"The Way of G-d"

Part 1: "The Fundamental Principles of Reality"

Ch. 5: "The Spiritual Realm"

Paragraph 7

Since, as we've been saying, the transcendent forces are the backdrop behind everything that happens here on earth, it follows that they're also the backdrop behind both good and bad things.

Now, that would seem to suggest that G-d is responsible for bad-- since He’s the backdrop behind the transcendent forces, as we’ve been saying. Yet we saw early on in this work that G-d is All-Good (see 1:2:1). So how could He be All-Good yet be responsible for bad?

This will prove to be a rather complex concept, with new terms and implications. So we’ll lay out the groundwork here, and delve into it in more detail next time.

We’re taught here that the transcendent forces experience “good” and “bad”, i.e., favorable or unfavorable conditions, themselves.

But don’t misunderstand-- the transcendent forces are the very most subtle and immaterial of things. So the sort of favorable or unfavorable conditions they’d undergo are decidedly out of our own experience, and are only favorable or unfavorable relevant to each other. There’d be an imponderably abstruse “hair’s-breadth” difference between the two. Let’s go on from there, though.

The favorable condition they experience is referred to as the state of “repair” (“tikkun” in Hebrew), while the unfavorable one is referred to as the state of “impairment” (“kilkul” in Hebrew).

(Now, only dynamic things can be said to be either “repaired” or “impaired” rather than “right all along”. That explains why the world itself-- which is an offshoot of the transcendent forces-- is always in flux and always advancing or receding.)

The state of “repair” the transcendent forces experience is brought on by what's called "G-d's shining His light” upon them (i.e., approving of them); and the state of “impairment” is brought on by what's called "G-d's withholding His light” from them (i.e., disapproving of them).

There are very many implications to all this. But suffice it to say for our purposes here that G-d either shines or withholds His "light" each and every moment-- in varying degrees, in every corner of the universe and our beings-- depending on circumstances. Ramchal’s point is that like everything else, this phenomenon starts off in the transcendent forces.

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