The Allegory of the Girl Who Refused to Play with a Real Baby in Favor of Her Doll

We must know that the world was created with a desire to receive. Therefore, as soon as a baby is born, it wants to enjoy through its final day — such as for us to play with it. And when it grows, it wants only delight and pleasure.

We must know that pleasure is a spiritual thing. We cannot grasp the pleasure; it is light, and there is a rule that there is no light without a Kli [vessel]. Therefore, each pleasure must come within some clothing.

For this reason, we determine that each delight and pleasure is truth, since each pleasure extends from the light, and the only difference between man and beast is only in the clothing, meaning in the Kelim [vessels]. And certainly, the light dresses according to the value of the Kli. However, this is in particular. In general, there is no difference between a great man and a small man but only in the clothing.

Just as we see that when a little girl is playing with a doll, the pleasure she feels is real, and if we, the parents, want her to leave the doll and go eat, the girl thinks that she has cruel parents, meaner than the neighbors, since the neighbors don’t interrupt her playing and her parents do. We also see that if there is a six month old baby in the house and he is crying, and we say to the girl, “Why are you playing with the doll and kissing it? It’s a false baby, come and play with a real baby,” she refuses, even though we are certain this is a true clothing.

And if we can say to the girl, “Why are you not enjoying the real baby?” she will have no answer. But if we tell her, “You see how the baby’s mother is playing with him?” or “Even other people are playing with the boy and kissing him, and it will never happen that a grownup will play with a doll and kiss it.” At that time she will probably reply that the real pleasure is actually in the doll, meaning in a false clothing, and the reason why grownups kiss and play with real babies is only that they have no desire for pleasure, but I want to enjoy my life, so I must be happy with the doll.” It is indeed so, but a person who is still not sufficiently developed cannot derive pleasure from true clothing although there is pleasure there. It is likewise with the case of from Lo Lishma [not for the sake of the Creator] and Lishma [for the sake of the Creator].

— Kabbalist Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag (RABASH), “Letter 12.”

This allegory says that there are people who prefer to remain in a lie, subduing themselves to the lie, unwilling to see the truth.

Also, there are people who concern themselves with the truth, i.e., to enter spirituality, and who warm themselves up to such an attainment by connecting to their environment, a group of people who share a common aspiration to achieve the truth — the purpose of life, which is adhesion with the Creator, the upper force of love and bestowal.

If we wish to reach the truth in our lives, we thus need to care about our environment, and try to perform actions that are closer to the truth, i.e., actions of love, bestowal and connection, even if we feel no pleasure in doing so.

The pleasure will come. In the meantime, however, we feel darkness in such actions. We will then engage in this correspondence between darkness and truth, and pleasure and falseness, until we will eventually seek how to genuinely reach the truth.

Therefore, those who wish to reach the truth should perform actions of love, bestowal and connection in order to come closer to the darkness — a lack of pleasure in such actions — as to the light. It is because, when we conduct ourselves in a manner of love, bestowal and connection early on, we have no vessels for such qualities. We should thus try to gain such vessels, and by doing so, we will come to the light.

By connecting among each other in such a way more and more in the face of a smorgasbord of false fulfillments, we can latch onto the connection between us like climbing onto a horse, and then ride over the false fulfillments. Accordingly, we can look forward to the state that Kabbalists describe as “your darkness will shine as your light” in our connection, and eventually the truth will come.