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What Is God’s Payment for? entire character of a person and of his service here in this world.
And practically speaking, the will is the character of a person’s
Therefore, we can understand why the Creator brought the soul life! A person without will is dead, and a person with will is alive.
down into this world of concealment and the evil inclination. It was
so that the soul will have free will. Then everything good that it I once went to a yeshiva to deliver a talk. I saw that although the
attains comes to it only because it has worked and overcome the students were learning and praying, they were gloomy and rigid,
powers of evil that opposed it. almost dead. I asked them, “Is this a yeshiva or a cemetery!?”

If there were no free will, there would be no work for which it If a person’s Torah learning doesn’t inspire him to constantly
deserves reward. That is why the Holy One, blessed be He, created arouse his will, then the very core of that learning is missing. As
this world. The Hebrew word for “world,” olam, is related to the verse states, “I, too, gave them rules that were not good and
the word he’elem, “concealment,” because this world conceals judgments through which they should not live” (Ezekiel 20:25).
the existence of the Creator, and it conceals the true delight—i.e.,
closeness to the Creator—which is a spiritual, eternal delight. The This is the opposite of the verse, “You shall observe My rules
Creator brought the soul down into the body, which hides the true and My judgements, which a person will do and live by them”
delight from the soul. And He gave the body an evil inclination (Leviticus 18:5). Hashem gave us the Torah so that we may truly live.
that pulls it to physical pleasures that completely conceal the true “You who cling to Hashem your God are alive, all of you today”
delight. This concealment is the root of free will, because if (Deuteronomy 4:4). “Life” is will. It is clinging to Hashem—because
it were easy for a person to feel the delight of closeness to only clinging to the Life of lives is called life. And how do we
the Creator and the sweetness of the Torah and of prayer, cling to Hashem? Only by means of will, yearning and longing for
he would run after Hashem, so that all of the powers of evil closeness to Him and for doing His will.
couldn’t overcome him. That is because, when we feel true “Life” means that a person is filled with a desire for Hashem, a
delight, all evil is completely nullified. Thus, a person would desire for learning Torah, a desire to pray.
attain goodness without work and effort, and he would lack
free will. “Life” means that a person is filled with a positive will.

If a person cannot choose freely between good and evil, but only The purpose of our Torah, which is the “Torah of life,” is to
has the option of choosing good, what will he receive reward for? bring a person to a state in which he is alive at every moment of
He hasn’t toiled. And even if he does receive reward, he won’t gain every day of his life—that he overflows with yearning, with good
benefit from it, because he is receiving it without having earned it— and strong aspirations. He looks forward with yearning to the time
and that constitutes the bread of shame. All reward is predicated of prayer, to meet with the Creator, to thirstily drink every word
upon the basis of free will, and free will is the outcome of the of the holy Torah, to experience the holiness of the Sabbath and to
opposition between the body and the soul. keep every mitzvah.

The Creator would have had no problem in creating a rosy world
in which we would see Him directly and take delight in our closeness More…
to Him, a world in which everything is good and no evil exists.
And He would have had no difficulty in creating a person with a A person attains perfection when he is always filled with the desire
luminous, pure body that does not desire any of the temptations to do Hashem’s will, when his inner being burns with a mighty,