Just as we turn to the program vendor when a software we install doesn't work, when human nature fails us, we must ask the "nature vendor" to provide us with one that works properly.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, the Creator is a force of love and wants to bestow His love. Hence, He created in us a desire to receive delight and pleasure. As a result, all our choices aim to increase our pleasure or decrease our pain. Every mineral, plant, animal, or person wants only one thing: to feel pleasure or avoid pain. Without the prospect of future pleasure, we simply cannot live.

The belief that in the future we will be happy is what we call "hope." When we say, "I'm hopeful," we really mean that we believe in the likelihood of experiencing joy and pleasure in the future. Otherwise, what can we be hopeful about? Thus, all our choices reflect our desire for pleasure.

The Elusive Pursuit of Pleasure

But do we truly experience pleasure? While there are many good moments in the lives of most of us, the overall picture is less than rosy. The increasing rates of drug abuse, extreme violence, depression and other ills of our affluent society testify that something very basic is missing in our lives. None of these problems is the cause; instead, they are symptoms of a much deeper problem—our inability to fulfil our desire to feel pleasure.

To understand why we are dissatisfied, we need to remember that the Creator is a force of love and wishes to give us pleasure. Since the greatest possible pleasure is being in "His shoes"—omniscient and omnipotent—this is what He wants to give us, His power and His mind, Himself.

In other words, His goal in creating us is to make us similar to Him. And by consequence, the only state in which we will ever be happy is when we are like Him, when we discover and share His qualities. Kabbalah states that when we obtain these qualities, we will be infinitely, completely happy.

Concealment and Revelation of the Creator
All the above is very nice, but if we take a look around and honestly ask ourselves if this is the world of a Creator who loves His creatures and wants to benefit them, we will probably think that something went very wrong, either with the Creator, or with us.

The first option, that something went wrong with the Creator, has been our stance since the dawn of history. This is why we keep trying to change the world He created and "improve" it. We constantly invent new foods, technologies, means of transportation, social rules, and the list is endless. We have been pursuing the "better," "stronger," and "faster" for millennia; but has this pursuit resulted in happiness, or even contentment? Probably not. Otherwise we wouldn't keep replacing and changing what we have. Indeed, why are we never satisfied?

Kabbalists wrote that at the end of the twentieth century, many people would begin to think that, perhaps, the stance that something was wrong with the world had not been the right answer. They would begin to feel that the problem wasn't with the world and its Creator, but with us! This new concept is gaining momentum, and more people than ever are aware that the problem is not with the world, but with humanity.

This is a critical shift: it means that we acknowledge that the problem is with human nature, and not with anything else. In consequence, just as we turn to the program vendor when a software we install doesn't work, when human nature fails us, we must ask the "nature vendor" to provide us with a different nature, one that works properly.

Thousands of years ago, a man named Abraham, who was later called Abraham the Patriarch, had searched and found just that—a method to communicate with Nature's "vendor," who instilled the desire to receive within us. Abraham developed his method and passed it around to anyone who would listen. His students continued to develop it, and today we call it "the wisdom of Kabbalah." If we use the advice of Kabbalists, we, too, will make first-hand contact with the Creator, and learn from Him how to be infinitely and unboundedly happy.       

December 16, 2007

As a research fellow at ARI (Ashlag Research Institute) for the past three years, Chaim Ratz has been involved in studies dealing with society, education, Jewish identity, Philosophy, and Kabbalah. Many of his articles have been published in the paper Kabbalah Today where he currently serves on the editorial board. As an executive editor, he also worked on a number of books, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Kabbalah (Alpha, a division of Penguin Books, 2007) and Awakening to Kabbalah: The Guiding Light of the Spiritual Fulfillment (Jewish Lights, 2006) among them.

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