The internal struggle – Tol’dot
Rebekah had a difficult pregnancy. She was carrying twins, and their movements were like wrestling going on inside her womb. The Torah says, vayitrotzetzu habanim b’kirbah – “and the children struggled inside her”. Even before birth they were at odds with each other. and this was to become the pattern of their lives.
In a sense their conflict is symbolic of the internal struggle that goes on within all of us. Competing emotions and ambitions tear us apart. In particular, there is acute discomfort when the two instincts, the good inclination (the yetzer ha-tov) and the evil instinct (the yetzer ha-ra) engage in a struggle for power.
There is a popular view that Christianity believes that the evil instinct in some way expresses the true nature of man while in Judaism it is the good instinct. Put simplistically, one faith stands for Original Sin and the other for Original Virtue, providing what Solomon Levy has called “a parallelism of opposition”.
There is something in this theory but it overstates both sides of the case. True, Judaism has no normative doctrine that because of Adam’s sin all human beings are automatically born tainted. But there are folkloristic Jewish suggestions of this kind, though no doctrinal significance attaches to such statements.
The Bible does not refer to Adam’s lapse anywhere else, and rabbinic tradition does not teach that man’s moral nature was changed by reason of Adam’s deed. Indeed, Genesis itself emphasises that man is a free moral agent: God says to Adam’s son, Cain, “If you do well, you will be exalted; but if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you can master it”.
There is thus no Original Sin in Judaism. Nor is there Original Virtue; it is a clever phrase, but it is an exaggeration. No one is perfect. Human beings do sin, and sin is too much of a reality to be brushed aside.
But there is a fundamentally optimistic streak in Judaism which asserts that as rational beings humans know that following the good inclination is better than following the evil inclination.
The real question, however, is why there needs to be an evil inclination at all. If it is evil, would we not be better off without it?
The Jewish view disagrees. It sees the yetzer ha-ra as logically necessary in a world where there is free will; unless there are both good and evil options to select from, there is no free will.
But more: Judaism believes the evil inclination has an essential role to play in the world. According to Talmudic legend, Ezra and his colleagues wanted to kill the yetzer ha-ra, but it warned them that if they succeed “the World would go down”. So instead of killing it they curbed its power by blinding its eyes.
The evil inclination is understood to be human passions. These are drives that are natural to human beings and not in themselves evil. They are evil only when misused or out of control. The evil inclination, if properly disciplined, drives a person on to build, create, love, and stretch the mind and heart. If not disciplined, however, it can lead to unmitigated disaster.
Without it there would be no movement, no development, no forging ahead; there might be only inertia. With it, human beings can achieve miracles.
To kill the evil inclination would impoverish the world, but it has to be brought under control. The evil inclination is evil only if it is hefker.
