What is the purpose of existence?
G-d is perfect. Therefore He could not have created the world for His own benefit, since there is nothing that He could have added to His own perfection. Rather, He created the world for our sake, i.e. in order to share His perfect goodness with us. Now, His perfect goodness means that He created us in such a way that by so doing, He was doing not only good but the best possible good. On the surface, this ought to have been achieved by creating us as close to Him, to perfect goodness, as possible. But that would have made us very different to G-d in one crucial respect. He would be a creator of goodness; we would be a created goodness. He would be an active bestower of good; we would be spiritual robots. Therefore, G-d made a two-stage process, with two separate environments. He created us so that at first we would be a certain distance away from Him. As a result we would have freedom of choice and, should we choose good, we would be active creators of good in our own right. The enviro
