B. The problem is us, not Him: Torah Or p. 83a-b

Above we stated that during times of exile there exists an iron wall between us and G-d in heaven. It’s important to note that it is not G-d who built this wall but us, the Jewish people, with our sins. In truth, even during exile G-d radiates his Divine life and love to the Jewish people just as before, although we are blocked from seeing and experiencing it due to the wall that we put up. We are the ones who put it up and we’re the ones who have to take it down, and that’s why even today we have permission to make cracks in the wall in order to merit to receive some of the revelation that already shines to us from G-d. It is for this reason that our sages specifically state that there is a wall of iron between us and G-d in heaven, and not between G-d in heaven and us, as in truth from His perspective there is no wall and He continues shining His light just as before.

• The Divine lesson: In relationships, we often mistake our feelings of dislike or animosity for another to be mutual, and sometimes even create and initiate such feelings due to imagined animosity that one feels the other person has towards him. While of course at times animosity is mutual, at other times, it isn’t, and is simply the growth of a paranoid imagination and low self-image. People often make this same mistake regarding Hashem. More than the evil inclination wants one to fail a battle and succumb to sin, it desires to make him give up fighting the war. Its main evil intentions arrive after a sin is committed by the person, in which he tells the person that he is no longer worthy of G-d’s love or closeness and that G-d despises him, and that as a result G-d has now put up a brick wall between him and G-d. So if he feels kicked out of G-d’s house figuratively he’ll go look for a different house to take refuge. This cannot be further from the truth. The above teaching emphasizes that no matter what the sin and how much one has sinned, G-d who is our loving father in heaven continues to shine His benevolence and love towards us. It is we who put up the divider between us and Him to make us feel unconnected and unworthy. We put it up by doing the sin, and we could take it down by retracting the sin through repentance and then once again become susceptible to the Divine love and light of G-d that He always continued and continues to shine upon us.