I was 15 years old when my father first recommended that I start working out. He bought all of the equipment, the bench press and the dumbbells, and I created a space at home where I could begin my exercising endeavors. My first day working out was quite amusing in retrospect. I did 100 repetitions of bicep curls at once. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first. That is, until two days later, when an excruciating pain ran down the upper half of my arm. I couldn’t move it, and as the day went by the pain only increased. I thought to myself “You have a long way to go.”  Working out was painful, but it was rewarding. It took me a while to connect the pain to a process that was bigger than what I was experiencing at the moment. In the first year of my working out the pain was bitter, but as years progressed, the pain became sweet, because I knew that the end result would be a gain and not a loss. The pain was only a medium, an illusion.

One of the hardest questions to answer is “why do we suffer?”  What’s the point of pain? It doesn’t seem right that bad things happen to good people. And even further why should there be bad things to begin with? It’s even harder to simultaneously juxtapose one’s belief in God while undergoing a painful ordeal. Because if God is good and benevolent as we read in the Birkat Hamazon then why do horrific events occur in the world either from nature or from people?

The Creator is the source from which an interconnected system of worlds emerges. These worlds are termed in Hebrew as olamot from the Hebrew word he’elem meaning concealment. These systems of worlds can be thought of as the “software” that runs the “hardware,” our world. It follows that that software simultaneously governs this world (olam) and conceals (he’elem) itself from our world, like drapes concealing the light of the sun on a hot summer day. When we experience any phenomenon in our world as either good or bad it’s not the whole picture we’re looking at, because we are unaware of the process that this “software” is leading us toward, that it is geared towards our development as humanity. But what if we understood this process?

Imagine we can connect to this system of worlds, this “software”. The Art Scroll commentary on the Torah portion Beshalach explains a fascinating experience that the nation of Israel attained. It was a degree of the revelation of the system of worlds to such an extent that they understood how all of the previously tormenting and excruciating experiences they went through in Egypt at the hands of Pharaoh were really parts of a coherent symphony of events that had to take place the way they did in order for them to reach the state of bliss they were in when the seas parted on Pharaoh. It was a sensation of how sweet the bitterness they experienced was, and it is a state that we can gain the capacity to experience if we open our minds and hearts to that possibility.