Every person asks this question at some point, usually in a quiet hour when the ordinary business of living is still. What is the purpose of my life. Kabbalah answers it, but the answer arrives the way a child arrives at language, not all at once and not in full sentences. A baby in its mother’s arms begins with nothing more than a murmur, a vowel sound with no shape to it, and no one listening would call that murmur eloquent. Yet within it lies the whole of the capacity for language that child will eventually speak and write, every word it will ever compose already folded into those first uncertain sounds. Understanding the goal of life works the same way. It begins as a stirring with no clear shape, and only slowly does it grow into something a person can actually hold and use.

Words themselves can only go so far here. However carefully they are arranged, they cannot hand over the reality itself, only the feeling that stands behind it, the way a description of warmth is not the same as sitting by a fire. So what follows should be read less as an explanation to be mastered and more as a sentiment to be felt, a direction pointed to rather than an object placed in the hand, as in truth no words or sounds could ever frame what is put on this site.

Kabbalah describes a first state in which a desire to enjoy was created and filled completely, with nothing withheld. In that state, desire and the force filling it were not two things but one, a single will and a single fullness held together without division. Nothing was owed and nothing was missing. Then came a restriction {Tzimtzum, צמצום}, a deliberate withdrawal, and the fullness receded by stages until what had been one whole thing began to feel like many small and separate pieces, scattered and cut off from each other as though something had broken apart. Every person alive now carries the sense of being exactly that, a splinter of a former wholeness, though almost no one recognises the feeling for what it is.

The difference between the first state and this second one is simply the absence of that fullness, and the correction is not complicated to describe, whatever it is to carry out. It happens when the scattered pieces, sensing their own separation, ask to be rejoined, and the fullness returns to meet that request, exactly as the Zohar teaches, there is no place void of Him, wherever the request is genuine. There is nothing more to the purpose of a human life than this. It is to feel the separation honestly, to recognise the self as a fragment cut off from something whole, and to want, with real desire, to be rejoined to it.

This purpose divides into two parts, and both are necessary. The first is to build within oneself an actual desire for connection with others, since the fragments were never meant to remain apart, and this desire has to be developed rather than merely wished for. The second is to recognise plainly that no one can achieve this alone, and to turn beyond the self and ask for the help required, a request the Kabbalists call the Raising of MAN {Mayin Nukvin, מ״נ}, the waters that rise upward from below to meet what descends from above. Baal HaSulam writes that there is none else besides Him, and it is this recognition, that the force capable of joining the fragments back together lies outside what a person can produce alone, which turns the request into something real rather than a private effort dressed up as fervour.

None of this connection or this request should be mistaken for the ordinary meanings those words carry in daily speech. It has nothing to do with agreement, courtesy, or the kind of cooperation people already understand well enough. What is being described is beyond definition in the terms available to us, since it concerns not the corporeal person each of us takes for granted as the whole of what we are, but a higher measure of the human being altogether, a superhuman quality lying dormant in every person regardless of circumstance. It is this higher measure that is meant to rise and be revealed, not the body and its ordinary concerns, and it sleeps in everyone equally, waiting on nothing except being asked for.

Seen this way, the goal of existence stops being abstract. It becomes the plainest thing there is. Creation was formed whole, it experienced a withdrawal that left it feeling scattered into separate pieces, and it is now moving, however slowly and however much resistance it offers along the way, back toward the wholeness it began in. A person takes part in this simply by feeling the separation as it truly is and by wanting, honestly, to be joined again to what was lost. Everything else this site aims to describe is only an attempt to put words around that wanting, and words, as already said, can only carry the sentiment. The murmur is not the language. But it is where the language begins, and there is no other place to begin from.