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16 | A New Light 1 Chapter Two:
Chapter Two:
The Secret of Free Will
From the earliest days, people have tried to decipher the riddle of
existence: the purpose of creation overall and the purpose of every
individual in particular. However, we, the people of Israel, have
had these purposes communicated to us directly by the Creator of
the world. Our holy sages have revealed to us that the Creator is
the ultimate Being of goodness and compassion. Because any being
who is good does good for others, God created us in order to do
good for us.
The essence of goodness that we can experience is the ability to
connect and bond with the Creator, to delight in His light and in His
closeness to us. We accomplish this through our soul. The soul of
every individual is more important than all worlds. It is holier than
the entire Torah and its commandments. Overall, its only desire is
Hashem. It is entirely divorced from sin. It is literally “a portion of
Divinity from above” (Job 31:2)—which, before it descended into
this world, derived delight and pleasure from the radiance of the
Shechinah—which is its sole delight.
Here in this world, the soul’s awareness of God is hidden,
because it is embedded in a coarse, physical body that cannot
experience true spiritual delight, and that body is placed in a world
of materiality and cravings. As a result, the Creator’s light and
pleasure are hidden from us. All that is revealed to us is the life of
this world and its physical desires. Therefore, a person is drawn to
coarse, physical delights and not to the spiritual delight for whose
sake he was created.
But you must be aware that not only is spiritual delight
immeasurably and incomparably greater than physical delight,
but that when physical pleasure is disconnected from a person’s
true purpose, it causes the soul to suffer terribly, and in fact it
constitutes the complete opposite of the soul’s character.
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The entire nature of the soul is its bond with the Creator. This
bond is brought about when a person performs the Torah’s mitzvot.
The word “mitzvah” comes from the word tzavta, meaning
“bond”—a bond with the Creator. Conversely, every sin constitutes
the opposite of the character of the soul and the opposite of its
function. Thus, the word chet, “sin,” means “to miss the mark.”
From this, we can see that punishment isn’t the outcome of a sin.
Rather, a sin itself is the worst punishment, because it disconnects
a person from the Creator. That is the most extreme expression of
the soul missing the mark.
The Bread of Shame
That being the case, the question arises: since the Creator wanted
to benefit us, why did He bring the soul down from the upper realm
into a world of darkness and materiality? Why did He create us in
this world, which contains so much suffering and where the essence
of true delight, which is our connection and bond with the Creator,
is so thoroughly concealed? Why did He create man with an evil
inclination that impels him to sin and do wrong, with a coarse body
that is attracted to physical pleasures that torment the soul?
The Kabbalistic texts explain that before the Creator made this
world, all souls delighted in the radiance of the Shechinah in the
supernal world. However, they suffered greatly from the fact that
they were receiving all of their delight without toil and effort, as an
unearned gift, without exertion. The Kabbalists call this the “bread
of shame.” The truth is that a person only gains pleasure from
something that he has worked for. As the verse states, “When you
eat the toil of your hands, you are fortunate, and it is good for
you” (Psalms 128:2). And as the Gemara states, “A person prefers
his own measure to nine measures that belong to someone else”
(Bava Metzia 38a). Rashi explains, “He prefers it because he toiled
over it.”
Moreover, not only is this “bread of shame” no delight, but it
causes the soul great suffering. The soul is “a portion of Divinity
from above,” a portion of the Holy One, blessed be he, Who is
entirely true and Whose seal is truth. Therefore, in its essence the