Q&A: Why Did God Create the World?
Why Did God Create the World?
Question
Why did God create the world? “In order to do good” — and if so, why didn’t God just place us directly in Heaven???
The answer that the Sages gave is that we would be ashamed if we simply received it for free, and therefore we work in this world. But this answer is puzzling — couldn’t God arrange this issue too, so that there would be no need for this world?!.
Answer
I’m not familiar with this answer in the words of the Sages. “The bread of shame” is a later answer, as far as I know.
In my view this is an absurd answer with no basis (how do they know that this is the purpose of creation?).
I dealt with this in Column 278. If I remember correctly, I distinguished there between two kinds of questions that “the bread of shame” is meant to answer (within the laws of our universe and outside them).
Discussion on Answer
Joining in ^^ 🙂
I suggest you ask Him. If there are two of you, there’s a better chance He’ll answer you.
Hello Judah, I’m from Argentina, I have the same question. Did anyone answer you?
With God’s help, 7 Tevet 5781
The Creator of the world explained the purpose of creation when there was a pair asking, and then explained: “which God created to do” — the creation of the world was intended to give human beings the challenge of completing it and cultivating it.
Best regards, Yaron Fish”l Ordner
One must distinguish in the question “why” between asking for the cause and asking for the purpose. As explained in “Patach Eliyahu” in the Zohar, regarding the Creator Himself, “no thought can grasp Him at all.” A limited human being, subject to binding laws, needs, and causality, cannot grasp a complete divine being that is neither subject to nor dependent on anything else.
What a person can attain to some degree are the ways in which the Creator conducts His world. Here one may ask what the purpose and destiny of the world as a whole is, and of each one of its creatures, and in this a person can have partial understanding. Even here, a person must listen very carefully to the words of his Creator in His Torah, both written and transmitted.
Best regards, Yfa”or
So if that answer isn’t correct, then what is?