Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Chassidism, poses a devastating question in his masterwork the Tanya: if most people will never fully defeat their evil inclination, why did their souls bother coming down to this world at all?
His answer transforms everything. The Zohar tells a parable about a wise man whose "eyes are in his head" (Ecclesiastes 2:14). The child-prodigy in the Zohar asks the obvious question: where else would a man's eyes be? The real meaning, he explains, is that the Shechinah (שכינה), God's indwelling Presence, rests above every person's head like a flame. But a flame cannot burn without oil. The body is the wick. Good deeds are the oil.
Here is the revolutionary part. Even a person's neshamah (נשמה), their divine soul, cannot serve as the oil. The soul, no matter how righteous, always remains a separate entity that fears and loves God. It never fully dissolves into the divine light. But when a person performs a mitzvah, that commandment is God's will in its purest form. The mitzvah has no barrier, no ego, no separateness. It becomes one with the Infinite.
This is why Torah study surpasses all other commandments. When you wrap yourself in a tallit, you perform one act of God's will. When you study Torah, you wrap your entire intellect inside the mind of God. Your thoughts become God's thoughts. Your understanding merges with divine wisdom. The Torah is not just a description of God's will. It is God's will and wisdom, and they are one with God Himself.
So the beinoni, the ordinary person who struggles daily with temptation, has not come to this world in vain. Every time they open a book of Torah, every time they perform a commandment, they achieve something that even the loftiest angel cannot: total unity with the Infinite through action.