Why Is Life So Hard?

It is not enough to have a place to live, clothes to wear, and food in our bellies. We all need more than this: we each need a sense of purpose, a reason for our existence. Otherwise, at best, we just kind of wander around aimlessly, not getting much done. At worst, we are driven by our fears and worries, and we become neurotic nerve-balls.

This is easily illustrated in the behaviors of children. Children, at a very young age, start trying to figure out the levers that affect their world, starting with, “What happens when I cry?” They like the attention: when newborns are monitored by breathing monitors, the babies quickly learn to hold their breath in order to summon Mommy.

It grows from there: as soon as children learn to operate as autonomous creatures, they start trying to find the limits. They will push, in every conceivable direction, to find the lines – and even to test those lines occasionally just to discover how firm they are. From outside, this test-feedback process, especially for boys, can seem cruel: boys will test authority in a range of situations until they receive a negative stimulus that they find convincing – for my boys, that negative stimulus ranged from euphemistically named “hug therapy” to kinetic force.

But both are needed. A boy pushes out of insecurity, he is trying to discover the depth of the relationship. The father’s response provides reassurance, because the feedback tells the boy whether (and how much) his father cares.

The thing is, the boys (I never did really figure out girls) were always so much happier after testing me, because they knew where they stood. And following from that, they emerged with a renewed sense of purpose, because they had something productive to do. This is why I have always loved building things with my boys: building together feeds the souls of father and son. Life is meaningful and beautiful when you partner to create something, each person knowing what they need to do in order to contribute to a solid result.

So when a person “tests” someone else, it is specifically to find the lines and limits in order to know where we stand – and also to discover what is expected of us. This is true in any relationship, from parents and children, to siblings, to husband and wife. It is most obviously true in schools, where children thrive best in crisp environments with clear lines (in our home school, the students wear a uniform), and know what they are expected to achieve each day. Because nobody succeeds in life merely by wandering around.

What is crazy is that this seems to apply to everyone involved. The feedback loop of testing-limits-consequences-rewards-lesson-learned is inherently reciprocal: every healthy relationship changes and improves both participants. Parents I know who swore they would never utter the word “no” to their children learned, sooner or later, that children would find a way to extract that word, and learn their parents’ limits, even if it meant doing something very foolish, gratuitously destructive, or obviously dangerous.

Testing limits is as old as time, from the Garden of Eden onward. Later in the Torah, the Children of Israel in the wilderness time and again tested G-d to establish the boundaries, as well as to glean a more refined sense of purpose.

For example:

And the people murmured against Moshe, saying, What shall we drink? And he cried to the Lord; and the Lord showed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet: there he made for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he tested them.

…

Would we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger. Then said the Lord to Moshe, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain portion every day, that I will test them, whether they will follow my Torah, or no.

The people, like children, are trying to find the boundaries in their relationship with G-d. They don’t know what is expected of them, and they lash out. G-d reacts by trying to teach them to trust Him, to grasp G-d’s expectations of us. And the result, just as with a boy who pushes his father until he receives a consistent and solid response that he can rely on, is a sense of mission and contentment.

But there is a deeper and more fundamental example. The first time the Hebrew word for “test” is found in the text is with Avraham :

Some time afterward, God tested Abraham, saying …“Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering.”

Why does G-d test him? Consider the possibility that Avraham for most of his life, did not know what we expected of him. In the Torah, G-d gave Avraham almost no instructions at all.

So Avram happily goes to Canaan when told to do so. But when he gets there, he is not sure what to do. So he built an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

Nothing seems to happen. So Avram tries again, but with a twist (emphasis added).

And he removed from there to a mountain on the east of Bet-el… and there he built an altar to the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord.

Still… nothing. So, not sure of what to do, Avram is passive until a famine hits, which prompts him to sojourn to Egypt, where, just like anyone who is unsure of the nature or depth of his relationships, he fixates on the worries (of being killed because his wife was beautiful). If we lack clear purpose, we revert to our fears. (You can find countless exemplars of this problem in today’s Woke world.)

The pattern continues. Avraham acts every time and in every situation where he has clarity. But otherwise, he seems to be aimless. Even late in his life, Avraham is not sure what to do:

And Avraham planted a tamarisk in Be᾽er-sheva, and called there on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.

Why do this? The altars did not seem to achieve much, so Avraham thinks that maybe he is supposed to plant a bush?! It is very odd.

Avraham is still not sure. The next verse:

And Avraham sojourned in the land of the Pelishtim many days.

Why do this? It seems that he is lost. Avraham is waiting for instruction, waiting for purpose.

And then, in a momentous story that still reverberates today, G-d gives Avraham a specific instruction: He orders Avraham to sacrifice Isaac.

G-d tests Avraham’s limits, and finds that he will indeed do what he is asked.

What happens after the Binding? Avraham, like any person who now knows what is expected of them, is energized. He does not wander anymore. From that moment on, he knows what he is to do: he first goes to great lengths and expense to honor his deceased wife, Sarah (whom he had not treated in this way during her lifetime – there is a reason she was so insecure about Hagar). Then he similarly invests in Isaac, a son who, despite being Avraham’s great ambition, had not been mentioned in the text since he was weaned.

And then Avraham goes on to remarry, have a bunch of other sons, and dies very happily and content. He found his way, thanks to the test. The Binding of Isaac changed Avraham forever, and clearly for the better.

But there is more: like any test within a relationship, the result changes both parties: G-d is the one who blinks, who changes His mind about the request. And one could even argue that G-d also learned from the testing of Avraham. He learned that even the most righteous man in the world needs to be given limits and direction. That man, like children, crave instruction and feedback. Without it, we can accomplish nothing.

This is not a small lesson to learn. It may be the lesson that leads to all the others. After all, it is possible that the entirety of the laws of the Torah after Avraham are the result of the lessons learned by G-d through Avraham’s life: G-d learns that we need commandments. We need to know what we are supposed to do, and what we are not supposed to do. Because if Avraham could not grow without being tested by the divine connection, then none of us can.

Is this true for each and every one of us, in our own lives? Does G-d test us not only to challenge our faith, but also to push us to grow? Are we tested with hardships and challenges because, as G-d learned with Avraham, if we are not challenged, then we lose our hunger and sense of purpose and mission?

P.S. We learn later what happens when we refuse to learn from our experiences. After the episode of the spies, and G-d threatens to kill all the people, Moses begs for the people to be forgiven.

And the Lord said, I have pardoned according to thy word: but truly, as I live, and all the earth is filled with the glory of the Lord: surely, all those men who have seen my glory, and my miracles, which I did in Miżrayim and in the wilderness, and yet have tested me now these ten times, and have not hearkened to my voice.

We were tested and given limits, and we refused to internalize the lessons – and as a result:

They shall not see the land which I swore to their fathers, nor shall any of those who provoked me see it:

The lesson here is not only for the generation of the spies, it is a lesson to us all. If we ignore the “obvious” feedback that G-d gives us in our lives, if we refuse to learn from the tests we are given, then our lives become nothing more relevant than a timer slowly ticking down until we die.

P.P.S. You can verify the above by seeing for yourself every time the word for “test” is used in the Torah.