Was Falling a Good Thing?

Unlocking potential is a great achievement, isn't it?

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But when it’s tough and you come up with the goods — yeah you worked hard but that’s sort of expected... Because how many things go smoothly in This World anyway?

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What’s a real innovation though is the transformation of the evils themselves in those trying circumstances.

After all, that’s why we have come to such low levels in the first place — to transform and elevate, so eventually no G-dly spark remains behind.

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Example:  Martyrdom

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Suffering at the hands of oppressors who leave but two choices: To transgress a Commandment of G-d or to die. Today it’s an unfamiliar occurrence, but in the past -­ something too familiar to the exiled Jew.

 

Such tragedy is considered the biggest merit that can be attained.

 

This unique merit is won through resistance to the oppression, thereby winning that particular battle of not transgressing G-d’s Will (albeit at the cost of losing one’s life).

 

Any hidden good in those evil oppressors has been elevated. 

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But at the end of the day it was far from ideal:  Lives were lost and the oppressors (now without that hidden good) remained evil even after the martyrdom.

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Here’s a more pleasant and “elevated” example:

 

Example:  Emptying Egypt

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Spending 400 years in foreign lands, 210 years in the most immoral yet so firm Egyptian culture, and of those, the last 86 to 116 years spent in back-breaking labor commanded by the cruel Egyptians —

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Any chances of transformation there?

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Well, in fact, that was a primary outcome of this first and bitter exile:  The Jewish People took with them Egypt’s gold, silver and fine clothing.  And (— a big and —) it was all given to them with free will by those same cruel Egyptians.

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The Jewish People thus "emptied" Egypt —

וינצלו את מצרים (Exodus 12:36) — also in a spiritual sense: 

Egypt lost all of whatever could be elevated to the exiting Jews.  Nothing was left behind. It was, though, thanks to the hard spiritual (in addition to the physical) labor that preceded the exodus.