G-d made several worlds before ours, but He destroyed them all,
because He was pleased with none until He created ours!
“..And there was evening [the Hebrew can be read to suggest ‘evening’ was a reality before now]. Hence, we know a time order existed before this. Rabbi Abbahu said This proves the Blessed Holy One went on creating worlds and destroying them until He created this one And G-d saw everything that He made and behold, it was very good [comparatively] This pleases me, but those [worlds] did not please me”. (Bereshit Rabbah 3:7.)
Certainly Hashem could have done things right the first time. He went through all of the “trouble” of building something which He knew up front would be later destroyed, to teach mortal man that it is alright if you do not get things perfectly right the first time. It is completely fine to fail. In fact, it’s part of nature to fail. Hashem wishes us to learn the following lesson:
NEVER QUIT!
If we were to reflect back on our life, we may find many instances where we failed and where we quit. When we fail, we always have the choice to try again. When we quit, we choose not to try and maybe fail again. Failure can be a temporary delay to success, but quitting guarantees you’ll never succeed. By creating many worlds G-d taught us that “If at first you don’t succeed, pick yourself up and try again!!
Throughout creation, Hashem reflects back and said that day was “Tov”.
But on the sixth day, the creation of man, Hashem says it was “Tov
meod”. The Medrash explains, “tov meod zeh yetzer harah”. How could the yetzer harah [evil inclination] be Tov meod? The very name of yetzer harah is something that is inherently evil and bad! Based on the aforementioned we can suggest that the greatest yetzer harah we can have is the feeling of “Tov meod”: that at the onset of any new endeavor, if things aren’t perfect, we might give up. If we have the possibility of not excelling in a specific task immediately there is a feeling that there is no reason to even start.
“The best is the enemy of the good.” – Voltaire.
This is the yetzer harah telling you that life must always be tov meod and that you may never fail.
The Yetzer tov will tell you that life is a process of trying to improve and to grow from our previous failures.
שחמט דיגיטל