Human Suffering and the Suffering of Spirit

Drawing on her experience of treating people, Rabba Saphir Noyman Eyal identifies the most desperate aspect of human suffering: an inescapable cycle. Treatment can bring relief briefly, but suffering returns. It feels like a trap. Suffering and its treatment resemble a convention: rationality offers a currency of relief, as paper is accepted as though gold stood behind it. Without appreciation of the higher plan, relief remains within the same cycle.

The cycle cannot be understood through the search for relief alone. Providence relates not to souls but to spirits: to purpose and experience. For the spirit, corporeal life is at least inconvenient. Human suffering is a distant echo of the exile that the spirit, and therefore Divinity, undergoes through human stubbornness. Bereshit tells of a trial to establish this throughout humanity. That attempt failed, and its failure unfolded through the generations, reaching Noah and the Tower of Babel, where the beginning of forcing religion on another person began. The search was then for a current able to carry the hope and memory of unity through the higher will. This was found in the family of Eber (עֵבֶר): the ability to listen, prophesy, and see beyond.

Seeing beyond does not reject rationality, but reveals its limit: being rational is not the same as being intelligent, because it can limit us from going beyond ourselves. Rationality is needed, but it cannot substitute for higher intelligence. The last generation Kabbalists seek to tie us back to the time of the Hebrews, not the time of Israelis or Jews, bringing back the presence of Divinity. To prophesy is to have language able to express the higher intelligence or the will of God, not to impose it. Human consciousness can grasp what is expressed. Yet the choice may live only briefly as a feeling, then disappear. It must be reestablished in surrender, with the stubbornness to see beyond and not only for ourselves.