Q: Why is it that each time I hold a book of Kabbalah, I immediately get all sorts of disturbances that “crawl” into my mind, until I just want to drop it all and leave? But as soon as I’m sent pain from Above, I take a Kabbalah book in my hand and then I have no problem focusing on it?
A: All that the Creator created is a desire to enjoy. In humans, that will is developed more than in all other animals. The goal of the Creator is for man to be like Him: complete and eternal. But that goal can be attained only through the influence of pleasure or pain.
Because we are made to enjoy and to feel pleasure, we cannot not feel anything. We feel the scarcity of pleasure as agony. When pleasure comes, we accept it as something natural and take it for granted, thinking, “I deserve it.”
When pain comes, we resent it and feel, “I don’t deserve this.” Again, this stems from the fact that we are born of a substance called “desire to enjoy.”
Because the Creator has a desire to bestow upon His creatures, He created us with a desire to enjoy. But if we were influenced by pleasure alone, because we are made solely from a desire to enjoy, we would turn into such egoists that we would become stupid.
Thus, only the search for pleasure forces us to develop. In order to bring us to the complete development, meaning to be like the Creator, there is only one option: bestowal.
When we receive pleasure, we think we deserve it, but as soon as we feel pain, we begin to search for its source. Thus, we gradually come to the Creator, the origin of both the pleasure and the pain.
Pain creates in us a desire to find its source, to know the Creator. Otherwise, we would never know the Creator and would never be able to equalize with Him.
If we are told that studying Kabbalah is good for us, how can we strengthen ourselves on the way? The Creator sends us disturbances so we will learn by overcoming them how to approach Him. And if the disturbances are not enough to give us the strength to overcome them, we are sent more agony to force us to make an extra effort to overcome them.
At that point, the disturbances no longer frighten us because the fear of pain forces us to be on constant alert. And this is the way!
You, after all, want to attain the greatest thing there is, not just in our world, but anywhere! So keep up your efforts, and success is sure to come.