures.

The material of creation is a desire to enjoy. This is how the Creator made us. All forms of desire on the inanimate, vegetative, animal, and human levels only want one thing: to fill themselves so they feel pleasure.

Pleasure is a very complex concept. What happens in the body when it is enjoying?

We perceive everything like animals: “I feel pleasure!” What is pleasure? Where does it take place? In what cells and internal systems? Do you sense a certain kind of fulfillment against some feeling of lack? Does one complete the other?

Based on this, we see that pleasure can only be whenever there is a preliminary need, and only to the extent of its fulfillment can one feel pleasure.

In principle, what should the Creator have done? Only one thing: Having wished to give delight and pleasure to the created being, He needed to create a desire for that pleasure, or a feeling of deficiency. Yet the Creator did the opposite: He created evil, a minus, so that afterward by neutralizing and filling this minus with an opposite quality, the created being would feel the plus.

This is why it is written “I created evil…” and this is bewildering to an ordinary person. Evil, however, was created only in order to then replace it with good. This means that we need to do some work here, a certain manipulation of oneself, or nature, or the Creator in order to come from the feeling of evil to the feeling of good, from hatred to love.

This raises many questions. How could I feel all the qualities that are opposite to the Creator? Why do I have to go through all the terrible sensations that are worse than death? If the Creator wants to give me eternal, perfect fulfillment, does it mean that I have to feel a state opposite to it?

The solution is as follows: I do not have to go through terrible states, emptiness that is “worse than death,” and so on. I simply need to realize that after feeling even the slightest bit of suffering, I can immediately move on to enjoyment. More precisely, I should feel the suffering from the absence of pleasure, and then I will never feel the suffering itself.

This is where the wisdom of Kabbalah is leading us. It is calling on us to strive for connection, kindness, and love, and this is when I begin to feel that I am completely opposite to that. However, at that point I will already be in the positive field, in the field of the Creator, in His half.

This is why the contrast that I will feel when I aspire to clarify what He is and who He is will also be positive, since it is an indication that I am not like Him. Precisely at that point I will be able to demand and ask without detaching from Him. While trying to adhere to the Creator’s property—bestowal and love—I will feel how my “I,” my nature, is tearing me away from Him, and at the same time I immediately hold onto Him through the group.

Thus, I do not have to go through terrible, opposing states, but only small unpleasant sensations, like a baby who is being separated from his mother. This is enough for him to cling to her and always be concerned about drawing closer to her.

Such alternating small states that we go through are called the stages of our development. Each time, while we aim for the Creator through the group and constantly think about how to urge the friends toward Him, I feel how much compared to them I am still not succeeding in this, and in this manner I come closer to the Creator, I acquire His properties.

In other words, we do not have to go through states of darkness, separation, and estrangement, which are opposite to adhesion with the Creator. By working on His side, working through the group, it is enough for us to feel literally a tiny bit of separation from Him each time in order to pull ourselves toward Him, and to carry out our work in this manner.

The Creator’s actions on us will then be felt like small prods and calibrations, the way a mother nudges a child: “This is what needs to be done, give this a try.” They will be felt only in this manner and not in their true form of the enormous black abyss that is “worse than death.”
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From KabTV’s “The Last Generation” 3/22/18