645. By Your Actions, We Know You
August 1957, Boston
It is known that the purpose of the creation of the worlds is to do good to His creations. It is also known that we speak only of what extends from Him, but in Him, Himself, there is no thought or perception. Accordingly, we should understand why we say that the thought of creation is to do good to His creations, since we do not attain His thoughts, as it is written, “My thoughts are not your thoughts.”
However, we should say as in the known rule, “By Your actions, we know You.” It was interpreted that through the actions, we know His thoughts. Since the righteous of the world were rewarded with all the delight and pleasure, by this act they concluded that such was His intention: It is to do good to His creations.
It therefore follows that everything we say is only from the place where there is a connection between the Creator and the created beings, where the act is already apparent in the created beings, as in the verse, “You have made them all with wisdom.” That is, we are speaking only from the perspective of actions, as it is written in the Poem of Unification, “By Your actions, we know You.” However, we have no utterance or a word to speak of the Creator without His created beings, as was said, “There is no thought or perception of Him whatsoever.”
Accordingly, why should we not ask why we say that Creation does not add anything to Him, so why did He create it if it does not add anything, since this question is asking whether the Creator had a need for Creation before He created it? It follows that we want to speak of Him prior to creation, meaning before there was a connection between the Creator and the created beings, and we said above that prior to this connection, “there is no thought or perception whatsoever.”
However, we see that this was His intention. The proof of this is that He gives us abundance when we are ready to receive the King’s gift, and there will not be any flaw in the gift, meaning when the bread of shame is not felt in the gift, namely when man’s intention is only for the sake of the Creator.
At that time, when one receives from the Giver, it is also with the above-mentioned aim, meaning that he wants to receive the King’s gift because he feels that this is His will, and not for the sake of self-benefit, and then he is rewarded with receiving all the delight and pleasure.
And to add clarification, it is as it is written, “The whole earth is full of His glory,” as it is written in The Zohar, “There is no place vacant of Him.” Yet, we do not feel it for our lack of tools of sensation.
We can see that with a radio receiver, which receives all the signals in the world, the receiver does not create the sounds. Rather, the sound exists in the world, but before we had the receiving device, we did not detect the sounds although they did exist in reality.
Likewise, we can understand that “There is no place vacant of Him,” but we need a receiving device. That receiving device is called Dvekut [adhesion] and “equivalence of form,” which is a desire to bestow. When we have this machine, we will immediately feel that there is no place vacant of Him, but rather “The whole earth is full of His glory.”