The Evil Inclination Must Not Define Us

We are sprinting towards the Ten Days of Repentance, which will kick off with Rosh HaShannah only days away. Much of the liturgical “work” that we will perform during the High Holidays involves the examination of our conduct over the previous year, along with private and public acknowledgement and confession of our sins. On Yom Kippur alone, traditional Jewish liturgy mandates ten occasions when we recite privately and repeat publicly a litany of more than fifty transgressions. With each of these five hundred confessions, we smite our hearts with our fists to demonstrate our contrition.

What exactly is this choreographed confession supposed to achieve? The Talmudic Sages who came up with our liturgy conceived of the human psyche as comprised of two conflicting, fundamental tendencies: an urge to do what is right and an urge to do what is bad. They called our urge to be good The Good Inclination, and our urge to be bad The Evil Inclination. The Sages believed an individual has an obligation to resist the Evil Inclination and embrace the Good Inclination, and they regarded the struggle to do so as emblematic of what it meant to be human and to exercise free will. They devised our confessions during Yom Kippur as a means to assist us in defeating the Evil Inclination and the sway it exercises over our hearts.

The Sages were mystified by the power the Evil Inclination exerts over human beings. A Talmudic passage in Tractate Succah (52A) describes how, at the end of days when all humans will be judged, the Righteous and the Wicked will weep when taking stock of their experience with the Evil Inclination. The Righteous will perceive the Evil Inclination as a high mountain and will wonder how they ever were able to surmount such a peak; the Wicked will perceive the Evil Inclination as the thickness of a single hair and will wonder why they were incapable of stepping over such an inconsequential obstacle. The passage ends with the following zinger that reflects how mysterious the Sages found humanity’s urge to sin: “And so also The Holy One, Blessed be He, will wonder with them.”

If we are at the mercy of an almost overwhelming proclivity to sin, then is there any hope for our being able to resist it? Or is the Evil Inclination so powerful that our struggle to overcome it is doomed to fail?

Although the Talmud is replete with examples of people who wrestled with their Evil Inclination, only to come up short, the Sages did not regard the Evil Inclination as an insurmountable. One Talmudic tale (Tractate Kiddushin 81A) depicts Rav Amram the Pious seized by erotic fixation on a beautiful woman redeemed from captivity. Rav Amram, enflamed by illicit desire, lifts a ladder so heavy that ten men could not pick it up and starts up the ladder to proposition the redeemed captive. But half-way up the ladder, Rav Amram calls out, “Fire in the house of Rav Amram!” and his rabbinic colleagues come running to intercept him. Rav Amram then adjures the Evil Inclination to leave him, which it does in a column of fire.

The message of this story is clear: had Rav Amram not called out; had his rabbinic colleagues not intervened, he would have succumbed to his Evil Inclination. By calling out, Rav Amram recognized that even though he was unable at that moment to vanquish his Evil Inclination by himself, he was nevertheless obligated to struggle against it by summoning others in a position to help him.

My novel titled “The Evil Inclination,” explores the psychic and spiritual toll of failing to call out. The protagonist, Lev Livitski, is a devout Orthodox Jewish college student from Brooklyn who embarks on a secret love affair with a brazen, seductive Italian Catholic girl, Angela Pizatto. She pulls Lev from his prudish, abstinent reality into a realm where sex becomes their overwhelming fixation. But Lev is not equipped to contextualize his erotic obsession with Angela, and as it builds, he begins to lose himself, confusing his failure to dominate his Evil Inclination with a wholesale betrayal of his faith and his family. Because Lev fails to follow Rav Amram’s strategy of enlisting the support of his community, he comes to view the Evil Inclination as insurmountable—i.e. it becomes an excuse for his misconduct. In refusing to take responsibility for his missteps and admit to them, Lev’s transgressions come to define him.

Unlike Lev Livitiski, our High Holiday liturgy adopts Rav Amram’s approach. The confession of our misdeeds and our asking God’s forgiveness is the way we “call out” for assistance in defeating our worst impulses. When we publicly recite these offenses in our synagogues, surrounded by our community engaged in a similar project, we are summoning each other to intervene on our behalf. It is in its essence a communal effort, for we articulate our confessions in the plural: “For the sin that we have committed before You…”

Our Sages believed that only human beings—not God or celestial beings— have the capacity to sin. A corollary of that unique capacity is that only human beings have the ability to repent of their transgressions. Repentance requires that we take responsibility for our misdeeds first by acknowledging them and then by resolving not to repeat them. If we follow Rav Amram’s strategy of enlisting the support of our community, we have a chance of overcoming the Evil Inclination. But if we refuse to engage in this struggle, then we capitulate to our worst impulses, and we let the Evil Inclination define us.