And God Created Evil.

- Job - 

Hermetism

And God Created Evil
On the two times of evil

There is a verse in the Bible that arrests the attention more than any other in that book held sacred by so many:

"I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."

Isaiah 45:6-7

The verb the Hebrew uses here for the creation of evil is bará (ברא). The same one that opens Genesis, Bereshit bará Elohim, in the beginning God created, and the one the Bible almost always reserves for the creative action of the divinity: it does not apply it to human subjects. It is the verb with which God creates heaven and earth, and with which he creates man. And it is the one Isaiah places before evil. There lies the blade: to permit is one thing, to create is another. What is permitted comes from elsewhere; what is created is one's own work. God does not permit the darkness or evil: he places them in the world and answers for them. And what is thus created is named ra (רע), a word that, depending on context, may mean evil, but also harm, misfortune, or calamity.

It is worth pausing there, because everything depends on that word. Ra does not name a principle with an existence of its own, something that would be Evil in itself, capitalized, an entity that decides and from which the particular evils that befall someone would issue. Biblical Hebrew rarely uses it in that absolute sense: it appears almost always in opposition to something, and the parallelism of the verse confirms it: light against darkness, peace, fullness, that which is whole, against ra. What stands opposed to peace is not moral perversity: it is misfortune, calamity, what breaks apart what was whole. Isaiah asserts, then, God's sovereignty over that which the human being experiences as disaster.

The wound that translation tried to close

The question that arises for believers is this: if God is the creator of evil, is God benevolent? The question is better examined from a certain distance, with the curiosity of one who is trying to understand a point of view not his own. Today it is easy enough to find every version of the Bible verse by verse, and there one notices that some translations have softened the phrase by replacing the word evil with calamity, adversity, or affliction, in order to relieve the difficulty. They have real support, because ra covers that field. But the verb will not be attenuated: what stands there is bará ra, to create adversity. Call it calamity or call it evil, the text places it on God's side; it does not present it as something God inherits or tolerates.

The Christian tradition answered by another route. Augustine, inheriting from Plotinus, founder of Neoplatonism, defined moral evil as privatio boni: not a substance created alongside the others, but the corruption or disorder of something originally good. Evil for him is not a thing; it is the deterioration of a thing. But Augustine does not say that suffering is imaginary or that it has no effects; he develops his proposal precisely against the Manichaeism of his time, against the idea of two opposing principles. His solution is metaphysically powerful. But it comes at a price: it transforms the question. One no longer asks why a good God created evil, but why a good God makes a good creation that can be corrupted, can deteriorate, suffer, and produce suffering. The problem is not dissolved; it is displaced.

The kabbalistic reading that interests me here does not seek that displacement. Its point of departure is the blade of the verse just as it stands: if the divinity says that it creates evil, then evil is an element of the system, not a counterpower opposing it from outside. Evil has no separate kingdom. It is, in this reading, God himself acting in a way we do not yet understand.

A single principle

The verse should not be taken out of its context. In Isaiah 45, God addresses Cyrus, the Persian king, and the passage is written as Babylon falls under Persian rule. The Persians of that time already worshipped Ahura Mazda, and already conceived the world as divided between two forces: arta, the true order, and drug, the lie. Darius, the king who succeeded Cyrus a few decades later, had a prayer carved into the rock of Behistun asking Ahura Mazda for protection against the Lie, the enemy army, and drought. There the Lie has a proper name and acts on its own account: it is not something the god has made.

That is what is known of the history of that period. It is not yet the cosmic dualism of Ahura Mazda against Angra Mainyu, which the tradition would fix centuries later in Zoroastrianism, nor can it be proved that Isaiah was answering the Persians. But the contrast stands before us: where one tradition divides the world between two powers, Isaiah answers that nothing falls outside the sovereignty of YHVH (יהוה), neither light nor darkness, neither peace nor disaster. All of it is his work, and he answers for it.

And here the kabbalistic reading begins. The monotheism of the verse has no need to grant evil a sovereignty of its own. Nothing can set itself up as a second god before a single God. That is the decisive difference from strict dualism: not that dualism leaves evil eternally victorious, since dualist eschatologies also await a final renewal, but that, so long as evil has an independent origin, it remains other, irreducible, something that at most can be defeated but never reintegrated. Whereas that which proceeds from unity can, in the end, return to it. An evil God had not created would be an evil God could not undo. The discomfort of the verse is, read this way, its hidden promise.

Resistance and light

The heart of this reading has a deliberately physical image. Light reveals itself only against a resistance. It works like the light bulb: without a filament opposing the passage of the current, there is no incandescence, no visible light. Resistance is not the opposite of light; under certain conditions it is its condition. Kabbalah has a name for this force: Gevurah (גבורה), severity.

Kabbalah arranges the attributes through which the divine acts in the world in a diagram of three columns, the Tree of Life: on the right, expansion, the giving that gives without measure; on the left, Gevurah, contraction, that which limits, contains, and says this far; and in the center, the column that balances the two and holds them in relation. Neither side is worth anything alone: giving without limit spills over and is lost, limit without giving suffocates.

Gevurah restricts so that something may take form. The gesture of the filament that opposes the current and thereby turns it into light is at bottom the same as that of tzimtzum (צמצום), the first act of creation according to Kabbalah. Before there was a world, the infinite light filled everything, and there was no place where anything distinct could exist. The first gesture was not to expand but to withdraw: the Infinite contracts upon itself and leaves a void. Everything that exists, exists in that void. And what we call evil, in this reading, begins as just that: a limit.

From this follows a distinction that inverts the usual intuition. There can be a satanic good: a good that paralyzes, that accommodates, that keeps things as they are. The good of a life without friction, in which everything works and nothing presses, and where for that very reason the search dies down and the soul falls asleep without noticing. Against that good, a loss may be an evil that awakens, and without which change would have been impossible. What we call evil is sometimes the voltage that lights up a soul the good had put to sleep.

I write "sometimes," and the word matters. Because this image is fertile precisely up to the point where it ceases to be, and that limit must be marked before going on.

The adversary who makes us grow

The elephant in the room remains to be named, the figure that organizes evil: the Satan, ha-satan (השטן). And the name must be said with precision, because it does not mean what the popular imagination believes. Satan is not the fallen Lucifer of the Christian imaginary, nor is he, in the Hebrew tradition, a counterpower to the divinity or the lord of a hell. He is an adversary, an accuser, an angel beautiful as all angels are, with a very specific function within the heavenly court, subordinate to God. Subordinate does not mean benign: in many accounts he tempts, accuses, and receives permission to punish.

But there is a contemporary kabbalistic teaching that offers a surprising image, and I record it for its force:

Satan weeps when the soul strays, and smiles when it keeps to its path without letting itself be dragged away.

In that reading, the adversary does not seek our fall: he places the obstacle so that we may acquire the strength to overcome it. It is a bold reinterpretation, and I mark it as such: it does not claim to be the classical doctrine of Satan, which is considerably less kindly.

What I can maintain, within this reading and with the scars I carry, is the role of pain as an indicator. Pain marks where something in the soul has not finished being resolved; it works as a compass pointing to what asks for attention.

But something must be said about time, because without it the whole construction becomes obscene. The kabbalistic tradition teaches that what we call evil in the short term may reveal itself as good in the long term, and the reverse. Meaning does not dwell in the moment; it dwells afterward. The Zohar speaks of a hidden light, or ha-ganuz (אור הגנוז), which God concealed in creation and reserved for the righteous: it is not available now, it will be revealed when its time comes. No one has the right to pronounce it in advance. Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers and spent years in an Egyptian prison; only decades later, at the head of the kingdom with the famine upon them, could he say to them: "But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good" (Genesis 50:20). At the bottom of the pit that sentence did not exist. No one had the right to pronounce it for him.

Pain may therefore reveal a place that needs work, but it authorizes no one, save the one who passes through it, to declare now what it means. What ought to be clear in the future remains hidden in the present. The image of the adversary who makes us grow describes an open possibility, not an assured destiny: it says that something may be born of the blow, and that this is known only afterward. To hold the paradox without closing it is, in this tradition, a form of knowledge, and a way of dissolving evil.

The two times of evil

The most serious objection remains. If evil is the resistance without which, within this reading, something does not grow, how could evil be "overcome" without growth itself coming to a halt? A world without any resistance seems a world without voltage. It seems as though the system needed evil forever.

The answer the kabbalists propose distinguishes two times. There is a now in which evil operates as resistance: the obstacle that forms, the weight that builds muscle. But that now is not the last word, and here one must be exact, because it is easy to misunderstand: evil, in the end, does not become good. Cruelty does not turn retroactively good. What happens is something else: it ceases to be necessary.

And here the kabbalistic structure says, better than any image, what evil properly is. Gevurah, the left-hand column, is severity: divine and necessary so long as it remains joined to the central column, in the service of the whole. Evil, what the tradition calls Sitra Achra (סטרא אחרא), the "other side," is not a separate substance: it is that same column when it is cut off from unity and made absolute, made the center, claiming to be an end. Resistance that no longer sustains a work, but claims to sustain itself. And there lies its impossibility: a disconnected filament resists nothing. Resistance exists only while something passes through it.

The scaffolding says this better than any argument. When misfortune strikes the house, a scaffold is raised to hold it while the repair is made, and that scaffold does not become the house: once the work is finished, it is taken down, without what it helped to build disappearing with it. It need not be destroyed nor made eternal. It simply ceases to be needed. So it is with evil in this reading: it is not transfigured into the good it made possible, nor must it perpetuate itself to justify the work. Severity returns to the unity from which it had come loose; the construction finished, the resistance is superfluous, not because it has been defeated, but because there is no longer anything to hold up.

We are the castle we build out of our ruins

"God created evil" then ceases to function as an accusation and comes to name an operation: nothing, not even darkness, would fall outside unity, and only what belongs to unity can, in the end, be transformed.

For the believer, the phrase resolves a theological problem: it saves God's sovereignty without splitting the world in two. I cannot sign that part. But the operation stands without it, because what these traditions built over centuries was not only a defense of God: it was a way of inhabiting misfortune without being destroyed by it. To distinguish the severity that forms from the severity that has come loose. To recognize that meaning arrives late and not to demand it before its time. To know that the scaffold comes down.

Each of us lives a universe on a small scale. Tragedy comes and brings the scaffold with it: it is not chosen, it is not assembled, it appears. That scaffold is evil, calamity, misfortune, limitation. Upon it we make repairs to our fractured house, and for a time one has to live with that structure overhead, ugly and provisional, holding up something not yet visible. Afterward life goes on, the scaffold comes down, and what was raised while it stood remains. Then another tragedy arrives, and with it another scaffold. The work is never finished. And the scaffold, in coming down, leaves its mark on the wall: we are the castle we build out of our ruins, and the scars are the joints where one can see where the repair passed through. That is the rhythm. No one comes to dismantle the scaffold; it comes down when the one who repaired recognizes that it is no longer holding anything up in that part. And what the structure was holding ceases to be needed. That is how evil is overcome: not by defeating it, but by reintegrating it.

***

Bibliography

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions; Enchiridion; The City of God [on evil as privatio boni].

Plotinus. Enneads [I, 8: on the nature of evil].

Sabán, Mario J. Las estrategias del Satán [contemporary kabbalistic interpretation; source of the reading of the adversary, of the "satanic good," and of the holding of paradoxes].

The Zohar [Emor 88a, on or ha-ganuz, the hidden light].

Biblical quotations follow the King James Version, except Isaiah 45:6-7, in my own translation from the Hebrew.

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