The Concept of Evil

by Andreas Wittenstein

There is a Jewish tradition that humans are torn between יֵצֶר הַטוֹב (yétsèr hatov) ‘the tendency toward good’ and יֵצֶר הָרָע (yétsèr hàrà‘) ‘the tendency toward evil’. This is an interesting idea. But is it real? Is it useful or good? Is it even Jewish? Let's take a look.

Is ‘Evil’ Real?

Evil fascinates us because we can't comprehend it. Evil is utterly unfathomable. Why is that? When we look for evil in ourselves in order to understand the ‘evil’ that others do, we may find plenty to be ashamed of, but do we ever discover an actual urge to do evil?

People have evolved many urges or tendencies for survival. We have urges to eat, drink, and breathe, in order to nourish our bodies. We have urges to forage and hunt, to provide the nourishment we need, and an urge for security to keep from becoming food ourselves. We have an urge to manipulate other people, so that we can get others to help nourish our bodies when we are too young or otherwise unable to provide for ourselves; and we have an urge to help others when they can't provide for themselves. We have an urge to stockpile food to fall back on in lean times, and an urge to hoard other valuables so that we can persuade others to help us in lean times. We have urges to fight or flee to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our belongings; and an urge to make friends and keep peace, for the same reasons. We have an urge to mate, in order to propagate, and urges of fidelity and jealousy to protect our progeny. And we have many, many more urges.

But do we have an urge to do evil? No. By itself, none of these urges in intrinsically good or bad. Each one is in some situations more appropriate, in others less so.

Overarching all these lesser urges is the urge for good. When we keep all these other urges in balance, pursuing them in appropriate proportion and priority, we feel good. When we keep all these other urges in balance, we are good, and we strive to achieve and maintain this goodness.

But there is only one balance point. If we pursue any urge at all out of proportion or priority, then we lose our equilibrium. All directions away from good are bad. There is no one particular direction that can be called ‘evil’, and nobody has a general urge to be ‘bad’.

Although we have many different urges, evil isn't one of them, and none of them is evil. So the reason we can't comprehend evil is that we aren't evil ourselves. And the reason we aren't evil is because we can't be: There is no such thing as evil.

Is ‘Evil’ Useful or Good?

Even if evil isn't real, might the concept be useful anyway, perhaps metaphorically or pedagogically?

Because evil is alien and unreal, it's unanalyzable. Therefore, by ascribing someone's behavior to evil, we make it impossible to analyze or understand —and hence impossible to prevent— such behavior. As a result, the only way of correcting ‘evil’ appears to be to permanently remove the perpetrators from society, whether by imprisonment or execution. However, contrary to popular myth, statistics clearly show that crime and terror rates are in general directly proportional to incarceration and execution rates, so the concept of evil is plainly counterproductive.

People who do horrible things aren't alien monsters. As Hannah Arendt showed in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, they're all too ordinary. If we call them ‘evil’, we make monsters of them and forfeit the ability to empathize with them. If we want to correct any problem ascribed to ‘evil’, we need to peer behind the mask of ‘evil’ in order to discover the real causes of the problem.

We label people as ‘evil’ in order to distance ourselves from them, just as we try to animalize enemies in war, in order to set them apart as ‘other’, to assure ourselves that ‘we’ couldn't possibly behave like ‘them’. But ask any of ‘them’ how they see things, and you'll see that ‘we’ are ‘them’, just with the pronouns reversed. By distancing ourselves from them, we not only lose the ability to empathize with them; We also lose an important key to understanding ourselves.

Inasmuch as ideas, once conceived, take on lives of their own, I believe that the very concept of ‘evil’ is evil. Merely by conceiving of evil as a force, we imbue it with an existence it would otherwise lack. By calling people evil, we make monsters of them, thereby according them powers they would never have on their own.

Ethically, bad is merely a deficiency of good, much as darkness is a deficiency of light. By imparting to people contradictory tendencies to good and ‘evil’, we create a force of darkness within their souls, setting up an artificial conflict that divides each person against her- or himself.

Is ‘Evil’ Even Jewish?

Even if the concept of evil is false and destructive, should we perhaps hang onto it for the sake of tradition?

Literally, יֵצֶר yétsèr means ‘product’, ‘creation’, ‘form’. The phrase יֵצֶר הָרָע yétsèr hàrà‘ ostensibly has its origin in story of Noah in the Torah:

וַיַּרְא יְהוָה כִּי רַבָּה רָעַת הָאָדָם בָּאָרֶץ וְכָל־יֵצֶר מַחְשְׁבֹת לִבּוֹ רַק רַע כָּל־הַיּוֹם:
וַיִּנָּחֶם יְהוָה כִּי־עָשָׂה אֶת־הָאָדָם בָּאָרֶץ וַיִּתְעַצֵּב אֶל־לִבּוֹ:

And G‑d saw how great was the badness of the human on the earth, and every product יֵצֶר (yétsèr) of thoughts of people's minds was only bad רַע (ra‘) all the days. And G‑d regretted that G‑d had made the human on the earth, and G‑d's heart was saddened. —Genesis 6:5

In contrast, all of G‑d's own creations, including man and woman, are declared to be טוֹב (tov) ‘good’ after G‑d created them [Genesis 1]. There is no implication of human malevolence among Noah or his contemporaries; It's just that our human, incompetent plans have bad outcomes. G‑d ascribes man's failures to חָמָס (khàmàs) ‘lawlessness’, and destroys the earth to start anew, this time providing law and order by striking a covenant with humanity.

וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֶל־לִבּוֹ לֹא־אֹסִף לְקַלֵּל עוֹד אֶת־הָאֲדָמָה בַּעֲבוּר הָאָדָם כִּי יֵצֶר לֵב הָאָדָם רַע מִנְּעֻרָיו

And G‑d said to G‑d's mind “I will no longer doom the earth because the product יֵצֶר (yétsèr) of the mind of people is bad רַע (ra‘) from their youth.” [Genesis 8:21]

This is why each year, we confess the ways in which we have ‘missed the mark’ in the עַל חֵטְא ‘Al Khét’, renew our covenant with G‑d, and make a fresh start.

The early rabbis, however, reinterpreted יֵצֶר yétsèr to mean ‘impulse’, ‘urge’, or ‘inclination’. According to the Talmud,

“When G‑d created human, G‑d created human with two urges, the יֵצֶר הַטוֹב yétsèr hatov and the יֵצֶר הָרָע yétsèr hàrà‘, both the good and evil inclinations.” [Ber. 61a]

This idea of the human mind being a battleground for the forces of good and evil runs through much of the Talmud and the writings of the prophets. Why? After all, the root יצר ytsr unequivocally refers to the outcome of our creations, not the intent.

The rabbis who started espousing this radical new dualistic view were in exile in Babylonia, following the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586BCE, fifty years after which they were conquered in turn by the Persians, who brought with them the new dualistic Medo-Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. In the Zend-Avesta, written early in that century, Zoroaster explains the world as the outcome of the struggle between rival gods Ormuzd and Ahriman. Ormuzd is infinite light, supreme wisdom, and the author of all good; Ahriman is the principle of darkness and the author of all evil.

When the rabbis took up this idea from their conquerors and used it to reinterpret the story of Noah, they were wise enough not to deify evil as an external god rivalling G‑d, as the Zoroastrians and eventually the Christians did. Still, when they invented the concept of יֵצֶר הָרָע yétsèr hàrà‘, evil worked its way into Judaism.

For Jews who believe that G‑d is immanent, and who believe that we were created in G‑d's image, having an evil urge inside us is no better than having a devil outside.

People aren't evil, and evil is not a real force; It's just a bad idea. The very concept of evil is evil and destructive, useless and counterproductive. We borrowed the idea of evil from another religion that has long since died out, and we don't need it. Even hiding inside us as an impersonal urge, evil undermines monotheism and challenges G‑d.

It's time to root out evil.

—from our January 2002 Newsletter

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