Kitzur Ashlag 3

Based on paragraphs 4 and 5:

Ashlag contends that we can only answer the sorts of existential questions he’d raised by “look(ing) at the culmination of things … at the ultimate goal of creation”.

Now, some would differ and suggest that there were no goals; that G-d simply created. Ashlag argues against that, though, given “no one other than a madman does anything without a particular goal in mind”. He concedes the fact that while some “acknowledge that G-d indeed created the universe” they nonetheless “also claim that He then left it to its own device” since it would be beneath “so exalted a Creator to keep watch over such as they”, given we’re so lowly.

But Ashlag assert that the only reason why we’re lowly is because we allowed ourselves to be so, not because G-d chose that role for us. G-d allowed us free choice, and that it’s we who opted for meanness and lowliness sometimes. After all, he maintains, “how could we ever imagine” G-d “purposefully setting out to create beings who'd be as tormented and tried their whole lives as we are, who'd then utterly abandon them and not even bother to look after them or help them besides?”

It follows then that “we’re truly good and noble creatures (at bottom), and of inestimable worth -- as worthy as one would expect our Producer to have made.” So once again we’d do well to look at what G-d had in mind when He created the cosmos

(c) 2007 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

(Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org )

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