Post by Rabbi Neil on Oct 20, 2023 23:15:26 GMT
Perhaps Anne Frank’s most famous words were words of hope, words that people often turn to in times of despair. “In spite of everything,” she wrote, “I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” If Anne Frank could hold onto hope even as millions of Jews were being murdered, the modern thinking is that we should be able to as well, however dark things become. But in her devastating book People Love Dead Jews, author Dr. Dara Horn describes Anne Frank as Everyone’s Second Favorite Dead Jew (their favorite being the one whose death started an entirely different religion two thousand years ago). Dr. Horn says that the idea that Anne Frank died with hope still in her heart is only an assumption, writing that “it is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: [she] wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”
Coming face to evil with evil is transformative, and most people in Western society are fortunate enough never to have actually had that encounter. It may have touched their lives, but they have rarely been in the presence of it. As a result, the way that they encounter evil is normally through a second-hand report - a Facebook post, a video that they see online, a newspaper report. What most people have is an experience about evil, not an experience of evil. In 2002, a young man murdered and dismembered one of my closest ever friends, photographed what he had done and was somehow able to proudly show his fellow prison inmates the photographs. Once I had moved out of the catatonic shock stage of grief, I wanted revenge. I wanted him to feel excruciating pain and I wanted to be the person who made him feel that pain. But when I first laid eyes on him in the courtroom, I felt different. He didn’t look evil. He didn’t carry himself as evil. Despite his lawyer’s argument that he wasn’t evil but was instead deeply scarred by childhood trauma, the court ruled that he was, in fact, fundamentally evil, and that he should never be allowed to be in society again. A full-life sentence was passed, meaning that he will never leave prison. It was, in my opinion, exactly the right verdict. Some evil must be removed from society for society to exist.
In his book The Open Society and its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper said that unlimited tolerance ultimately leads to the disappearance of tolerance. He explained that “if we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them." At first, he seems nervous of what he has written and insists that rational argument and public opinion should be the preferred method of combating intolerance, but then he concedes that the intolerant may not be “prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols…. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." He comes to a chilling but essential conclusion that challenges the assumptions of many Western liberals - that “there can be no human society without conflict” because “such a society would be a society not of friends but of ants." In other words, conflict is sometimes necessary to combat intolerance. The tolerant society has to be intolerant of intolerance, and if the intolerant in society are extreme in their intolerance, if they are violent in their intolerance, we may have to be extreme in response and even resort to violence to stop them because that is the only way to create a tolerant society.
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “The Banality of Evil” in 1963 to describe how it is possible for people to do evil things without themselves being evil. In her final book from 1977, The Life of the Mind, she wrote that “the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” I’m not sure that I agree. I think that most people who do evil believe that they are doing good. Their logic is so perverse that they justify the most heinous acts as being moral. In fact, I think a driving force in the perpetuation of evil is its justification as being moral or, even worse, as being Divinely approved. Hannah Arendt thought that we don’t address evil because it manifests in society as normal behavior while Dara Horn believes that we don’t address evil because we take the easier mental path by only trying to learn the lessons of evil having existed in the past instead of confronting evil today. I think there’s at least partial truth to what both say, but I also think that there’s more. At its core, I think there’s a religious element to the refusal to acknowledge evil in our society.
The Book of Psalms asks, “What is humanity that You are mindful of them, human beings that You pay attention to them? You have made them a little lower than divine.” (Ps. 8:5-6) How could we be monsters, how could we be evil, if we’re just a little lower than divine? Similarly, Rabbi Akiva says (Avot 3:14) “Beloved is humanity for we were created in the image of God. And still greater was God's love in that God gave to us the knowledge of our having been so created.” I think that many Jews today don’t want to confront evil or even acknowledge that it exists because of a misunderstanding of what it means for people to be created in God’s image. If we were created in the image of God, and if God is not evil, people assume that human beings cannot be evil. If we were created in the image of God and if God is not evil, then no matter what a person does, they will never be labelled as evil, unless we go beyond a superficial understanding of what it means to be created in the image of God. And if we never label anyone as evil, we quickly tolerate evil and then, as Popper says, we help to create an intolerant society. We help evil to spread.
So, what does it mean to have been created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image? Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the 18th century commentator, says that it means that “from a certain angle,” we “resemble the Power that is Master of all the powers.” Rav Kook, the 20th century thinker, says (For the Perplexed of the Generation 1:1) that the notion of being created b’tzelem Elohim is the foundation of Torah and that “the essential meaning of “the image" is the complete freedom we find in humanity, [which means] that we must have free will.” In other words, he says that the Divinity in every human being is in their ability to choose between good or evil, and not that every person is inherently good.
Sharon Wechter starts an online piece on this topic (https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/btzelem-elohim-gods-image) by saying that believing that everyone is created in the image of God means treating others with loving-kindness, respect, and dignity, but then she quotes Ohev Yisroel of Apta, who says something very different: “[Just as] Our body forms its likeness on the earth by the shadow it casts, so do we, by our activity, form the eternal God to our likeness: If we act well, we thereby form the right hand of God*. If we resist evil, we form the left hand of God. If we do not look at ugly things, we form God’s eyes. If we do not allow our ears to hear lies, we form God’s ears and so on. God asks this of us and we have always to be conscious of it, so that we can always do right and not sin.” (Jiri Langer, Nine Gates to the Chassidic Mysteries [New York: David McKay Company, 1961], p. 170). In this perspective, being created in the image of God means that what we do makes God evident in this world. The more goodness we create, the more God is made manifest in the world. Wechter urges us “to abandon the extremes” so that we can “cooperate to purposefully shape humanity in the image of God.” More than that, though, I think Ohev Yisroel is saying that being created in the image of God means that our actions become the image of God in this world. Wechter also adds Gunther Plaut’s commentary on this topic, explaining that there are three meanings to being created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. “First, this b'tzelem Elohim demonstrates our amazement at our special place in Creation, particularly our unique intellectual capacity. Second, this likeness describes our moral potential. We become truly godlike when we demonstrate through actions of mercy, love, and justice. Third, if each of us is like God, then all of us together are always in the act of forming an image of God (Plaut, The Torah, p. 35).”
What do all these commentaries tell us about evil and being created in the image of God? What they do not say is that evil does not exist. They do not tell us to ignore the presence of evil, they only tell us that we have a choice between doing good and doing evil. Indeed, if we choose to do evil, then we do not bring into reality the image of God in this world. Being created b’tzelem Elohim means that we have potential, that we have choice, that we can make God evident in this world through our actions. It means that we can resemble something greater than ourselves. Those who perform evil acts were created b’tzelem Elohim but chose not to do anything with it. But what about those who were born evil? Those people who are incapable of doing good? In Talmud (Shabbat 104a), we learn that the Sun’s rays will melt wax, but yet the same rays will harden clay… therefore to decent people, God’s Presence opens their hearts and they become humbled, but to evil people, God’s revelation only serves to stiffen their defiance and stubbornness. Talmud therefore understands that we are created in the image of God and simultaneously acknowledges that some people are evil. It shows that there is no contradiction between those two claims.
In the last two weeks, our community has been struggling with the horror of the events since October 7th. That initial attack was an unmitigated, inexcusable evil. We are obliged to see the terrorist who murders babies in their cribs as being created b’tzelem Elohim but that does not mean that we should excuse their evil or that we should even seek peace with them. It means that they had the potential to choose good but did not. Karl Popper would say that their violent intolerance and their clear refusal to engage in rational discourse means that for the sake of the future of society, their intolerance must be stamped out. But what Popper doesn’t discuss is whether one should respond to that violence with more violence when the aggressor has deliberately placed themselves amongst the civilian population which, again, is also obviously an act of evil. We will discuss the ethics of that situation tomorrow in Torah Study.
Evil exists. People do evil things, usually because they have convinced themselves that they are doing good. Observers who have never experienced evil first-hand will tend to minimize the enormity of evil because it is incomprehensible to them and, perhaps, because they don’t want to recognize that being created in the image of God means that they themselves have the capacity to do evil. They want to believe that they themselves could never perpetrate evil, despite the history of our people showing innumerable times that anyone is capable of evil. Only by truly recognizing evil and by responding appropriately to evil can we create a tolerant society.
There are two schools of thought as to how the Messianic Age comes about. One says that the arrival of the Messiah is not determined by events in this world (see, for example, Yevamot 62a, Avodah Zarah 5a, Niddah 13b). The other says that human society will become rotten to its core (see, for example, Sotah 9:15, Sanhedrin 97a) and that redemption will come only through the war between Gog and Magog. In times of war, when evil rears its head, liberal Jews often love to focus on the end goal of nation not lifting up sword against nation (Isaiah 2:4) but they don’t consider how that kind of world might be achieved. They assume that since the end goal is a time of no warfare that the means to get there must be the same, but Jewish tradition never says that. So, they call for a ceasefire as soon as there is a war, without considering the possibility that the war may be necessary to create a peaceful society. Of course, it is possible for the war to combat evil to become an evil itself – that is always possible. Some might say it is inevitable, especially in the way wars are fought today. They would say that such an evil would necessitate another response, which may in turn just lead to a chain of evil actions. I understand that thinking.
If we talk of evil being a possibility given being created in the image of God, then we must also talk of good. Evil exists and when it rears its head, we must always fight it in an appropriate way. But that cannot be the total of our morality. Fighting evil is one thing, but doing good is another. Elevating goodness, celebrating goodness, modelling goodness is just as important. But given that I said earlier that people who do evil always think that they’re doing good, how do we know if what we think is good is actually good? The prophet Micah has the answer: “God has showed you, o mortal, what is good. So, what does the Eternal One require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” May we all act justly, love mercy and learn to walk humbly with our God, and let us say, Amen.
*A strict translation is that we form the right-hand of the God-Human, which is essentially talking of the creation of union between us and God, not the creation of a literal God-Human.
Coming face to evil with evil is transformative, and most people in Western society are fortunate enough never to have actually had that encounter. It may have touched their lives, but they have rarely been in the presence of it. As a result, the way that they encounter evil is normally through a second-hand report - a Facebook post, a video that they see online, a newspaper report. What most people have is an experience about evil, not an experience of evil. In 2002, a young man murdered and dismembered one of my closest ever friends, photographed what he had done and was somehow able to proudly show his fellow prison inmates the photographs. Once I had moved out of the catatonic shock stage of grief, I wanted revenge. I wanted him to feel excruciating pain and I wanted to be the person who made him feel that pain. But when I first laid eyes on him in the courtroom, I felt different. He didn’t look evil. He didn’t carry himself as evil. Despite his lawyer’s argument that he wasn’t evil but was instead deeply scarred by childhood trauma, the court ruled that he was, in fact, fundamentally evil, and that he should never be allowed to be in society again. A full-life sentence was passed, meaning that he will never leave prison. It was, in my opinion, exactly the right verdict. Some evil must be removed from society for society to exist.
In his book The Open Society and its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper said that unlimited tolerance ultimately leads to the disappearance of tolerance. He explained that “if we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them." At first, he seems nervous of what he has written and insists that rational argument and public opinion should be the preferred method of combating intolerance, but then he concedes that the intolerant may not be “prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols…. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." He comes to a chilling but essential conclusion that challenges the assumptions of many Western liberals - that “there can be no human society without conflict” because “such a society would be a society not of friends but of ants." In other words, conflict is sometimes necessary to combat intolerance. The tolerant society has to be intolerant of intolerance, and if the intolerant in society are extreme in their intolerance, if they are violent in their intolerance, we may have to be extreme in response and even resort to violence to stop them because that is the only way to create a tolerant society.
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “The Banality of Evil” in 1963 to describe how it is possible for people to do evil things without themselves being evil. In her final book from 1977, The Life of the Mind, she wrote that “the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” I’m not sure that I agree. I think that most people who do evil believe that they are doing good. Their logic is so perverse that they justify the most heinous acts as being moral. In fact, I think a driving force in the perpetuation of evil is its justification as being moral or, even worse, as being Divinely approved. Hannah Arendt thought that we don’t address evil because it manifests in society as normal behavior while Dara Horn believes that we don’t address evil because we take the easier mental path by only trying to learn the lessons of evil having existed in the past instead of confronting evil today. I think there’s at least partial truth to what both say, but I also think that there’s more. At its core, I think there’s a religious element to the refusal to acknowledge evil in our society.
The Book of Psalms asks, “What is humanity that You are mindful of them, human beings that You pay attention to them? You have made them a little lower than divine.” (Ps. 8:5-6) How could we be monsters, how could we be evil, if we’re just a little lower than divine? Similarly, Rabbi Akiva says (Avot 3:14) “Beloved is humanity for we were created in the image of God. And still greater was God's love in that God gave to us the knowledge of our having been so created.” I think that many Jews today don’t want to confront evil or even acknowledge that it exists because of a misunderstanding of what it means for people to be created in God’s image. If we were created in the image of God, and if God is not evil, people assume that human beings cannot be evil. If we were created in the image of God and if God is not evil, then no matter what a person does, they will never be labelled as evil, unless we go beyond a superficial understanding of what it means to be created in the image of God. And if we never label anyone as evil, we quickly tolerate evil and then, as Popper says, we help to create an intolerant society. We help evil to spread.
So, what does it mean to have been created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image? Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the 18th century commentator, says that it means that “from a certain angle,” we “resemble the Power that is Master of all the powers.” Rav Kook, the 20th century thinker, says (For the Perplexed of the Generation 1:1) that the notion of being created b’tzelem Elohim is the foundation of Torah and that “the essential meaning of “the image" is the complete freedom we find in humanity, [which means] that we must have free will.” In other words, he says that the Divinity in every human being is in their ability to choose between good or evil, and not that every person is inherently good.
Sharon Wechter starts an online piece on this topic (https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/btzelem-elohim-gods-image) by saying that believing that everyone is created in the image of God means treating others with loving-kindness, respect, and dignity, but then she quotes Ohev Yisroel of Apta, who says something very different: “[Just as] Our body forms its likeness on the earth by the shadow it casts, so do we, by our activity, form the eternal God to our likeness: If we act well, we thereby form the right hand of God*. If we resist evil, we form the left hand of God. If we do not look at ugly things, we form God’s eyes. If we do not allow our ears to hear lies, we form God’s ears and so on. God asks this of us and we have always to be conscious of it, so that we can always do right and not sin.” (Jiri Langer, Nine Gates to the Chassidic Mysteries [New York: David McKay Company, 1961], p. 170). In this perspective, being created in the image of God means that what we do makes God evident in this world. The more goodness we create, the more God is made manifest in the world. Wechter urges us “to abandon the extremes” so that we can “cooperate to purposefully shape humanity in the image of God.” More than that, though, I think Ohev Yisroel is saying that being created in the image of God means that our actions become the image of God in this world. Wechter also adds Gunther Plaut’s commentary on this topic, explaining that there are three meanings to being created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. “First, this b'tzelem Elohim demonstrates our amazement at our special place in Creation, particularly our unique intellectual capacity. Second, this likeness describes our moral potential. We become truly godlike when we demonstrate through actions of mercy, love, and justice. Third, if each of us is like God, then all of us together are always in the act of forming an image of God (Plaut, The Torah, p. 35).”
What do all these commentaries tell us about evil and being created in the image of God? What they do not say is that evil does not exist. They do not tell us to ignore the presence of evil, they only tell us that we have a choice between doing good and doing evil. Indeed, if we choose to do evil, then we do not bring into reality the image of God in this world. Being created b’tzelem Elohim means that we have potential, that we have choice, that we can make God evident in this world through our actions. It means that we can resemble something greater than ourselves. Those who perform evil acts were created b’tzelem Elohim but chose not to do anything with it. But what about those who were born evil? Those people who are incapable of doing good? In Talmud (Shabbat 104a), we learn that the Sun’s rays will melt wax, but yet the same rays will harden clay… therefore to decent people, God’s Presence opens their hearts and they become humbled, but to evil people, God’s revelation only serves to stiffen their defiance and stubbornness. Talmud therefore understands that we are created in the image of God and simultaneously acknowledges that some people are evil. It shows that there is no contradiction between those two claims.
In the last two weeks, our community has been struggling with the horror of the events since October 7th. That initial attack was an unmitigated, inexcusable evil. We are obliged to see the terrorist who murders babies in their cribs as being created b’tzelem Elohim but that does not mean that we should excuse their evil or that we should even seek peace with them. It means that they had the potential to choose good but did not. Karl Popper would say that their violent intolerance and their clear refusal to engage in rational discourse means that for the sake of the future of society, their intolerance must be stamped out. But what Popper doesn’t discuss is whether one should respond to that violence with more violence when the aggressor has deliberately placed themselves amongst the civilian population which, again, is also obviously an act of evil. We will discuss the ethics of that situation tomorrow in Torah Study.
Evil exists. People do evil things, usually because they have convinced themselves that they are doing good. Observers who have never experienced evil first-hand will tend to minimize the enormity of evil because it is incomprehensible to them and, perhaps, because they don’t want to recognize that being created in the image of God means that they themselves have the capacity to do evil. They want to believe that they themselves could never perpetrate evil, despite the history of our people showing innumerable times that anyone is capable of evil. Only by truly recognizing evil and by responding appropriately to evil can we create a tolerant society.
There are two schools of thought as to how the Messianic Age comes about. One says that the arrival of the Messiah is not determined by events in this world (see, for example, Yevamot 62a, Avodah Zarah 5a, Niddah 13b). The other says that human society will become rotten to its core (see, for example, Sotah 9:15, Sanhedrin 97a) and that redemption will come only through the war between Gog and Magog. In times of war, when evil rears its head, liberal Jews often love to focus on the end goal of nation not lifting up sword against nation (Isaiah 2:4) but they don’t consider how that kind of world might be achieved. They assume that since the end goal is a time of no warfare that the means to get there must be the same, but Jewish tradition never says that. So, they call for a ceasefire as soon as there is a war, without considering the possibility that the war may be necessary to create a peaceful society. Of course, it is possible for the war to combat evil to become an evil itself – that is always possible. Some might say it is inevitable, especially in the way wars are fought today. They would say that such an evil would necessitate another response, which may in turn just lead to a chain of evil actions. I understand that thinking.
If we talk of evil being a possibility given being created in the image of God, then we must also talk of good. Evil exists and when it rears its head, we must always fight it in an appropriate way. But that cannot be the total of our morality. Fighting evil is one thing, but doing good is another. Elevating goodness, celebrating goodness, modelling goodness is just as important. But given that I said earlier that people who do evil always think that they’re doing good, how do we know if what we think is good is actually good? The prophet Micah has the answer: “God has showed you, o mortal, what is good. So, what does the Eternal One require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” May we all act justly, love mercy and learn to walk humbly with our God, and let us say, Amen.
*A strict translation is that we form the right-hand of the God-Human, which is essentially talking of the creation of union between us and God, not the creation of a literal God-Human.
