This month’s Torah content has been sponsored by the following generous donors:
Mr. Allen and Mrs. Lobat Hakim in memory of Allen’s parents, Yaakov ben Binyamin and Miriam bat Yehuda
Mr. Daniel Etessami
Mr. Jordan and Mrs. Joyce Karmily
Mr. Josh Amini, for the speedy return of Omer Maksim ben Orna Esther and Ronen from captivity in Gaza
In its description of creation, the Torah tells us that God judged everything He brought into existence to be “good” – light, the stars, the oceans, and even the animals. The one creature that does not earn the label “good” is Adam, the first human being. When it comes to Adam, the Torah only uses the term “good” to highlight what is NOT good about his condition:
“It is not good for man to be alone – I will make for him a helper who is similar to him.”
Although he is never called “good”, goodness does make a prominent appearance later in the story of Adam – as a subject, together with “evil”, that he is tempted to explore:
“And the Eternal God commanded the man, saying, ’from all the trees of the Garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, lest you die.’”
The allure of acquiring “knowledge of good and evil” entices Eve to partake of the forbidden fruit:
“And the serpent said to the woman, ‘you will not die. For God knows that on the day you eat from it, you will become like gods, knowing good and evil.”
Indeed, in the aftermath of their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, God Himself states, “Man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil…”
This story has perplexed readers for millennia. Isn’t knowledge usually considered something positive? Why doesn’t God want mankind to obtain “knowledge of good and evil”? Why are Adam and Eve punished for pursuing it?
Generally speaking, the Universe is governed by the principles of God’s wisdom. Galaxies and planets don’t deliberate about the trajectory of their motion. Birds don’t struggle with existential questions about the direction of their lives. The fact that the totality of existence so beautifully reflects law and order is what makes it “good” from the Divine perspective. Every component of the world functions the way it was designed, in a harmonious, predictable, and consistent manner.
There is, of course, one exception: the human race. Unlike the rest of creation, the behavior of human beings is not purely natural in the physical or biological sense. It also flows from their conscious awareness and free choice. People, simply by virtue of existing, are not necessarily good. We must reflect on the proverbial “big picture” and decide to become good. This requires acceptance of the fact that the universe does not revolve around us. We are just one small part of the Creator’s handiwork and, in order to fulfill our potential, we must seek understanding of His plan and intentionally live in accordance with His wisdom.
People who choose not to engage with God’s wisdom still need some way to make sense out of the world and find purpose in their lives. So they invent a subjective framework, a mental bubble in which their own interests, aspirations, and fantasies do occupy center stage and no attention needs to be paid to the reality beyond that. This is what the serpent calls “becoming like gods, knowing good and evil.” Being a god means seeing ourselves as the be-all-and-end-all of existence. “Knowing good and evil” means rejecting any objective sense of right and wrong and appointing ourselves the sole arbiters of what is true, important, valuable, and desirable.
All things considered, we occupy a difficult middle ground. Two possible paths lay before us, and we are responsible for charting our own course. We have the potential to be good, but it is up to us to actually “become” good. This would be perfectly fine if our natural tendency were to seek the good and members of our species only occasionally stepped out of line. But the opposite is the case.
On both an individual and a societal level, human beings overwhelmingly choose to invent their own set of values rather than pursue knowledge of objective truth to guide them. This attitude, the belief that “man is the measure of all things”, has been the predominant one from the times of Adam and Eve until today. In other words, from the Divine perspective, the sun, moon, antelope, and oak trees are all good, but the majority of human beings are not “good!”
It seems as if, by our very nature, we are predisposed to live in a way that is out of sync with the will of our Creator. In fact, Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, explains that the story of the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is not the narration of an event. It is actually an account of the inevitable consequences of the human condition. As I explained in another article, we find an allusion to this idea in the following Aggada:
Rabbi Yohanan bar Hanina said: “The day [i.e., the sixth day of creation] was twelve hours long. During the first hour, his [Adam’s] dust was collected. Second, it was shaped into an undefined figure. Third, his limbs were extended. During the fourth, soul was placed in him. Fifth, he stood on his feet. Sixth, he gave the animals names. Seventh, Eve joined him. Eighth, they climbed onto the bed as two and came down from it as four [they conceived and bore two children.] Ninth, he was commanded not to eat from the tree. Tenth, he failed. Eleventh, he was judged. Twelfth, he was expelled and left [the Garden of Eden] as it is written, “man does not lie down in honor.” (Sanhedrin 38B)
Rabbi Yohanan bar Hanina teaches that not only the creation of Adam and Eve, but their sin, punishment, and expulsion from the Garden of Eden, all took place on the sixth day. These events occurred during the process of creation, not after it was finished.
In other words, the entire story of the Garden is supposed to teach us something about who Adam and Eve were and how they were made. It is not really about a “sin” that they committed or the “curses” – banishment, death, and the difficulties of livelihood and childbirth – that resulted from it. On the contrary, from the moment they were created, human beings were never destined to live in paradise, enjoy endless comfort and luxury, or eat from the “tree of life” and be immortal. Things like the fear of death, the pain of childbirth, and the constant struggle to make a living were meant to be part of human experience from the beginning. They are what prevents us from getting totally lost in the realm of our own subjectivity.
As we transition from infancy to adulthood, much of what we call “maturity” is the increase in awareness, from experience, that the world does not revolve around us, and that we must learn about it and adapt to it to be successful. This is true not only on an individual level but on a global level as well. The initial motivation behind many breakthroughs in science, medicine, technology, etc., has not been a thirst for knowledge for its own sake, but a desire to bridge the gap between our personal interests and our environment.
We get sick, so we study biology in search of cures. Life is short and difficult, so we explore disciplines like psychology, sociology, physics, chemistry, and even astronomy, all in order to develop technology that will make it longer, easier, and more enjoyable. The fact that we are fragile and vulnerable and subject to forces outside our control is what reminds us that there is an objective reality beyond us and that we have no choice but to engage with it.
Without this external pressure, we would be set adrift on a sea of our own inner fantasies.But even when we do attend to the world around us, it is almost exclusively for the purpose of meeting our own needs and rarely progresses past that point. Government funding is given to research that we hope will provide human beings some measurable benefit. Media reports mention scientific findings when they have some practical relevance to our lives. For most people, curiosity ends the moment there is no more “useful” information to be harvested. Then we retreat to the reassuring confines of our subjective bubbles as quickly as we can.
Considered in this way, it seems as if God fashioned us to be our own worst enemies. Although He put safeguards in place to prevent us from totally withdrawing from reality, we are still hard-wired to cling to our self-centered fantasies and to limit our engagement with wisdom as much as possible.
The Torah itself acknowledges this fact. While it carefully shies away from calling us “good”, it does not hesitate to refer to us as “bad.” In Parashat Beresheet, we read:
“Hashem saw how great was human wickedness on earth—how every plan devised by the human mind was nothing but evil all the time…”
Similarly, after Noah’s Flood, God declares:
“Never again will I doom the earth because of humankind, since the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.”
It appears that the Creator Himself agrees that we are “built to fail.” Our Sages address this concept in a startling Aggadic statement:
The Sages taught: So difficult is the evil inclination that even its Creator calls it evil, as it is stated: “For the inclination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth.” (Qiddushin 30B)
All is not lost, however. The Rabbis tells us that there is a solution to the contradiction of human existence – Torah!“
There is a parable that illustrates this: A person hit his son with a strong blow and placed a bandage on his wound. And he said to him: My son, as long as this bandage is on your wound and is healing you, eat what you enjoy and drink what you enjoy, and bathe in either hot water or cold water, and you do not need to be afraid, as it will heal your wound. But if you take it off, the wound will become gangrenous. So too the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Israel: My children, I created an evil inclination, which is the wound, and I created Torah as its antidote. If you are engaged in Torah study you will not be given over into the hand of the evil inclination, as it is stated: “If you do well, shall it not be lifted up?” (Ibid.)
In the parable, Hashem is compared to a father who inflicts a wound on his son and then prescribes him the treatment that will prevent it from developing an infection. Similarly, Hashem created us with the “wound” of an evil inclination. In giving us the Torah, He has provided the antidote that prevents the evil inclination from festering and destroying us.
This analogy is deeply problematic. The father in the story intentionally causes harm to his son and only then offers him a remedy. Wouldn’t it have been better for the father not to strike his child to begin with? We would normally condemn a dentist who causes his patients to develop cavities so that he will be called upon to fill them, or a doctor who breaks a patient’s bones so he will have the opportunity to set them. Yet the Sages imply Hashem has deliberately placed us in a crisis so that we are forced to turn to His Torah for salvation. Are we to understand from this that Hashem afflicted us with an evil inclination just so He could intervene and alleviate our suffering?
The objective of these Aggadic statements is not to cast a negative light on the Creator but to help us better understand ourselves. Human beings are complex creatures. As members of the animal kingdom, we have physical needs and desires that influence our feelings, thoughts and behavior. At the same time, we have minds that can reason in sophisticated ways, grasp abstract ideas, curb our impulses, and direct our energies toward loftier ends.
The parable of the Sages clarifies how the two aspects of humanity – material and spiritual – function in practice. Ideally we would like for them to work together in harmony and for our bodies and senses to promote the development of the mind. However, that is not the way they are actually designed. Our bodies are products of the physical world alone and operate according to the principles of biology. The same instinctual forces that induce a dog or a gorilla to eat, drink, or reproduce, also exist within us. They serve the same purpose in us that they do in the dog or the gorilla – namely, ensuring our individual survival (eating and drinking) and the survival of our species (reproduction).
Physiological drives, even in humans, are not tailored to serve any higher, holier objective. They naturally follow their own built-in, pleasure-seeking trajectory. So, by definition, they cannot help our minds break free of its self-centeredness to explore objective reality. On the contrary, the instincts infiltrate our intellects and imaginations to their own advantage. We first fantasize about desirable sights, sounds, tastes, and sensations. Then we invest mental energy in planning how to obtain whatever it is we now want or need. This means turning our mind’s eye away from the quest for real wisdom and keeping it trained on the endless pursuit of instinctual gratification.
Surprisingly, this aspect of our physical makeup is something we would call a feature, not a bug. This is exactly how our bodies are designed to work! In fact, in seeming contradiction to the Aggadah cited above, Midrash Rabba Beresheet tells us the following:
“Rabbi Naḥman bar Shmuel bar Naḥman said in the name of Rav Shmuel bar Naḥman: “Behold it was very good” – this is the good inclination; “and behold it was very good” – this is the evil inclination. Is the evil inclination, then, very good? Rather, were it not for the evil inclination, a man would never build a house, would never marry a wife, would never beget children, and would never engage in commerce…”
The evil inclination, then, is both very good and very bad – because “good” and “bad” are only meaningful relative to our frame of reference. Everything Hashem created is perfectly designed to fulfill its objective. This includes the whole gamut of animal instincts and emotions inside us. On the most basic level, they motivate us to survive and procreate. But they also inspire us to work hard, to invest in projects, to build, and to innovate. In this sense, the “evil inclination” accomplishes the purpose for which it was created, and we wouldn’t want it to operate any other way. It serves to preserve life and promote growth. For this reason, the evil inclination deserves the label “good” or even “very good.”
Of course, this is only true when we assess the human condition from the perspective of the physical alone, using only our bodies and the material world around us as our standard. In terms of the higher purpose of human existence, on the other hand, the situation is much more complicated. From the standpoint of the lifelong quest for knowledge of Hashem, having bodily urges that “dance to the beat of their own drum” is an obstacle rather than an advantage. These instincts thwart the aims of the soul and impede its function rather than helping it achieve the purpose for which it was created. When the frame of reference is the human mind, the Rabbis tell us that “even God refers to the inclination of mankind as bad.”
We find ourselves faced with a terrible conundrum. Hashem gave us physical bodies and placed us in the material world so that we would have the opportunity to learn, grow, and actualize our uniquely human potential. But having a body means existing in a condition where our own nature actively and efficiently works against the higher aspirations of our soul.
In their parable, the Rabbis compare this situation to a father who strikes his own son and then provides him with treatment to prevent infection. The father presumably hit his son in order to educate or discipline him, as was common in those days. So too, Hashem made us the way we are and put us where we are for an educational purpose. But like an untreated wound, a body that teems with unbridled instinctual energy can be hazardous to our health. If left to their own devices, the animal drives within us will overwhelm us and undermine our whole reason for being.
Abandoned to our natural fate, there would be no hope for most people. We would be unable to rise above the powerful forces that are literally designed to drag us down. As the Talmud tells us:
Rabbi Shimon ben Levi says: A person’s inclination overpowers him every day, and seeks to kill him, as it is stated: “The wicked watches the righteous and seeks to slay him.” And if not for the fact that the Holy One, Blessed be He, assists each person in battling his evil inclination, he could not overcome it, as it is stated: “The Lord will not leave him in his hand.” (Qiddushin 30B)
The Sages explain that we need Divine help in order to succeed as human beings and not as mere animals. On our own, we are no match for the instincts that use every strategy at their disposal to keep us down. At the same time, it is unrealistic for us to expect miracles of salvation on a daily basis. Where, then, is the special assistance we so desperately need in order to prevail in our spiritual struggle? It comes in the form of the Torah and mitzvot, the Heavenly “support system” we received thousands of years ago at Mount Sinai.
Knowledge and observance of Torah empowers us to reflect upon our impulses one by one, to become aware of them, analyze them, and conquer them. Nurtured by its wisdom, we learn to enjoy the benefits of physical existence without being overwhelmed by them. Involvement in Torah study trains us to look at the world and at ourselves from the vantage point of objective reality, of the true “good.” In so doing, it helps guard our psyche against the fantasies of instant gratification that would otherwise infect and corrupt it.
The same passage of Talmud cited above expresses this idea as well:
One who engages in Torah study lifts himself above the evil inclination. And if you do not engage in Torah study, you are given over to its power, as it is written: “Sin crouches at the door” (Qiddushin 30B)
Remarkably, Torah learning even transforms our instinctual energy – normally an impediment to spiritual growth – into a potent source of fuel for the mind in its journey to understanding. As a famous Talmudic aphorism phrases it:
“If that base one [the evil inclination] meets you – drag him to the House of Study!” (Ibid.)
When we experience the incredible impact of Torah in our lives, we witness Hashem’s providence firsthand and in real time. The gift of Torah grants us access to levels of wisdom and personal development that we would never have reached on our own.
Of course, human beings who consciously and deliberately act in accordance with God’s plan should be viewed as at least as “good” as the rest of Creation. But since their behavior is a function of their own understanding and free choice, the status these individuals achieve is even higher. They have not just made themselves “good”. They have become, with Hashem’s help, living embodiments of goodness, as our Sages proclaim:
“Good means nothing other than a righteous person, as it is stated: “Say of the righteous that he is good” (Isaiah 3:10).” (Yoma 38B)
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