Q: Is the word, “pleasure,” that Kabbalists use in their books really about delight and pleasure as we understand it, or does it have a different meaning altogether, and they only call it that for convenience?
A: The purpose of creation is to delight the creatures. The complete Creator can only delight the creatures with completeness. The Creator cannot create an incomplete creation. By “complete” we mean that only He fills the entire reality, which is also why He is the only One. Because of that there is a desire to be filled with Him. That desire is satisfied entirely, unreservedly. That is why His state is called “Ein Sof” (infinite).
But the Creator creates that situation for the creature to feel himself complete in his own right. For that to happen, the creature must attain a sensation of appreciation. He can only acquire that out of the sensation of the oppositeness of form and incompleteness. That is the purpose of his being distanced from the Creator to a state called “this world,” where the creature feels corporeal animate pleasure – our current situation – instead of feeling the Creator.
The more the creature becomes aware of his incomplete situation – which is possible only by studying Kabbalah – the more he becomes aware of the perfection that is the Creator. He begins to realize that perfection is adhesion with the Creator, equivalence with His attributes, being filled with Him.
During the study one realizes that to be complete means to be as close as possible to the Creator, as similar as possible to His attributes; to equalize with His form. As a matter of fact, that is already the situation, but he cannot feel it as such, and therefore he cannot regard it as such.
As a person comes to understand himself and the Creator, he begins to feel the completeness as though he is returning to it. The sensation of fulfillment in these situations is called “pleasure,” and the desire to feel the Creator as supreme completeness is called “vessel.”