Why do people do bad things?

The traditional Jewish answer is yéitzer hara, the evil inclination, which all humans are born with. This is, to be clear, not a claim that all humans are inherently broken or wicked, but rather a recognition that we are all capable of making harmful choices — we are all susceptible to things like jealousy, revulsion, and greed that can pull us towards acting badly; no one Just Is ontologically good — we are all capable of going wildly astray [a].

[a] This evil inclination is balanced by yéitzer hatov, the good inclination, which I’m essentially going to ignore here. My sense is that traditional sources have much less to say about this, in part because it represents less of a problem for them. A drive towards goodness needs no explanation in the rabbinic imagination, while a drive towards wickedness needs lots.

This immediately poses a problem for sages who imagine G-d as wholly and unreservedly Good: Why would such a Creator make humans with an evil inclination baked into their hearts? Why didn’t G-d just make us good outright?

One traditional response is to reject the question. In Bəreishit Rabah, an explanatory commentary on the first book of Torah hailing from around 400AD (give or take 100 years on either side), Rabbi Naḥman bar Shəmu’eil bar Naḥman quotes Rav Shəmu’eil bar Naḥman as having said that the evil inclination is not just good but very good, going on to explain, “If it weren’t for the evil inclination, a person would not build a house, take a spouse, reproduce, or take and give [money for goods and services]” (9:7, my translation). This is hardly an isolated line of thought: The Babylonian Talmud has numerous stories about various rabbis eliminating yéitzer hara from the world only to find its absence bringing calamity of one sort or another. The paradigmatic cases for the rabbis tend to be sexual: You can’t remove the urge to sleep with the wrong people without removing the urge to sleep with the right people, too — it’s all one indivisible urge.

When I first encountered this idea in shul, it was presented in less sexual terms — I more often heard the evil inclination being described as the ultimate source of the drive to make art, engage in politics, advance the limits of human knowledge — and it left me a little confused. The impulse to write a sonata seemed very far removed from the impulse to lie, and I had trouble making sense of the connection. I think I am finally coming into an understanding.

In this week’s Torah portion, the Israelites ask Aharon to make them a golden calf, because Mosheh has been on Mt Sinai for way too long. זֶה מֹשֶׁה . . . לֹא יָדַֽעְנוּ מֶה־הָֽיָה לוֹ | Zeh Mosheh . . . lo yadánu meh háyah lo | “This Mosheh . . . we don’t know what happened to him” (Shəmot 32:1).

Setting aside the recency of the miracles of the exodus and the very flashy theophany on the mountain, I’m inclined to be sympathetic to the Israelites here. Uncertainty is a terrible feeling, a feeling only amplified by heightened stakes. More than once, I’ve stayed up regrettably late because I couldn’t bear not knowing what happened next on some TV show or other; I don’t have high hopes for how I’d behave if a miraculously liberational leader hiked up a mountain billowing with smoke and flames with no indication of when, if ever, he’d be back.

This inability to tolerate not knowing can lead to wonderful things. One thinks perhaps of science [b] and medicine — in seeking to know how to heal the body’s failings and how to transform the raw materials of the Earth into useful things, we have created the possibility of living in astonishing comfort, health, and abundance, even if that possibility is far from universally realized — but it underlies creative endeavors, too. How can a building physically manifest ideals of participatory democratic government? What, psychologically, would lead a happily married person to commit adultery? How can music tell a story without relying on words? We have made deep and moving works of art in striving to know the answers to questions such as these.

[b] Which, etymologically, just means “known things”.

And yet knowing has its limits. There are very basic things we will never be able to know about the ancient world because so much evidence has been destroyed over the years. There are experiments we cannot run because it would be unethical to subject humans to the necessary test conditions. There are parts of my life that I reserve for myself, that no one else will ever get to know, because I do not choose to share them.

Disregarding these limits can lead to terrible things. On the one hand, a desire to know at all costs can lead to immoral inquiries — parents reading their children’s diaries without permission, scientists withholding known cures for diseases, the whole long litany of wrongs you can get to by asking what happens if you just don’t stop at any line. But on the other, when knowledge is impossible, intolerance of uncertainty can lead to fabricating answers out of whole cloth, and then sticking to them ferociously in the face of alternate possibilities. It cannot be that gender categories are fluid and contingent, shifting constantly across times and cultures with no immutable basis to hold firm to; they must be fixed certainties we can project across all peoples, always and everywhere. It cannot be that each generation evaluates the past anew, condemning figures that their parents hailed as saints; any critique of a beloved forbear must be a lie concocted to smear their known, immutable goodness. It cannot be that others have reasons for their actions that remain opaque to us; it must be that we know best and they are either fools or schemers, undeserving of autonomy and respect.

To lead just lives, we must make peace with the agony of not knowing. Unlike the Israelites at Mt Sinai, we must endure Mosheh’s absence, however unending, without building a false g-d to assuage our discomfort [c]. And yet that peace must always be partial, provisional. If we felt no discomfort with not knowing, we would never have learned to heal, would never have learned to paint caves and sing songs. The discomfort with uncertainty is the same discomfort. The urge to know is the same urge: the very good evil inclination in our hearts.

[c] In this dəvar, I don’t want to get into the question of whether the Israelites actually do anything wrong here. Personally, I’m not all that fussed about including icons in religious practice and think that there are strong arguments that the Israelites would have understood the golden calf as being a symbol of haSheim, not a brand new and different g-d. (There’s a good deal of evidence that Shəmot 32 was originally written as a critique of regional variants of ancient Israelite religion around the time of the destruction of the Northern Kingdom in 722BC. For a good analysis and discussion of the implications, I recommend William HC Propp’s treatment of this chapter in the second volume of his Exodus translation and commentary for the Anchor Yale Bible series.) For now, I’m willing to take the text as given and accept the golden calf in its proverbial sense as the paradigmatic false g-d. One text can mean many things, it’s fine.

How do you strike the right balance here, between seeking to know and accepting unknowledge?

I don’t know. I’ll let you know if I find out.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]