Seeing in the Dark: Why Does Hashem Hide Himself from Us, and Where Is Justice in This World?

It is no secret that we live in a world of concealment; we cannot see openly how commandments or transgressions act in higher realms and how all of this affects us. If someone eats non-kosher food, lightning will not suddenly strike them, and if someone encourages a friend in crisis, they won’t receive a gift card in the mail the next day. There's usually no direct correspondence between a person's level of righteousness and what they experience in life. After all, we see good and righteous people going through great difficulties, while people far from Hashem achieve astonishing success in various areas of their lives.

And why do righteous and good people suffer? There are several explanations for this question, and we will briefly mention some of them.

First explanation: Through the suffering of this world, the righteous person pays for the few sins they have committed, thereby ensuring their reward in the eternal world is complete and even greater.

Second explanation: Sometimes people experience suffering not due to sins from their current lives, but as an atonement for sins from past incarnations. Even though a person does not remember events from previous lives, the soul is the same soul, and all the events it goes through in its different life paths are meant for its eternal correction.

Third explanation: Righteous people sometimes suffer for the sins of their generation, thus invoking Hashem's attribute of patience, not to punish the generation now, but to wait in hope that they will return to the right path.

Fourth explanation: Life here is not meant to be spent drinking coffee alongside cake on the balcony. Life has a purpose, which is to grow spiritually and create a close connection with Hashem. This closeness is created only by spiritual elevation. When Hashem seeks closeness with one of His children, He sends them a challenge. The harder the challenge, the greater the spiritual elevation Hashem wants to grant them. This means that the meaning of the challenges is that Hashem wants to grow us spiritually and push us to create a stronger connection with Him.

In contrast, we see people who aren't paragons of virtue, yet they receive great material abundance, and there are reasons and heavenly calculations for this as well. Ultimately, all this confusion and obscurity in the world around us can often be misleading, causing us to think that the good deeds and commandments we observe have no real impact.

But the truth is, the lack of feedback for our actions is part of the essence of this world. It is what allows the power of choice between good and evil. If the lives of the righteous were perfect, and everyone far from religion suffered failure after failure, free choice would indeed cease to exist. Everyone would know that it's beneficial to perform commandments and beware of transgressions, and thus we would become robots without free choice. Fulfilling commandments without free will was not the Creator's intention. Hashem desires faith in Him and His commandments from within a world of haze, trials, and free choice. Only in this way can we reach the purpose of life, which is the choice of good. Therefore, it is unreasonable to expect Hashem to run the world in such a way that everyone who strengthens themselves or performs an important commandment will certainly receive great salvation, while those who do not strengthen themselves or observe Torah and commandments remain stuck. In this world, there is a concealment of divinity, as it is said: "The world implies concealment," and our task is to reveal divinity from within the concealment.

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