to be full of revealed goodness.Not basic goodness. Deep goodness. But to understand suffering, we first have to understand what kind of Being the Creator is.
The Infinite Creator is not a bigger being inside the universe.
Not an object.
Not a body.
Not a force trapped inside nature.
Not a bigger version of a person.
He is the source of existence itself.
Everything exists because existence is being given by Him at every moment.
“If everything that exists were dependent on something else for its existence, then nothing would ever exist.” — Based on a teaching of the Rambam in his book Guide for the Perplexed.
So suffering does not happen in a world abandoned by Him. It happens inside a creation continuously held in existence by Him, but built in a way that allows for freedom, growth, distance, and repair.
“Human beings cannot enjoy goodness with the same dignity when it feels completely unearned. It would feel embarrassing.” — based on a teaching of the Lubavitcher Rebbe
So the Creator did not only give goodness. He built a world where goodness can be discovered, revealed, and received with dignity. A world that only received goodness passively would be easier. But it would not reveal the same dignity, partnership, responsibility, or depth of connection.
So creation was built not only to receive goodness, but to become able to recognize it, choose it, and hold it without shame. So creation begins with the first creations: light and vessels.
Not physical light.
Spiritual light: the Creator’s desire for His goodness to be felt and known.
“Light is a metaphor of the Creator’s desire to be perceived.” — Rabbi YY Jacobson
And vessels: the 10 spiritual containers, wisdom, understanding, kindness, strength, beauty, and the rest.
The design was that there was more light available than the vessels could hold at first. Not a mistake. A setup for dignity. Because if the vessels only received what they could already hold, life would be nice, but basic.
No growth.
No partnership.
No earned goodness.
So the Creator made it this way: extra light exists, and the vessels have to develop to receive it. That development is effort. Relationship work. Becoming able to notice more goodness without falling into survival mode, which is: people pleasing, avoidance of conversations, arrogance, control.
But when a vessel feels it cannot hold what is available, it experiences distance (felt as suffering).
And distance creates ego-feelings: fear, shame, guilt, insecurity, the inner sense of “I” that says, “I’m on my own.”
Ego-feelings create disunity.
Instead of the vessels working together as one system, each one protects itself.
They compete.
They tighten.
They stop cooperating.
And that disunity is what leads to shattering: too much light plus vessels acting separately equals breakdown. And this stage of creation is called Tohu. A world where there was a lot of light, but not enough ability to hold it together. Shattering does not mean the light is bad. It is what happens when goodness meets a system that cannot cooperate yet.
Then the shattered pieces of the vessels become the raw material of our physical world. In Chassidus, this is described as fallen sparks.
Meaning: our world is built from mixed pieces, sparks of goodness hidden inside broken patterns.
The goodness is still there, but it is mixed with ego-feelings. And those broken patterns are not only out there. Those broken patterns are also inside us. That brokenness entered the human story very early. The snake carried that same pattern of ego and distortion. And feelings are contagious.
Adam and Eve absorbed that way of relating. They stopped believing they could live honestly before the Creator and still be loved.
So they hid.
Psychologically, those shattered pieces live inside the nervous system. Survival mode is not random.
It is built into the human story:
fight: aggression
flight: avoidance
freeze: shutting down feeling
fawn: people pleasing
control: “I have to control everything or I won’t be safe”
perfectionism: “I measure my value by how I compare to others”
numbing: “I don’t feel, I don’t even have words for it”
Not because we are evil. Because the system learned:
“This is how I survive distance.”
“This is how I survive feeling alone.”
So what is healing? Healing is repair in the body and mind.
It is building bigger vessels.
It is healing the trauma built into creation.
It is when ego-feelings stop running the whole system, and life is guided more by relationship mode than survival mode.
shame → self-compassion
fear → trust
control and threats → compassionate boundaries
blaming → owning
numbness → practice feeling
isolation → practice connection
This requires all of us getting better at awareness,
compassion,
boundaries,
and self-forgiveness.
– Based on a teaching of the Chernobyl Maggid, a student of the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi YY Jacobson has a class on the teaching.
“And there is even a hidden gift in being misguided.
When a person wakes up, they often feel a deep motivation to help others who fell into the same place.” – based on a teaching of the Rebbe. As vessels (people) grow and develop, and increase in humility (compassion + loving boundaries), more goodness can be revealed safely. Goodness that once overwhelmed us starts to feel like calm, love, and clarity.
And this does not only happen in one person. It happens across generations. Because a lot of survival mode is inherited,
learned in families,
stored in bodies,
and passed down as behavior patterns.
The era of revealed goodness (world to come)is when humanity heals enough from that original felt-distance.
When the trauma of hiddenness, the concealment of His presence, is repaired enough, we become capable of connecting with the very light that once felt like darkness. Not because the light changed. Because the vessels,us, became steadier, more connected, and more united.
And this is why repairing relationships is the main work. Not only between individuals, but between communities and nations too.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe, the leader of our generation, whose teachings continue to guide more and more people each year, spoke about this kind of repair as cosmic work: when we heal what is broken between people and peoples, we are not just being nice.
We are rebuilding the vessels of creation. And he frames that repair as an atonement, so to speak,
on behalf of the Creator for the suffering humanity experienced through the hiddenness and concealment of His presence built into creation.
Meaning: the Creator made room for a world that could feel painful, so that human beings could turn pain into partnership, and distance, felt as shame, fear, and guilt, into relationship.
This reveals something deeper: creation is not a random idea. It is intentional. It has an inner structure. Creation is not just made of matter and objects. It is also made of processes inside life:
pleasure,
desire,
emotion,
understanding,
and choice.
Pleasure is the basic goodness of existence.
Desire is life reaching toward that goodness.
Emotion is what that reaching feels like from the inside.
But because created beings have free choice, ego-feelings can interfere with that reaching.
Fear, shame, guilt, and insecurity can block desire from receiving what is good.
And because human beings were created in His image, we do not only react.
We can also understand. As Rambam explains, being created in His image does not mean having a body like Him.
It means having intelligence, the capacity to recognize truth. So the human being was made with two great capacities: to understand, and to choose.
That means creation was built for more than existence. It was built for conscious relationship. So the goal is not only that goodness exists. It is that goodness be recognized, chosen, shared, and received without shame.
That is why creation is desired: so divine goodness could be revealed through relationship, until even this lowest world becomes a place of real intimacy with The Creator.
