to be full of revealed goodness.
“People pleasing, abuse, and avoidance may all come from the same place. A person who never learned how to handle feeling alone.”
Not basic goodness. Goodness that can be recognized, chosen, received, and held without shame. But to understand suffering, we first have to understand what we mean by The Creator.
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.
Not something trapped inside the universe.
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 existence,
nothing would ever exist.” — based on a teaching of the Rambam in 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 receive 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, chosen, 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. Chassidus describes the beginning of creation with light and vessels. Not physical light.
In simple terms, light means the goodness the Creator wants to reveal. And vessels means the inner capacity to receive it. Light is the Creator’s desire for His goodness to be felt and known.
“Light is a metaphor for the Creator’s desire to be perceived.” — Rabbi YY Jacobson
And vessels are the spiritual capacities meant to hold that goodness,
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 goodness exists, and the vessels have to develop to receive it.
That development is effort. It is relationship work. more goodness can be revealed safely, without collapsing into control, avoidance, shame, or numbness. people pleasing, avoidance, arrogance, control. But when a vessel cannot yet hold what is available, it experiences distance.
That distance is felt as suffering. And that felt distance brings ego feelings, feelings that make a person feel separate, self protective, and alone: 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 part protects itself.
They compete.
They tighten.
They stop cooperating.
And that disunity leads to shattering: too much light, plus a system acting separately, equals breakdown.
And this stage of creation is called Tohu. A world with a lot of light, but not enough ability to hold it together.
Shattering does not mean the light is bad. It means goodness met a system that could not cooperate yet.
Then the shattered pieces of the vessels became 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 fear, shame, distortion, and self protection.
And those broken patterns are not only out there.
They are also inside us. That brokenness entered the human story very early. The snake introduced a way of relating built on distortion, fear, and separation.
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 will not be safe”
perfectionism, “I measure my value by how I compare to others”
numbing, “I do not feel, I do not 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.”
But felt distance is not only the cause of survival mode. It is also the raw material of awe. If distance is held without enough emotional steadiness,
it turns into shame,
fear,
control,
avoidance,
and numbness.
But if that same distance is reframed with truth, with the understanding that the distance hurts because relationship is real, it becomes awe. And awe is where a relationship with The Creator begins. Awe weakens hatred, because hatred grows when pain stays trapped inside ego.
Awe does not erase the loneliness. It gives it direction.
What felt like abandonment starts to feel like longing for relationship. Awe is not just wonder. It is wonder, fear, and sadness together: wonder at His greatness, fear because your choices matter, sadness because the distance feels real.
Awe grows through appreciation.
When you notice what you have, and express appreciation for it, your sense of wonder increases.
You start to feel:
“I am being given something.”
That deepens awe. Because awe is not only about how great the Creator is. It is also about noticing His goodness in your actual life. And that makes the distance feel real, not as abandonment, but as longing for relationship.
So what is healing?
Healing is not only learning to feel better. It is learning how to let felt distance become awe instead of survival mode.
It is repair in the body and mind.
It is learning how to carry fear,
sadness,
and shame
without letting them run the whole system.
It is building bigger vessels.
It is moving from survival mode
toward relationship mode, where a person lives with more honesty, appreciation, compassion, and boundaries.
shame → self compassion
fear → trust
control and threats → compassionate boundaries
blaming → owning
numbness → practice feeling
isolation → practice connection
This requires all of us to grow in 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 this 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 Lubavitcher Rebbe
As vessels, people, grow and develop, and grow in humility, compassion, boundaries, and self forgiveness, more goodness can be revealed safely.
Goodness that once overwhelmed us starts to feel like calm, love, and clarity. cAnd 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, the world to come, is a time when goodness will not only exist, but be openly felt.
It is when humanity heals enough from that original human experience of distance.
When human beings stop experiencing His hiddenness only as abandonment, and become more able to experience it as a place for relationship, 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.
This is also why the Lubavitcher Rebbe is the leader of our generation.
Chabad Chassidus has been explaining the deepest ideas about the Creator’s goodness for over 200 years. The Rebbe took that depth, and made it accessible, structured, and alive for this generation.
He did not leave those ideas vague.
He published over 70,000 pages of original teachings, clear, structured, and deep, so they could be studied,
revisited, and applied across generations. And his influence is not fading.
It is increasing every year. A leader of the generation cares for every person, and reveals ideas that help people understand the Creator’s goodness more truthfully.
That is why his teachings still matter. He spoke about this kind of repair as cosmic work (based on a Midrash):
when we heal what is broken between people and peoples, through greater awareness, deeper compassion, healthier boundaries, and more self forgiveness, we are not just being nice.
We are rebuilding the vessels of creation.
And the Rebbe frames that repair as an atonement, so to speak, not because the Creator did wrong, but because He made room for a world that could feel painful through hiddenness.
Meaning:
the Creator made room for a world that could feel painful, so that human beings could turn pain into partnership, through awareness, compassion, boundaries, self forgiveness, and appreciation. And underneath all of this is an even deeper point: creation is not random.
It is intentional. It has a structure built into life itself.
Creation is not only 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, where goodness is noticed, chosen, appreciated, and shared. 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.
