Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 53
“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)
This paragraph is so full of wisdom, caution, learning and thoughtfulness that I am going to spend a while on it. Beginning with the first part of the first sentence, “evil is real, mighty, and tempting” is something that we have to first acknowledge to be true. I am defining evil as ‘acting in opposition to God, acting in opposition to what is good, kind, just, merciful, truthful, loving, etc. Many people want to accuse another human being of being evil, many people want to denounce an action as evil, and they are not in the awareness of how real evil is, they use it as an adjective rather than a noun, they use is as an adverb rather than a verb! Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, once again, that evil is both a noun and a verb as well as an adjective and adverb. Without this recognition, we will find ourselves pointing our fingers elsewhere and not noticing the evil that is real, mighty and tempting in each of us.
Jewish Tradition speaks of two natures/inclinations that every human being has, the “good/divine” inclination and the “evil/earthly” inclination. I learned about divine and earthly inclinations from Rabbi Harold Kushner and I believe they are better descriptors. Jewish Tradition also says, “the good/divine inclination is good and the evil/earthly inclination is very good!” What a paradox for all of us, how can “evil/earthly” inclination be very good? Because the evil/earthly inclination is, as Rabbi Nachman bar Samuel bar Nachman says the name of Rabbi Samuel bar Nachman: “were it not for the Yetzer Hara (evil/earthly inclination), a man would not build a home, or marry a woman, or have children, or engage in business(Genesis Rabbah 9:7). When we believe that someone else is evil and someone else is wrong, when we go to paint another as the source of all evil, the source of everything bad, we are deflecting from looking at our own misuse of our evil/earthly inclination! We are projecting our own evil actions onto someone else so we can feel good about our self. Every spiritual discipline, every religion acknowledges “that evil is real” and we all possess the capability of being evil, as Christ says: “let he who is without sin/evil, cast the first stone”.
We also deny the strength of evil and the temptation for evil because evil also gives us power, we believe. We have seen throughout history how evil has tempted good people to do very bad things. After watching the “U.S and the Holocaust” documentary by Ken Burns, one is able to see how anti-semitism led America to halt the immigration of Jews seeking asylum from Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe leading to their death in a myriad of ways in Concentration Camps, being shot in the streets, burned in pits, dying in the forest, etc. While most people would not call Breckinridge Long evil, he was. He allowed people to die needlessly and had a cabal of willing people to go along with and carry out his prejudice. We are guilty of falling into the temptation and might of evil with our treatment of people who are not like us, ie, our prejudicial attitudes towards African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Jews, Muslims, Irish, Italians, etc. We have made the stranger feel unwelcome here in America for a very long time, in direct opposition to the words on the Statue of Liberty. While many of us have not actively engaged in this evil, we have been either indifferent to it, passive about it, and/or went along with it so we could get along.
The evil Rabbi Heschel is speaking about, in my opinion, is so insidious it goes unnoticed. It is the evil that we perpetrate each and every day in the ways we talk about another person, another group, the ways we are going to “kill the competition”, the path to “getting higher ratings than anyone else”, the demonizing of someone else, some other group in order to feel good about our self, our group. Our need for power and fear of losing it leads us to evil actions and becoming evil. We are easily tempted to evil as God says in Genesis 8:21, “the inclinations of the human are evil from their youth”, yet knowing this we blame our own evil on another, we wrap ourselves in the false flag of nationalism, of liberty, of conservatism, of liberalism, etc so we can deny the truth of God’s statements in Genesis and our own real-life experience of our selves!
In recovery, we are on a mission to turn our evil inclinations away from satisfying them and gratifying them with joy and glee. Our mission is to use the energy of our evil/earthly inclinations to create new ways to be of service rather than use old ways of demanding, stealing, intimidating another(s) to be of service to us. We engage with our inclinations to resist the temptation and the seemingly magnetic pull of evil to serve it and, in contrast, use our evil/earthly inclination to serve the good.
I have turned from serving my own evil/earthly inclination over these past almost 34 years while not losing the energy, sight, creativity and power of my yetzer hara. I am not perfect and I have indulged my evil/earthly inclination too much at times and these times have been fewer and farther in-between! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark