Why Did God Create Us? Understanding Free Will, the Evil Inclination, and the Power of Prayer

Hello, I’m 17 years old. I’d like to understand why God created us. What does He need us for? Why did He create us with an evil inclination? After all, He could have created us perfect. Finally, why do we need to pray to Him if He is so great?

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Hello Avi, and thank you for your important questions.

God created us in order to bestow goodness upon us. If there were no human beings, there would be no one to receive that goodness. The Creator is like a father who has everything, and brings children into the world so he can share what he has with them. This is the most rational and natural act for One who is perfect: to share His perfection with beings who are not perfect. The ultimate purpose of creation is giving. For this reason, humanity was created.

Human beings however, were not created perfect. In a real relationship, there must be two sides. If the Creator only gives, and the human being has no choice but to receive, then what he receives is a gift that he did not earn (“free bread of shame”). Out of such forced giving, a person could never truly love the Creator or appreciate His love. Only because a person has the choice to rebel against God’s love and commandments, does he also have the ability to embrace His infinite love and choose to live by it. We were given the yetzer hara (evil inclination), so that our closeness to God would be our choice, freely chosen out of love, not force.

Human life is therefore full of challenges and desires in this temporary world.

If we look deeper, Judaism teaches that the ultimate good is actually closeness of the soul to God. The righteous enjoy eternal reward because their pure soul is close to divine holiness, while the wicked suffer because their soul has become distant from the divine light. 

God’s goodness is closeness to Him, and in order to be close to Him and connect with His eternal and infinite goodness, a person must resemble Him. For this reason, man was given a soul that is “a piece of the Divine above”, and with it, the power of free choice, which makes him similar to God. If you ask, “In what way are we like Him?” the answer is in our capacity to love.

This is, in fact, the meaning of life. Just as God loves humanity and gives everything without expecting anything in return (since God gains nothing from us), so too must a person resemble Him and love Him with all his heart, without expecting reward. Free will makes man greater than the angels, for only man can choose between good and evil, and by choosing good, he achieves eternal closeness to God. This is the true power of love.

The Torah teaches us (Deuteronomy 6:5): “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” The Sages also taught in Pirkei Avot (1:3): “Be like servants who serve their master not for the sake of receiving reward.”

The greatness of all the true tzaddikim (righteous), is that they study and observe the Torah purely out of love for God, not from fear of punishment or pursuit of reward in the World to Come.

Still, such a lofty level is not demanded of us at the beginning. The Sages therefore said: “From serving not for its own sake, one will come to serve for its own sake.” Every Jew begins serving God out of a desire for reward and fear of punishment, and slowly rises to higher levels of love and pure devotion. If you’d like to explore this wisdom more deeply, I highly recommend the classic works Mesillat Yesharim (The Path of the Just), Orchot Tzaddikim (Ways of the Righteous), and Chovot HaLevavot (Duties of the Heart).

This also answers your last question: God certainly does not need our prayers as He created the entire universe and lacks nothing. We are the ones who need prayer, because through prayer, a person realizes that everything he has comes from the Creator. By turning to Him in words and thoughts, a person builds a personal relationship with the One who gave him life. In doing so, he draws ever closer to God and gains the holiness and eternity promised to him.