In the beginning, God made light and dark – light are the acts of compassion and dark are the acts of cruelty.

Well I can readily understand how acts of compassion God did for me; but acts of cruelty?

The answer my friends is very very very simple, yet possibly hard to digest.

You see, what is man if not a free choice being?

When God, said “Let us make man in our image” he meant fundamentally, that this rational ability to decide, is what man truly is! as the Rebbe says, the definition of a person, is their decisions.

Free choice is who we are – take it away, then we are whatever is choosing us!- for example, is a biological ameba itself? – take it a step further, is a fish a conscious thinking choosing thing? in fact there is no being, both in heaven and on earth, that has consciousness, the ability to independently create decisions, follow them – We see this most in the Jewish people, for when it comes to sacrificing their lives (the most precious thing we have) for their ideals, they have historically infinitely disproportionately (to gentile nations) in the vast majority of cases, from Masada to Bergen-Belson, from ancient Persia, to communist Russia etc. stood their ground.

So the question is, why the cruelty?

And here is the most profound understanding of the Divine plan based on the Rebbe’s teaching – you see, there is a verse that states “A setup was the Garden of Eden” – do we really think the first sin wasn’t planned and hence in fact, all sins are planned – which gets us back to our philosophical quandary, why would light accept darkness? – if you had infinite power, would you allow darkness?!

And the answer is, for man to be man – namely, have free choice – there had to be both the desire for light, and the desire for darkness! (in fact an angel is just the desire for light, hence called holy-animal – an instinct) but to rid man of the desire! for ultimately destiny is for us to freely choose light and freely reject darkness, well, it had to rear its ugly head!