Good and Evil - Wherein we discuss the function of the desire for evil.
Let’s talk about tov v’ra (good and evil) and what they actually mean in Torah, because they are not what most people think.
I believe most people assume religion defines good and evil as moral categories. While it’s true that the words also mean moral categories, but this is not the first usage of the word "Good" in Torah, and how it is first used is very instructive.
Near the beginning of the story, God “looks” at the light and calls it good, and then proceeds to end every act of creation with that affirmation, “and God saw... and it was good." What can it mean for God to call something "good?" This can't mean that they were morally good or ascetically good. What is the primary definition of the word "good" according to the Torah?
Ramban:
"God saw that the light was good"
This idea is to teach that they continue to exist by His will, and that if His desire would separate from them even for a moment they would cease to be …so when it says by each act of creation ‘And God saw and it was good’…the meaning is that He wills it to be this way forever.”
In other words, something is good if it functions the way God intended, and then it will also endure. The original meaning of good is very utilitarian, as it simply means functioning well.
Each aspect of creation, be it light, water, earth or heaven, beast, fish or bird, became a specific physical form from an elemental energy/matter called heyuli in ancient Greek. So when God created (for example) the fish and then declared they were good, it meant that the present form was permanent, the heyuli having obviously gone through earlier forms (which perhaps we find as fossils today) but at some point God called them “good” and the creative process was complete.
We can infer from this that the word ra, which is almost always translated as evil, means primarily instability and/or incomplete. Of course the words good and evil also mean the moral categories as we now think of them - but I believe it is important to have this point clear: At their root good and bad mean well-functioning or dysfunction. For example the Gemara says a person may not keep a bad dog (who will injure people) or a rickety ladder in their house. The ladder is "evil" because it is unstable. And it teaches us a great lesson in the difficulty with evil and where we get the sense of moral outrage we (hopefully) have about evil. Because unless we have experience with this ladder and know it to be unstable, or unless we use our wits and test it out first, we might only discover it’s rotten when we’re almost at the roof. Look out below!
Evil always takes the appearance of good, what fun would it have otherwise?
Hidden in the rotted wood of what seems to be a ladder, lies potentially months of painful recovery or maybe even death. And again, this is what gives rise to our sense of good meaning moral. Because only an evil person would knowingly give someone a rickety ladder, or inflict other dysfunctions upon them. And as we know - humans are capable of inflicting any and all suffering when they hide their evil in a cloak of good. Because evil always fools us into thinking that it’s cool for cats to embrace (especially when we’re young) that which is bad for us, even things that might kill us someday. Alcohol. Drugs. Cigarettes. Unhealthy Sex. Consumerism. Gluttony. How bout this one - being a fashionista? No no no - it can’t be, I’ve never heard of anyone dying from a fashion show and besides, I know good fashionistas. I know good alcoholics too, but I can’t say no one dies from of it.
The common thread between all these vices is that they all share the same purpose: to provide at least temporary respite from the fear of death. To put it simply, it’s the attitude of eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Judaism has a different ethic.
Eat in moderation (except on holidays ;))
Drink l’chaim,
and be merry because we live forever.
It’s hard to be good - at least it’s harder to be good than not to be, in the short term. As many works on Jewish ethics say, a person is generally either growing or not trying. So that the focus on being a 51 percenter is not so much a linear count of mitzvos as an indication of whether we are a ben aliyah, a person who is spiritually upwardly mobile, or a ben yerida, a person on the way down. If a person has their head above water to the extent that they achieve 51% - in God’s book they are swimming (or at least staying afloat). If not…. But as life challenges us every day to apply ourselves, if we just move forward each day - or even most days, we’ll be heading in a good direction.
And while cannot know God’s calculation, as the Rambam said, still I think we must be able to take our own pulse, so to speak. As the entire purpose of Creation is for us to create ourselves through the power of choice, it follows that we must have access to sufficient information with which to make reasoned choices. In other words, if we are meant to be good, then we have to be able to know whether or not we’re “being good.”
This is the function of the law. When we know there is for example a law against speaking negatively of others except under certain circumstances, we can know within reason whether or not the story we’re about to relate about our neighbor is permitted by Jewish law or not. As the verse says it is a Tree of life to those who hold fast to it. And within our observance of halacha, the law, the mitzvos, and most literally, the path, we do not have to be perfect.
The righteous falls seven times and gets up (Proverbs)
There is no righteous person in the land who does good and does not sin.
Being righteous does not mean not failing. Being righteous means being able to recover from failure. The real evil is in not learning from our mistakes. But mistakes themselves are just part of becoming whole.
And the reason for this is because even bad is good.
At the end of the six days of Creation,the verse says:
God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
The word “very” is in Hebrew me'od, which we usually think of as a superlative, in other words, super-duper good. And many commentaries attribute that to the creation of humanity which is the “pinnacle and purpose of creation.” Ramban also brings this idea, but his main view changes the meaning of the verse considerably. It will help us to know that the word me'od is a conjunctive, a joining of the prefix "from" and the word "sufficient." In other words, evil is in a sense an additional aspect of the creation itself, not the "od" the sufficient, whole and stable part, but a part which is "from" it, and necessary for it. Oh but let's let the man speak already.
Ramban
"V’hinei tov me’od"
This [tov meod] refers to creation enduring as I have explained, and the meaning of meod (very) is “mostly.” On this sixth day He added this word because He is speaking of creation as a whole, which contains evil in parts of it.
He said that it was tov me'od, meaning its me’od is good [i.e. it's abundance, the "extra" of evil, which is necessary for the good, as he explains...]
This is the source of the Rabbis in Bereshith Rabbah: “And behold it was very good. And behold, it was good - this refers to death.” Similarly the Rabbis mentioned “This means the evil inclination in man” and “this means the measuring out of punishment.”
Onkelos also intendeds this thought for he said here, “And, behold, it was very orderly,” meaning that the order was very properly ordered, as evil is necessary for the endurance of the good, as it says, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose, under the heavens.”
Tov meod - creation was very good, overall. There was of course part of it which is evil, but that’s ok too because the good needs it. Funny to think about a perfect God making a world which is only mostly good. God get’s an “A” on creation, but not an A+. Huh.
But we see that part of creation contains a reboot mechanism. For the good of the overall system, individual parts will break down when they’ve lost their functionality. So that even (the overall existence of) death is good, in that even though it is a (temporary) loss of a piece of the puzzle, it is how in the end, things are reborn. And perhaps it also helps in part to answer why we as humans are in the end, here. Perhaps part of our function, as God’s representatives here on Terra, is to tend to those instabilities as we find them, and bring them back to good.
Perhaps the perfecting of our world was Adam’s job before the Tree (and after the redemption, beam me up, Scotty).
We are problem solvers, resolving the issues that face our world and bringing peace where we can. Perhaps we’re meant to push God’s GPA up into the honours category.
Just a thought.
But recognising that we as individuals will also fall, and fail, and that the focus is on getting back up and trying to learn from our mistakes, is probably the most important thing for any of us to remember.
Depression happens. Bad days, bad mistakes happen. To actualise our potential, it is inevitable that we will struggle. Before we can achieve we may suffer. It’s ok. It will pass. (Especially if you’re young!) Sometimes we feel that we’re suffering from something, and yet it is that very thing which is pushing our growth and about which we will eventually say “it made me what I am today.” It is our struggles which take our potential for greatness and force us to actualise. It takes away some of the sting when we think this way, if indeed we are only struggling and not suffering. If we are indeed suffering, we need to ask for help from God and man.
I believe it’s a game changer when we think of mitzvos as the great Rav Noach Weinberg z’l used to describe them - as instructions for living, instead of just morals or ethics. Because once we do we can lose the need to defend ourselves, for we are not bad for making mistakes, but rather for not caring whether we make them and not caring about the next time.
To sum up: Good and evil are really function and dysfunction. Defining moral good and evil becomes much easier when we look at it this way. Being a good person means being a person working towards better functionality within your own life. Giving up, losing to the dysfunctions in your character, that is evil, and can destroy.
(Hilchos Teshuva 3:1-2 Translation by Eliyahu Touger, found on the Chabad.Org website.
I believe most people assume religion defines good and evil as moral categories. While it’s true that the words also mean moral categories, but this is not the first usage of the word "Good" in Torah, and how it is first used is very instructive.
Near the beginning of the story, God “looks” at the light and calls it good, and then proceeds to end every act of creation with that affirmation, “and God saw... and it was good." What can it mean for God to call something "good?" This can't mean that they were morally good or ascetically good. What is the primary definition of the word "good" according to the Torah?
Ramban:
"God saw that the light was good"
This idea is to teach that they continue to exist by His will, and that if His desire would separate from them even for a moment they would cease to be …so when it says by each act of creation ‘And God saw and it was good’…the meaning is that He wills it to be this way forever.”
In other words, something is good if it functions the way God intended, and then it will also endure. The original meaning of good is very utilitarian, as it simply means functioning well.
Each aspect of creation, be it light, water, earth or heaven, beast, fish or bird, became a specific physical form from an elemental energy/matter called heyuli in ancient Greek. So when God created (for example) the fish and then declared they were good, it meant that the present form was permanent, the heyuli having obviously gone through earlier forms (which perhaps we find as fossils today) but at some point God called them “good” and the creative process was complete.
We can infer from this that the word ra, which is almost always translated as evil, means primarily instability and/or incomplete. Of course the words good and evil also mean the moral categories as we now think of them - but I believe it is important to have this point clear: At their root good and bad mean well-functioning or dysfunction. For example the Gemara says a person may not keep a bad dog (who will injure people) or a rickety ladder in their house. The ladder is "evil" because it is unstable. And it teaches us a great lesson in the difficulty with evil and where we get the sense of moral outrage we (hopefully) have about evil. Because unless we have experience with this ladder and know it to be unstable, or unless we use our wits and test it out first, we might only discover it’s rotten when we’re almost at the roof. Look out below!
Evil always takes the appearance of good, what fun would it have otherwise?
Hidden in the rotted wood of what seems to be a ladder, lies potentially months of painful recovery or maybe even death. And again, this is what gives rise to our sense of good meaning moral. Because only an evil person would knowingly give someone a rickety ladder, or inflict other dysfunctions upon them. And as we know - humans are capable of inflicting any and all suffering when they hide their evil in a cloak of good. Because evil always fools us into thinking that it’s cool for cats to embrace (especially when we’re young) that which is bad for us, even things that might kill us someday. Alcohol. Drugs. Cigarettes. Unhealthy Sex. Consumerism. Gluttony. How bout this one - being a fashionista? No no no - it can’t be, I’ve never heard of anyone dying from a fashion show and besides, I know good fashionistas. I know good alcoholics too, but I can’t say no one dies from of it.
The common thread between all these vices is that they all share the same purpose: to provide at least temporary respite from the fear of death. To put it simply, it’s the attitude of eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Judaism has a different ethic.
Eat in moderation (except on holidays ;))
Drink l’chaim,
and be merry because we live forever.
It’s hard to be good - at least it’s harder to be good than not to be, in the short term. As many works on Jewish ethics say, a person is generally either growing or not trying. So that the focus on being a 51 percenter is not so much a linear count of mitzvos as an indication of whether we are a ben aliyah, a person who is spiritually upwardly mobile, or a ben yerida, a person on the way down. If a person has their head above water to the extent that they achieve 51% - in God’s book they are swimming (or at least staying afloat). If not…. But as life challenges us every day to apply ourselves, if we just move forward each day - or even most days, we’ll be heading in a good direction.
And while cannot know God’s calculation, as the Rambam said, still I think we must be able to take our own pulse, so to speak. As the entire purpose of Creation is for us to create ourselves through the power of choice, it follows that we must have access to sufficient information with which to make reasoned choices. In other words, if we are meant to be good, then we have to be able to know whether or not we’re “being good.”
This is the function of the law. When we know there is for example a law against speaking negatively of others except under certain circumstances, we can know within reason whether or not the story we’re about to relate about our neighbor is permitted by Jewish law or not. As the verse says it is a Tree of life to those who hold fast to it. And within our observance of halacha, the law, the mitzvos, and most literally, the path, we do not have to be perfect.
The righteous falls seven times and gets up (Proverbs)
There is no righteous person in the land who does good and does not sin.
Being righteous does not mean not failing. Being righteous means being able to recover from failure. The real evil is in not learning from our mistakes. But mistakes themselves are just part of becoming whole.
And the reason for this is because even bad is good.
At the end of the six days of Creation,the verse says:
God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
The word “very” is in Hebrew me'od, which we usually think of as a superlative, in other words, super-duper good. And many commentaries attribute that to the creation of humanity which is the “pinnacle and purpose of creation.” Ramban also brings this idea, but his main view changes the meaning of the verse considerably. It will help us to know that the word me'od is a conjunctive, a joining of the prefix "from" and the word "sufficient." In other words, evil is in a sense an additional aspect of the creation itself, not the "od" the sufficient, whole and stable part, but a part which is "from" it, and necessary for it. Oh but let's let the man speak already.
Ramban
"V’hinei tov me’od"
This [tov meod] refers to creation enduring as I have explained, and the meaning of meod (very) is “mostly.” On this sixth day He added this word because He is speaking of creation as a whole, which contains evil in parts of it.
He said that it was tov me'od, meaning its me’od is good [i.e. it's abundance, the "extra" of evil, which is necessary for the good, as he explains...]
This is the source of the Rabbis in Bereshith Rabbah: “And behold it was very good. And behold, it was good - this refers to death.” Similarly the Rabbis mentioned “This means the evil inclination in man” and “this means the measuring out of punishment.”
Onkelos also intendeds this thought for he said here, “And, behold, it was very orderly,” meaning that the order was very properly ordered, as evil is necessary for the endurance of the good, as it says, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose, under the heavens.”
Tov meod - creation was very good, overall. There was of course part of it which is evil, but that’s ok too because the good needs it. Funny to think about a perfect God making a world which is only mostly good. God get’s an “A” on creation, but not an A+. Huh.
But we see that part of creation contains a reboot mechanism. For the good of the overall system, individual parts will break down when they’ve lost their functionality. So that even (the overall existence of) death is good, in that even though it is a (temporary) loss of a piece of the puzzle, it is how in the end, things are reborn. And perhaps it also helps in part to answer why we as humans are in the end, here. Perhaps part of our function, as God’s representatives here on Terra, is to tend to those instabilities as we find them, and bring them back to good.
Perhaps the perfecting of our world was Adam’s job before the Tree (and after the redemption, beam me up, Scotty).
We are problem solvers, resolving the issues that face our world and bringing peace where we can. Perhaps we’re meant to push God’s GPA up into the honours category.
Just a thought.
But recognising that we as individuals will also fall, and fail, and that the focus is on getting back up and trying to learn from our mistakes, is probably the most important thing for any of us to remember.
Depression happens. Bad days, bad mistakes happen. To actualise our potential, it is inevitable that we will struggle. Before we can achieve we may suffer. It’s ok. It will pass. (Especially if you’re young!) Sometimes we feel that we’re suffering from something, and yet it is that very thing which is pushing our growth and about which we will eventually say “it made me what I am today.” It is our struggles which take our potential for greatness and force us to actualise. It takes away some of the sting when we think this way, if indeed we are only struggling and not suffering. If we are indeed suffering, we need to ask for help from God and man.
I believe it’s a game changer when we think of mitzvos as the great Rav Noach Weinberg z’l used to describe them - as instructions for living, instead of just morals or ethics. Because once we do we can lose the need to defend ourselves, for we are not bad for making mistakes, but rather for not caring whether we make them and not caring about the next time.
To sum up: Good and evil are really function and dysfunction. Defining moral good and evil becomes much easier when we look at it this way. Being a good person means being a person working towards better functionality within your own life. Giving up, losing to the dysfunctions in your character, that is evil, and can destroy.
(Hilchos Teshuva 3:1-2 Translation by Eliyahu Touger, found on the Chabad.Org website.