Question:
You've probably gotten that question a million times, "Rabbi, why do
good people suffer in this world?" Well, to tell you the truth, that's not
what's really bothering me. What peeves me to no end is all the prestige, power,
pleasure and downright fun that goes to the rotten, nasty and mean low-lifes of
this planet.
Sure, I've heard all the answers. But none of them satisfy me.
I've been told, "How do you know he's really so happy? Maybe all those
wild parties are his way of escaping the gnawing guilt that doesn't allow him to
enjoy life in a normal fashion?"
I've been told, "How do you know he's really so bad? Maybe he sneaks out
of bed at night and clandestinely delivers turkey dinners to orphans and widows."
And finally, "Look at the big picture. In the end, all the good people
will be rewarded. But the bad guys, they're gonna get it, and get it real
bad."
Not good enough, I say. If this world is the craftsmanship of a G-d who
desires good and kindness, then what on earth is all this wormwood doing in His
world? If someone goes against the rules of the game and hurts someone else, he
should be immediately zapped out of existence. A truly good G-d shouldn't
tolerate crummy bad guys. And us good guys, since we're on His side, we should
be getting all the fun that those creeps are having!
Answer:
You're right, it shouldn't work that way. The world was not designed this
way. All those answers are secondary. The real answer is quite simple. The real
answer is: They've hacked the system.
You know all about hackers -- the dark side of cyberspace. For instance,
you've been through those online MUDs (multi-user domain games) where users
enter a shared simulated world, choose characters (called avatars) to
represent them and then go about wheeling and dealing, stockpiling virtual
arsenal and blowing up other avatars and anything else they fancy -- including
the code.
In case you're thinking of bankrolling one of those projects, keep this in
mind: 10% of your budget will go towards development, testing, servers,
marketing, etc.. The other 90% goes toward maintenance. Why? Because in the
middle of the night, when gaming programmers charge triple-time their already
top-of-the-industry rates, some hacker will discover that if he goes over there
and kicks here and then hits that real fast and types in some code, his avatar
becomes invisible/all-powerful/duplicated/filthy-rich or whatever else is of use
in this game. And then he lets all his friends know. And then he goes onto Ebay
to auction off all the new virtual weapons he's acquired -- for non-virtual money. And while
they're at it and your bleary-eyed programmers are struggling to patch that hack
without shutting down the whole ^!@&* game for all those innocent players
who just want to play by the rules -- because if they shut it down every time
this happened the game would be more down than up -- someone else finds another
hack, and then another, and your whole MUD is wallowing in its namesake.
Well, game designers, be consoled. You are not alone. The Grand Creator of
the ultimate MUD of all MUDs has been dealing with just the same issue for 5,763
years. Only that He asked for it.
Look, if you have an unavoidable weak point in your system, where are you
going to put it? Will you put neon signs pointing to it, reading, "Don't go
here! This will mess up everything!" You know human nature better than
that, don't you? You know there's nothing more tempting for a human being than
the forbidden, the dangerous and the outright destructive.
(Actually, it's not just human beings. Half the critters out there have the
same quirky dispositions. Like those squirrels just waiting for a car to come by
so they can show off to their friends how they run across the street and just
barely get missed -- most of the time. And birds that do the same with your
windshield -- leaving their autograph behind. Gazelles in Africa are known to
stop, jump straight up in the air and then keep running when chased by a lion --
just to put some thrill into the affair. Human beings aren't so peculiar, after
all.)
So here He goes putting a tree in the middle -- yes, the middle -- of the
Garden. Then He tells His very first two users, "See that pretty, juicy
tree over there in the middle of the garden? Please don't go eating from it,
okay? 'Cause then you could mess up things real bad."
And Adam says, "Hey, Eve! Whadyuknow, there's a tree over here we're not
supposed to eat from! Hey, I wonder what it tastes like, eh?"
Hacked & Re-Hacked
Gives you the idea that the very first hack was a set-up job, doesn't it?
We're not going to go there right now. Let's first look at the consequences
of that first hack: Most significantly, more hacks. Each hack had a similar
effect: To chase out any trace of G-d's presence in the scheme of things, to
mess up the system of rules and order, and to provide lots of goodies for those
who made the mess. After a while, it became easier to play the hacks than to
play by the rules.
This is how the Zohar describes the effects of Adam's first sin: The world
was like a fruit, the meat of the fruit surrounded by a shell and a husk. By
eating from that tree, Adam effectively mashed together the fruit and the shell.
Consequent hacks further stirred and ground up the mess until it became
impossible to find a piece of fruit without husk and shell mixed in. We all know
what that tastes like. Like the confusion of the world we live in.
Let me put this in game-design terms: You realize that in order to have a
world, you need both background and foreground. White on white doesn't
communicate too well. In the foreground of the world are the things that matter,
the things that communicate information, the events that bring Divine purpose
and delight. The background is the stuff that has to just be there as a stage
for all that drama to occur.
With background, the rule is, the quieter the better. Like a clean blackboard
for drawing a diagram. Like the silence of the hall in which you play music.
Like the dark sky for which you must wait before lighting it up with fireworks.
The background isn't bad. It's necessary so that there can be meaningful
content. But it has to know its place: That it's only a container. That it's
only the accompaniment and not the soloist. That the best thing it can do is to
take a back seat and keep its mouth zipped.
Imagine, now, that the background and the foreground become completely
confused. The whole painting is lost. Communication is garbled and rendered
meaningless. Well, that's just what Adam and subsequent hackers did: They took
all the meaning out of the world by mixing the foreground and the background.
The most nefarious effect of mixing foreground and background is not so much
that the foreground loses meaning. Worse: The background pretends that it
also has meaning. It takes on a life of its own, as though the entire painting
was made for it.
That is how evil came into our world. Evil is the background sprung to life,
nurturing off of its relationship with the foreground -- the sparks of holiness
that have become lost within it.
You're probably itching for an example by now, so here's one: The rabbis of
the Talmud tell us that gold was created only to be used in the Temple of the
Divine Presence in Jerusalem. But humanity hijacked gold for self-serving
purposes. Some even built palaces full of gold to glorify themselves. Gold
leaked out to the world and was prostituted.
G-d created the potential for beautiful music in the world. It was meant as a
way of reaching towards Him and expressing a sense of oneness in His world. It
wasn't meant for the glorification of human beings, idolatry, violence, war,
unbridled sensuousness and the coffers of the music moguls.
Electronic games don't exist so that we can turn our kids into
twitch-machines and immunize teenagers to the horrors of killing and war.
E-games exist to give us beautiful metaphors to understand the Creator and
creation.
All things good, exciting and fun were created for the purpose of attaining
higher consciousness and manifesting the essential oneness in the cosmos. That
was the original game. By now, the game has been warped into a mindless race to
stockpile the most toys, achieve the most sensory stimulation and crash down the
most walls.
Hand Over the Code
Things got so bad, the Administration had to make a clean wipe of all input
data, taking the system down for an entire year while holding only a single set
of characters (animals included) in PRAM. The next iteration (the "rainbow
release") was promised to be more resilient. In truth, there hasn't been a
system-wide crash since. However, this was at the cost of significant reductions
in avatar life-spans. And when the entire user-base attempted to bypass the OS
through a conspiratorial action, multiple languages had to be introduced to
inhibit the degree of user-to-user interaction.
Strangely, it took a long time for the Eternal Game Master to wake up His
programmers and hand over the code. To patch all those hacks and build some
resilience into the system, you need the original, annotated source code. You also need a good sense of the original concept and design. So you'll want to see that very first concept paper as well as the design document. There's no doubt that's what Torah is all
about. That's how the greatest of the Kabbalists, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (the
"Ari") describes the process of a mitzvah. He calls it "picking
out the sparks."
The sparks are the Divine lights that fell from the shattering of the world
of Tohu (we'll have to do that one in another letter,
sorry). They were initially waiting for their redemption, protected within the shells of this
world. Adam was placed in the garden for just that purpose. That was the
original game play.
Then, as mentioned, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil affair made a
tzimmes out of the apple pie -- as we explained above. So along comes Torah with
the secret recipes to identify, detect and rescue those poor lost sparks and
bring them back to their proper home -- each time an object or event of this
world is used for a mitzvah.
Aside from rescuing sparks, Torah also provides the formula for cutting off
the supply lines to those nefarious hackers. Those are all the no-do's. Once all
the forbidden lines are abandoned, the dark side simply starves into oblivion.
Then there are the guidelines for dealing with the "permissible
realm" -- all the matters of the outside world. How you are supposed to
eat, sleep, work honestly and conduct your personal relations with others -- all
with Divine purpose. In this way, everything falls back in place and the MUD
returns to order. In a certain way, permissible matters do more to rescue those
sparks than mitzvahs.
Occasionally, there are even cases where the darkness itself is transformed
into light. Sort of like enhancing the game thanks to the hackers' discoveries.
To do this, however, is extremely risky business. Often it is accomplished by
one of those hackers who has handed him/herself in and now works for the good
side.
But all is with the power of Torah. Because Torah, as the ancient Midrash
tells us, contains the blueprint, the concept paper and the design document of
the entire OS of this world. That's where G-d Himself looked when He built this
place.
More Hijackings
Mitzvahs are powerful, but they also bring new risks and hazards. As we
explained, all the nurture of evil comes through that hijacked foreground,
a.k.a. "good". In the original design scheme, the background had very
limited energy source. The foreground resource protocol, on the other hand, is
dynamic: more activity = greater supply. Once Torah enters the scene, resources
and energy from way beyond the system begin to flow in. In simple terms, good
brings more light into the world. And evil knows that. And it pants and cries
for some of that light.
So what does the background-come-to-life-as-evil conspire to do? As soon as
it detects a source of more light entering the world, it strives to funnel it in
its direction. It does whatever it can to trip up whoever is doing those good
and wonderful things and thereby spill all the goods over to it. And then it
expands its empire even further.
That is why, as the Talmud tells us, "Whoever is greater than his
fellow, his temptations are also greater." The dark side is not interested
in wimps who live normal lives. The dark side is not interested in hijacking
bicycles. The dark side is interested in 747s -- people and communities that are
plugged into purposeful lives.
Now you understand why wherever there is the greatest good, there you will
find the thickest shmutz.
Do You Actually Like This Answer?
A lot of people don't like this answer. It gets them upset. It's not like one
of those nice answers that make you feel gooey and warm inside because you can
say, "Oh, now I see things aren't so terrible after all." On the
contrary, thinking about this answer may even create a sense of outrage.
That's good. We're not supposed to be pacified by answers. We're supposed to
be outraged. That's part of the healing process. To be revolted with the way
things are and be driven to change it.
As you can see, the act of repairing the game itself becomes the new game. A
much deeper game. Requiring a much deeper set of skills.
This is what the second Rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Dov Ber (1773-1827) explains
to us in his Torat Chayim: When the world was created, it was created
with Wisdom. (The ancient Targum of Yonatan ben Uziel translates "In the
beginning G-d created…" as "With Wisdom, G-d created…")
Because the beginning of all beginnings is Wisdom -- the wisdom to create an
amazing world out of 0s and 1s.
But then there is a deeper wisdom. A beginning before the beginning. The
wisdom that precedes Creation. Which wisdom is that? The wisdom to heal that
which is broken -- without taking the whole system down. The wisdom to transform
darkness into light, to make hackers into quality assurance staff and hacks into
resilient code. And that is the wisdom of Torah.
By now, those patches fill the entire globe. But the hardest levels are just
before the win. By all indications, we are on the verge.
And now you know why He set us up to hack it in the first place.
