The Yetzer Hara and the Yetzer HaTov Revisited
One of the crowning achievements of Charles Darwin was the work on his theory of natural selection. According to Darwin, all animals in the world compete for resources, and only the fittest survive. Darwin believed that homo sapiens followed this same trend, and that in the struggle to survive, the strongest will always win. In such an arena of survival, ruthlessness and individualism conquer kindness and selflessness. But Darwin ran into a problem with applying this model to human beings, that is, all societies value altruism. Humanity esteems virtues of kindness, empathy, generosity, and humility––all vices when it comes to darwinian survival. Without moral virtues, we are just animals; and without primal instincts, we would all perish.
For millennium Judaism has viewed the balance of being virtuous and primal in the dichotomy of our having what it calls a יצר הטוב yetzer hatov, and a יצר הרע yetzer hara. A literal translation of these competing proclivities would be a good inclination and an evil inclination. But the tension within humanity isn’t between good and evil, but rather between our moral inclinations and our animalistic ones. To this end, the rabbis often project the yetzer hara as some kind of animal or beast. One talmudic tale tells of the rabbis who try to subdue the yetzer hara, which comes to them in the form of a fiery lion (גוריא דנורא) from the Holy of Holies (Yoma 69b). In another talmudic parable, a man named Chiyah Bar Ashi חייה בר אשי suffers from a persistent yetzer hara. His very name means “Beast son of Fire (Kiddushin 81b).” Animals are not a metaphor for evil (רע, but for the primal nature of man that is amoral.
Our yetzer hatov and our yetzer hara are not just inherent to who we are, but both are blessings of God upon us. The question is asked by Rabbi Nachman ben Shmuel as to how we can possibly call our yetzer hara (our evil inclination) “good.” The answer, is that were it not for the primal inclinations within us, humanity wouldn’t build, marry, procreate, and engage in business. Greed, lust, and ego are potentially harmful forces, but God’s world needs them to endure (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). Similarly, we should not that in the above talmudic tale (Yoma 69b), when the yetzer hara manifests in the form a fiery lion, it emerges specifically from the Holy of Holies. That is, the yetzer hara is a manifestaion of holiness. While we might call these inclinations “evil,” they are necessary evils in this world that, when tempered, drive the success of civilization. When left unchecked by our moral compass, the excess of these qualities breeds crime, fraud, war, inequity, and injustice. What sets us apart from the animal kingdom is that only humans can employ a moral conscience (our yetzer ha tov) to supersede our base instincts (our yetzer hara)
We like to paint individuals––either in real life or in literature––as heroes or villains. Jewish wisdom teaches that we are neither good nor evil, but rather that both a yetzer hatov and a yetzer hara that exists within each and every one of us. When Dr. Henry Jekyll, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” figures out how to separate his primal inclination and his moral inclination into two separate beings, he creates a monster on the one hand, and a feeble wimp on the other. Living a purposeful and meaningful life requires that we are driven by a healthy balance between our moral and primal natures.
