The other day, I was privileged to be sitting by a school, watching the children run and play. I saw the children, some of them very young indeed, getting on and off the bus, crossing the street, and running around. I thought, "How very precious a child is. How could their parents bear to let them out of their sight, to let them wander around in the world? God forbid, so many bad things happen in the world and children are so defenseless. It must be that parents realize that what the children do in the world is so precious that it is worth the risk. The joy that a child receives from playing, learning, and discovering, outweigh the dangers of sending him out into the world. We learn that the world exists only because of the breadth of the children learning in the house of their Rav. I then realized that it is the same with our neshamot (souls) and Hashem. He could have kept our neshamot with him, protected and safe. Instead, he sends them into the world where the neshama might come to suffer greatly or, God forbid, even worse, come to do evil. How could Hashem risk it? How can he continue to allow neshamot to suffer, and how can he allow great evil to occur in the world? We have seen such great evil being done in the world recently; evil itself seems quite easy to accomplish.
I don't think our problem is that we don't do enough good or enough mitzvot. I think we don't realize how important our good and our mitzvot are. How can I compare my wife's lighting of the Shabbos candles to a rasha (evildoer) flying an airplane into a building or pulling a trigger? The light of ths Shabbos candles lasts a few hours and no one seems to benefit from them except my wife and I and our guests. The act of terror seems to make so much noise in the world. And yet, the Shabbos candles have sustained our people against a long history of acts of terror. We learn that a little light dispels much darkness. Every mitzva we do, no matter how small, and every step we take towards Hashem, far outweighs the damage that any rasha could ever possibly do. Were it not so… how could Hashem continue to let the world exist?