The Evil Inclination

No matter your age or the zeal with which you pursue spiritual development, every one of us is engaged in a daily inner battle. Believe it or not, the human experience was more or less designed this way.

This idea is hinted at in the opening lines of the Book of Genesis¹. We're told that the Creator formed humankind with two competing inclinations:

"The Evil Inclination" (the Yetzer Hara)

"The Good Inclination" (the Yetzer haTov)

The Good Inclination

The good inclination needs almost no explanation. It is simply the part of us that seeks to do what is right. It is who we want to be, and who we are in those rare moments when we are not reacting to emotional pressure, struggles, or feelings of lack.

Call it the ego, the "id," or self-centeredness, the evil inclination is our innate tendency toward selfishness and personal gain, particularly ahead of the needs of others.

The world is full of people living fully into that selfishness. But before we grow too comfortable, we should note that the evil inclination is more complicated than it first appears.

Ulterior Motives

On a subtler level, even good people can be fooled by the evil inclination. This happens when we pursue good activities for the wrong motives.

For example, someone who studies the Bible mainly to best others in argument and gain notoriety, or someone who does good deeds in order to be seen, or gives charity only for the feeling of having done so. This may be the evil inclination at work.

Call it moral self-licensing, or simply mixed motives, the evil inclination is a sly opponent. In the extreme, we can turn even holy pursuits into a form of idolatry.

Consider this: if the core principle of the Torah is to "love your neighbor as yourself,"² then the evil inclination's primary mission is to subvert (and invert) that effort to the degree we allow.

The Heart

These two forces, the good and evil inclination, work much like the popular image of the angel and a devil perched on a person's shoulders. Which voice we listen to is up to us.

The battlefield for these forces is the heart. This is why Rabbinic literature, as well as the New Testament, consider the "heart" as the seat of our moral decision-making.

Solomon tells us that the right side of the heart is associated with the good inclination:

A wise man's heart inclines him to the right, but a fool's heart to the left. — Ecclesiastes 10:2

It follows that the left side is the domain of the evil inclination, and why the Bible instructs us to circumcise our hearts³.

Defeating the Yetzer Hara

The evil inclination only has power on this side of the World to Come. The Messianic era brings a new reality, a heart of flesh⁴, when we will no longer fall to the tricks and impulsivity of our inner saboteur.

This reflects the tradition that the evil inclination will one day be excised entirely:

In the time to come the Holy One, blessed be He, will bring the Evil Inclination and slay it in the presence of the righteous and the wicked. — Talmud Sukkah 52

A Paradox

An ancient story⁵ tells of a group of Rabbis who tried to capture and destroy the evil inclination, believing this would solve the problem of evil in our world. It did not go according to plan.

Once they trapped it, they awoke the next morning to find no eggs to eat, no one going to work, and no desire among the people to bring children into the world.

From this we learn two things. First, the evil inclination plays a vital role in human motivation and ambition.

Second, the evil inclination makes free will possible! For good decisions to matter, there must also be the potential to make a bad one.

This is the paradoxical reality upon which human life is designed. In Deuteronomy, we read:

... I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—if you and your offspring would live. — Deuteronomy 30:19

The goal, then, is to learn how to channel the energy of the evil inclination towards the good.

Ego Personified

At times, Rabbinic language speaks of the evil inclination in personified form. A popular name used is "Satan."

The second-century Rabbi, Reish Lakish, states it plainly:

"Satan, the evil inclination, and the Angel of Death are one — that is, they are three aspects of the same."
Talmud Bava Batra 16a

Jewish mystical interpretations associate Satan with the Angel, Samael. This strikes a proximity to popular views, but it is important to note that Judaism keeps these personifications of Satan within boundaries: subservient to G_D, and generally, metaphoric for the evil inclination.

However, in parts of the Christian tradition, "Satan" has taken on a life of his own. Unbound from the framework of Jewish tradition, the church has taken Satan more literally, and ascribed powers to him that far exceed the boundaries set in Jewish and Biblical tradition.

Read through this lens, Jesus's struggle with Satan in the wilderness conforms to the Rabbinic view in its full range.

The Ego

Rather than seeing Satan as an omnipotent being, it may be more productive to understand Satan as our own ego. This allows each person to have a unique, concurrent struggle without attributing omnipotence to any single force.

Understood this way, Satan - our selfishness - is different for each of us, drawing us toward our own particular weak points. One story captures this well:

The evil inclination is similar to a prankster running through a crowd showing his tightly closed hand. No one knows what it is he is holding. He goes up to each person and asks, "What do you suppose I have in my hand?" Each person imagines that the closed hand holds just what he desires most. They all hurry and run after the prankster. Then, when he has tricked them enough that they are following him, he opens his hand. It is completely empty! — Reb Nachman's Wisdom #6

If each of us is here for a unique purpose, then the struggles we repeatedly stumble over, the areas of our greatest temptation, may be precisely what we are here to master.

Seen this way, the evil inclination becomes a tool that can help us uncover our purpose in life, and our most powerful tool for growth.

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Notes:

¹ "What means that which is written, "Then God formed man" (Gen. 2:7), the word vayetzer "and He formed" being spelled with two letter yuds? The Holy One, blessed be He, created two impulses, one good and the other evil." - Berakhot 61a

² Leviticus 19:18

³ Deuteronomy 10:16; 30:6; Jeremiah 4:4

⁴ Ezekiel 11:19; 36:26

⁵ Yoma 69B