Ein Aya – Berachot 121a

Table of Contents

• The Talmud on 103 sections and the appearance of hallelujah
• The name Yah, “the throne of Yah,” and the world’s lack of wholeness
• The meaning of hallelujah as a joining of the name and praise
• The purpose of evils and the exalted perspective on reality
• “David did not say hallelujah until he saw the downfall of the wicked”
• Two layers of repair: changing perspective and changing reality
• Amalek and Israel as poles of evil and good
• The Throne of Glory as the interface between divinity and the worlds
• Transcendent and immanent presence, contraction not in the literal sense, and Hasidism
• Free choice, who generates evil, and reversing the causal axis
• Actual evil as a condition for repair: penitents, “awesome in His plot,” and Adam’s sin
• Perfection and perfecting, and labor as a need on high
• The book of Jonah, the gourd, and repentance as the goal
• Questions and answers: the “other side” and natural evil
• Questions about the time of creation and divine knowledge versus free choice

Summary

General overview

The lecture opens with the Talmudic statement that David recited 103 sections and did not say hallelujah until he saw the downfall of the wicked and said, “Let sins cease from the earth, and the wicked be no more… hallelujah,” and from this it brings proof that “Happy is the man” and “Why do the nations rage” are one psalm. Rabbi Kook explains that the name Yah points to a temporary mode of divine governance in an incomplete world in which evil is still present, and therefore it is difficult to connect praise with the divine name as long as wickedness still has room to exist; only through recognizing the purpose of evil and the downfall of the wicked does it become possible to say hallelujah as a joining of name and praise. From there a whole outlook is laid out in which evil and its eradication serve the purpose of an all-good reality, and two parallel layers of repair are examined: a change in human perspective alongside an actual change in reality, with broader discussion of Amalek, the Throne of Glory, contraction, free choice, the problem of evil, and the idea of “perfection” versus “perfecting,” and labor as a need on high.

The Talmud on 103 sections and the appearance of hallelujah

The Talmud states that David recited 103 sections of Psalms and did not say hallelujah until he saw the downfall of the wicked. The Talmud learns from the verse at the end of Psalm 104, “Let sins cease from the earth, and the wicked be no more… hallelujah,” that this is the first time hallelujah is said. The Talmud serves as proof that the psalm “Happy is the man” and the psalm “Why do the nations rage” are counted together as a single psalm.

The name Yah, “the throne of Yah,” and the world’s lack of wholeness

Rabbi Kook says that the name Yah is associated with the governance of the world as long as the world is not in its wholeness and deficiencies still rule within it and evil and wickedness have not yet disappeared from the earth. He cites the words of the Sages on the verse, “For a hand is on the throne of Yah,” that the name is not complete and the throne is not complete as long as there is wickedness in the world, in the context of “The Lord is at war with Amalek from generation to generation.” He points to the shortened form “throne” instead of “seat of honor,” and Yah instead of the full divine name, until the seed of Amalek will be blotted out, and then two letters will no longer suffice for the world.

The meaning of hallelujah as a joining of the name and praise

Rabbi Kook defines hallelujah as a joining of the praise of the Holy One, blessed be He, with His name, a combination of “praise” with Yah. He says it is very difficult to unite praise with the name as long as the world is conducted in a way that gives evil room to act destructively and commit violence and injustice, because His great name is holy and upright, and “the Lord is upright, my rock, and there is no injustice in Him.” He cites the words of the Sages in the chapter of Passover evenings that hallelujah is greater than all praises because it contains both name and praise at once.

The purpose of evils and the exalted perspective on reality

Rabbi Kook says that the whole difficulty exists “only before one raises one’s eyes to the distance and gains understanding of the purpose of evils,” and he argues that the good of reality is greater and more precious when evil exists and is then removed from the world than it would have been had evil never existed at all. He presents a perspective in which evil itself serves the completion of the good, because a world that becomes good after repair is greater than a world that was good from the outset. He says that from this exalted perspective it becomes justified to connect the name and praise even with the name Yah, which points to temporary governance.

“David did not say hallelujah until he saw the downfall of the wicked”

Rabbi Kook explains that this is why David did not say hallelujah until he saw the downfall of the wicked and came to understand that the existence of the wicked and their downfall are good for the world. He says that the existence of the wicked is better for the world than if there had been no wicked at all, because the evil in the world is prepared for a purpose that is entirely good. He explains that hallelujah is said through recognition of the role of the wicked and of the completion of the process through their downfall.

Two layers of repair: changing perspective and changing reality

The speaker presents two intertwined movements: one kind of repair in which the world itself seemingly does not change, but human perspective changes into an exalted outlook, and another repair in which evil is actually eradicated from the world and “the wicked are no more.” He uses the image of “her eyes were opened” in the case of Hagar, and Abraham’s seeing the ram, to describe a situation in which the thing was always there but had not been seen before. At the same time, he notes the assumption that in a repaired world there will be no transgressions, murder, or Sabbath desecration, so there is also a real change in reality, and the changed perspective also relates to the past and understands the purpose of evil as a “descent for the sake of ascent.”

Amalek and Israel as poles of evil and good

The speaker connects “For a hand is on the throne of Yah” to the rabbinic midrash on “Amalek was the first of the nations” as against “Israel is the first of His produce,” and presents Amalek as a purified pole of evil and Israel as a purified pole of good. He distinguishes between concrete appearances of nations, where there is always a mixture of good and evil, and a pure spiritual root of ideas, and mentions “the ministering power of Esau” as the spiritual force behind a nation. He explains that the destruction of Amalek is understood as the destruction of the evil pole so that the world will remain only with the good pole.

The Throne of Glory as the interface between divinity and the worlds

The speaker explains in kabbalistic terms that the Throne of Glory sits on the seam between the world of emanation and the separate worlds of creation, formation, and action, and presents emanation as a world of divinity in which the divine light is “with Him,” like a soul in a body. He describes the Throne of Glory as a place of “glory” in the sense of a place, and as the gateway of connection through which divinity appears in the lower worlds. He concludes that when the throne is not complete because evil is present in the world, the divine flow does not appear in its fullness, and when evil disappears, “the Throne of Glory opens wide.”

Transcendent and immanent presence, contraction not in the literal sense, and Hasidism

The speaker formulates the dispute as transcendence versus immanence, and as transcendence and immanent filling, and cites “there is no place empty of Him” along with the Hasidic saying, “Where is God found? Wherever people let Him in.” He describes an extreme Hasidic conception of “contraction not in the literal sense,” according to which no contraction really happened and everything is divinity, and connects this to a resemblance to Spinoza while distinguishing between “everything is existence” and “there is no independent existence and everything is divinity.” He argues that an extreme conception that erases the existence of the human being creates a logical problem, because there is still “someone” who is looking and speaking, and he rejects a model in which the human being becomes irrelevant, a mere puppet.

Free choice, who generates evil, and reversing the causal axis

The speaker sets up a tension: on one hand the human being chooses and does evil or good, and on the other hand “everything is in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He,” and he argues that here one must decide and not make do with two parallel perspectives. He proposes a model in which “no evil descends from above” and human evil comes from the human being, while the Holy One, blessed be He, grants the capacity to choose, and the capacity to choose necessarily includes the possibility of evil so that choosing good will have meaning. He concludes that actual evil is produced by human choice, and that the divine name and throne are not the cause of evil’s disappearance but the result: when there is evil, the throne is incomplete, and when the human being removes evil and repairs it, then His name and His throne become complete.

Actual evil as a condition for repair: penitents, “awesome in His plot,” and Adam’s sin

The speaker brings the rabbinic idea that in the place where penitents stand, even the completely righteous cannot stand, and explains that the advantage of the penitent comes from descent and ascent, which generate a greater completeness, and that “nothing is more whole than a broken heart” after it has been repaired. He presents a radical claim that not only is the possibility of evil necessary, but also the actual realization of evil, in order for there to be perfecting and repair and not just a static good state. He cites the midrash on “awesome in His plot,” in which Adam says, “You came upon me with a pretext,” and the comparison to a bill of divorce already sitting in the pocket, and presents a kabbalistic understanding in which the shattering and the repair are a built-in process that leads to a higher perfection.

Perfection and perfecting, and labor as a need on high

The speaker cites Rabbi Kook in Orot HaKodesh on “the form of complete perfection” as against “the form of unceasing perfecting” that comes from the cause of the primordial lack, and presents perfecting as a perfection in its own right and not just a means. He formulates the question of how the Holy One, blessed be He, who is perfect, can include within Himself the perfection of perfecting, and presents the direction of an answer: that the world and the human being were created so that the perfection of perfecting would appear through them. He connects this to “the secret of labor as a need on high” and formulates it by saying that in a certain sense the Holy One, blessed be He, “needs” the labor of repair in order for this perfection to be realized, in a way that echoes “the throne is not complete” as long as Amalek and wickedness still exist.

The book of Jonah, the gourd, and repentance as the goal

The speaker interprets the a fortiori argument of the gourd in Jonah to mean that Jonah “needs” the gourd and not merely has pity on it, and in parallel the Holy One, blessed be He, “needs” Nineveh and does not merely have pity on it. He explains that the need is for repentance and repair, not for the destruction of sinners, because the goal is the repair of evil, not its disappearance without repair. He connects this to the fact that the book of Jonah revolves around the possibility of repentance and the meaning of repair, and concludes that this repair is the way to complete the name and the throne.

Questions and answers: the “other side” and natural evil

A question is asked about concepts like the “other side,” “the ministering power of Esau and of Amalek,” and whether they indicate that evil descends from above, and the speaker answers that such a higher force is a potential force for evil, that the ability to do evil is good in ultimate purpose because it is a condition for choice, and only its actualization by the human being turns it into evil. Another question is asked about evil that does not depend on free choice, like earthquakes, and the speaker says this is a separate issue and offers possible directions: to view it as nature and the consequences of its laws, or to connect it to questions of reward and punishment, while refraining from any certain conclusion.

Questions about the time of creation and divine knowledge versus free choice

A question is asked why, according to labor as a need on high, the Holy One, blessed be He, was not “complete” before six thousand years ago, and the speaker suggests that perfection is not measured “moment by moment” but as an overall function across the axis of time, and also raises the problem of infinity and whether time exists prior to creation. A question is asked about divine knowledge and free choice and the possibility of “holding that there is no choice,” and the speaker replies that the fact is that there is choice, and that the objection concerning limitation of the Holy One, blessed be He, he leaves for further writing in the series.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, we’re at section 121. I’ll do a screen share. It’s still the same Talmudic passage we saw. The Talmud says: David recited a hundred and three sections—that is, psalms—and did not say “Hallelujah” until he saw the downfall of the wicked and said “Hallelujah,” as it is said: “Let sins cease from the earth, and the wicked be no more; bless the Lord, O my soul, Hallelujah.” So that appears in Psalm 104, and from here the Talmud proves that even though it’s said at the end of Psalm 104, it says here that David recited a hundred and three sections. That’s proof that the first psalm and the second psalm are one, right? “Happy is the man” and “Why do the nations rage?”—which was exactly our topic in the previous lecture. Here he wants to talk about this idea itself: why do we say “Hallelujah” only after “Let sins cease from the earth and the wicked be no more”? Only then is it possible to say “Hallelujah.”

About that, Rav Kook says as follows: The divine name is associated with the governance of the world as long as it has not yet reached perfection, and deficiencies still rule within it, and evil and wickedness have not yet vanished from the earth. Meaning, the name “Yah”—the short divine name, not the full name, not the Tetragrammaton, but only its first half—is associated with the governance of the world so long as it has not reached perfection, when it still contains deficiencies. That is why the name too is deficient, just as the world still has deficiency and evil and wickedness have not yet vanished from the earth. As the Sages said about the verse, “For a hand is on the throne of Yah”: the Name is not complete and the throne is not complete as long as wickedness exists in the world. Right, there are two abbreviated words here: “kes” instead of “kisei,” throne, and “Yah” instead of the full divine name. The Talmud says that the Name is not complete and the throne is not complete as long as Amalek exists. That verse appears in the context of Amalek: “For a hand is on the throne of Yah; the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” So as long as the war with Amalek is still underway, evil is still present in the world—or ruling in the world, if you like—then the throne is not complete, it is only “kes” and not “kisei,” and the divine name is not complete; it is only “Yah” instead of the full name. Until the seed of Amalek is blotted out, and it suffices for the world to use only two letters. Those two letters are both the “kes” and the “Yah.”

And it is very difficult to unite God’s praise with His name. In other words, the word “Hallelujah” is made up of two things. We’re very used to thinking of it as a single word. Right? We’re used to that from Psalms. But really these are two words. We praise “Yah.” So how does that become one word? We’re connecting two things here: the praise of the Holy One, blessed be He—“hallelu,” that He is being praised—with the name, with “Yah.” The word “Hallelujah” is really a joining of God’s praise with His name. So that is very hard to do as long as the world is conducted in such a way that evil has room to act, to do harm, to commit violence and injustice. For His great Name, may He be blessed, is holy and upright: “The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice.” There cannot be injustice in God’s name, and His action is upright and perfect. And the moment things are not upright and perfect—that is, there is evil here—then the Name cannot be complete.

Now when we join praise to His complete Name, which points to the future mode of governance that will be when the world is repaired under His kingship and the spirit of impurity will then be eradicated, and wickedness will vanish like smoke—then everyone will recognize and know that it is fitting to offer complete praise to His great Name. The word “Hallelujah,” in fact, will become not “Praise Yah,” but “Praise the Lord” in the full sense. By the way, if you look closely, the full divine name also appears inside the word “Hallelujah.” If you remove the two lameds, the full name is there too—just not in the right order. But anyway. Then everyone will recognize and know that it is fitting to offer complete praise to His great Name.

But in this world, according to the temporary mode of governance, seeing the terrible things that exist in the world—how can one connect the great Name with praise? Even if we say that most of reality is good and evil is only a minority—Rav Kook, optimistic as usual, meaning he looks at the world as though overall it is good, with patches of evil embedded here and there, but basically the world is good. Just a few days ago someone asked me on the website, someone remarked: obviously everything here in the world is bad. Every now and then you feel okay, but everything in the world is bad. People’s outlook on what happens in the world is of course a reflection of the person himself, I think, and someone who speaks like Rav Kook is apparently an optimistic soul. The good is the majority; most of reality is good and evil is little. But still one cannot connect the Name with the praise. Why? Because even if evil is little, it still exists. That means the very presence of evil indicates that God’s rule—or God’s manifestation—is still incomplete. So you cannot yet say “Hallelujah.”

And “Hallelujah,” as the Sages already explained in tractate Pesachim, is greater than all praises because it contains both Name and praise at once, as I said earlier. However, all this is only before we lift our eyes to the distance and gain understanding of the ultimate purpose of evils. Meaning, right now evil seems to us to be a problem, something that obstructs God’s appearance in the world. But Rav Kook says that evil itself is not really the issue; rather, it is only the way we currently perceive evil. In that perspective, before we look far ahead, when we look with our present, simple way of seeing, then indeed it seems that the Name is incomplete: there is evil here, something that should not have been here, and therefore it crowds out God, so to speak. God appears here only partially.

However, all this is only before we lift our eyes to the distance and understand the purpose of evils—what these evils came for, why they are here. The more exalted and precious the good of reality becomes by virtue of evil’s existing and then being eradicated from the world, more than if evil had never existed at all. Rav Kook is basically saying that evil itself is good. Why is it good? Because if the world had been perfect from the start, or good from the start, that would be less good than a world that is first bad and then repaired and made good. In that perspective, the existence of evil is actually the only way to make the world better. Because if there were no evil in the world, if everything were good, then that would actually be a lower good, an incomplete good. Evil that is repaired, a bad state that improves—that is a greater perfection.

And from this elevated perspective, this higher way of looking at things—not the simple perspective that sees evil as something that contradicts God, maybe something not even coming from Him but something that crowds Him out—from this elevated perspective we actually see that this too is a manifestation of God, and this too is directed by Him and intended to be here so that the world can be more complete. So from this elevated perspective it becomes justified to connect the Name and the praise even with the name “Yah,” which indicates temporary governance, this partial name—even to that we can attach the “hallelu,” the praise. Meaning, in the future it will not be “Praise the full Name” in place of “Hallelujah”; it will remain “Hallelujah.” Only in the future, when we see the long-range perspective, the higher perspective, we will understand that this partial name is not really a partial name. We will join praise to it and make it into a complete name—and I already mentioned that the full divine name really appears inside the word “Hallelujah.” You just have to know how to look in order to see it.

At a superficial glance we see some praise attached to a partial name. But that does not work; praise cannot be attached to a partial name. This great praise—as the Talmud in Pesachim says, the greatest of all praises—exists only when we understand that “Hallelujah” is not a joining of praise to a partial name, but a joining of praise to a full name. It is such a union that they become one: the vav and the heh of the Name even participate in the word “hallelu.” It’s all mixed together; it’s not “hallelu” and then afterward “Yah,” but the divine name is interwoven into “hallelu.”

Therefore David did not say “Hallelujah” until he saw the downfall of the wicked. Now he returns to the Talmud; all this was to explain the Talmud. And he came to understand that the existence of the wicked and their downfall is good for the world. Meaning, there have to be wicked people and they have to fall so that the world can become more complete. Therefore the existence of the wicked is actually better for the world than if there had never been wicked people at all. If so, we see that the evil in the world is destined—“prepared” here means destined—for an end that is entirely good. In the end, the existence of evil in the world is not some unfortunate necessary compromise. On the contrary: it could not have been otherwise. There had to be evil here so that we could repair it and make the world more complete.

Therefore, when he saw the downfall of the wicked, he said “Hallelujah.” That’s what the Talmud says above: when he says, “Let sins cease from the earth, and the wicked be no more; bless the Lord, O my soul, Hallelujah,” only there does “Hallelujah” appear for the first time. It appears for the first time only after he sees that sins cease from the earth and the wicked are no more—and he also understood what their role had been while they were still here. He sees that their role while they were still here was precisely that they would fall, and then in the end the world would be more complete.

There is a very interesting weaving together here of two perspectives, before I even begin to discuss it. In the end you can see, in several sentences he writes here, that the future repair the world is supposed to undergo is one in which, in fact, nothing changes at all. All that changes is our point of view. We move from a low-level view to what he calls here the elevated perspective, a higher way of looking, a way of looking at things at their root. And suddenly we see—as in “the eyes of both of them were opened,” when Abraham’s eyes were suddenly opened and he saw the ram caught in the thicket by its horns; he sees a well, in Hagar’s story: “And her eyes were opened and she saw a well of water.” On the simple level, what does it mean that her eyes were opened? It means it was always there. But she thought she was about to die of thirst because she didn’t see the well—not that a well was created for her in order to save her. You just have to know how to look. If you look correctly, you see that everything you have until now seen as bad was actually good.

So one thread in this weaving that I’m talking about is that in the world itself, apparently, nothing happens at all. What there is is only a metamorphosis in my way of seeing. I move from a low perspective to a higher one, and suddenly I see that there is a well of water here and there is a ram caught in the thicket. This was never about an altar on which to sacrifice Isaac. All of reality suddenly becomes clarified to me as something totally different. I had looked at it simply and thought there were problems in it, that God was not present here, that there was evil here, distress here. I was mistaken. The whole story is, in the end, only a mistaken perspective. When I look at it from the elevated perspective, as he calls it here, then I basically see that the world was always complete in some sense. On the contrary, the presence of evil is what causes it to be more complete. That is one strand.

But there is also the second strand, which of course he mentions no less, namely that at some stage evil is eradicated from the world. Eradicated from the world—“the wicked are no more,” “let sins cease from the earth and the wicked be no more.” So yes, you can’t ignore the fact that this is not only a change in one’s perspective on reality; something in reality itself also changes. Somehow what comes out is that there are two processes here, as I described them, two strands somehow woven together within the… He doesn’t describe it as two parts of the essay at all; this essay interweaves them. Sometimes he describes it this way, sometimes that way. Sometimes it is a change in the way a person looks, the elevated perspective, a rise to a higher vantage point. And sometimes it is an actual change in the world itself. These are two things that somehow happen simultaneously.

And when the world is perfected, then what happens is: first, I look at it differently; but it’s not that I look differently at the exact same reality. In the parable of the ram caught in the thicket or Hagar’s well of water, reality also changed. It may be that the perspective also causes reality itself to change, but clearly something in reality itself changes too. After all, there are things that are bad. Murder is bad. Desecration of the Sabbath is bad. Transgressions are bad things. The assumption here has to be that in the repaired world there will ultimately be no evil. There will be no transgressions. It’s not that I simply won’t see them, or will see them more empathetically. Rather, the empathetic view of reality will look back at the evil we passed through and repaired, and understand that its purpose was good.

So that is a changed perspective, but it is a perspective on the past. The world now standing before me is also different—not only my perspective has changed. The world itself is different, and then my perspective on the past—not on the current world—my perspective on the past understands the purpose of evil, that evil too was intended to make the world more complete. And that is the repaired world. In the repaired world, what comes out here is a kind of rewriting of history. Once the world is repaired, then the human being is repaired as well. And when the human being is repaired and looks from a higher vantage point, then even when he looks at the history we went through—I mean not only his personal history but the history of the whole world—the corruption and repair that perhaps begin with Adam’s sin, as in the books of the kabbalists: the great corruption begins with Adam’s sin, the great fall, from which point onward we are always occupied in repairing it, returning the world to some purer and more primordial state, to a more complete state, a fuller manifestation of God—from “kes” to “kisei,” from “Yah” to the full Name.

So the claim is that this perspective shows us that even the past we went through, the corruption that we have already repaired, was not really corruption from the outset. It was corruption and it did need repair, but its aim, its root, was positive. One could say: no evil comes down from above. Meaning, even when evil is created in the world, it is created for a good purpose. Nothing is created for a bad purpose. God does nothing for a bad purpose. There is evil in the world, but there is evil in the world because without it the world’s good, the world’s perfection, would not have been as complete as it could be.

So in the end this is a perspective not only on the present but more on the past. In the present the world itself is repaired, but when the world is repaired and the perspective is repaired, then even the past is colored a bit differently. We suddenly understand why there had to be descent for the sake of ascent. Okay, so those are Rav Kook’s words, and I want to talk a bit about this issue. It leads into all kinds of interesting theological questions.

“For a hand is on the throne of Yah”—and the throne and the Name are not complete until Amalek is destroyed. “The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation”—that’s the continuation of the same verse. In the background, of course, is the rabbinic midrash that contrasts “Amalek, first among nations” with “Israel, the first-fruits of His produce.” The Talmud says Israel is called “first” and Amalek is called “first.” Both are called “first,” and from the elevated perspective, from the more spiritual way of seeing reality, there was such a people, a concrete people called Amalek, who fought Israel. This is not some illusion, some fantasy, as people often try to portray it in homiletic literature—that Amalek is some psychological force, not something that really existed but merely some force in the soul we have to fight against. There are many derashot about this, but clearly Amalek was first of all also a people that existed in the world, and it is considered “the first of nations.”

In that sense, this contrast assumes that the nations are, in some sense, a manifestation of evil, while Israel is a manifestation of good. And of course nothing is ever pure. There is evil and there is good, broadly speaking, but within evil there is good and within good there is evil. But for that you need two ideal poles in which evil appears in its purity and good appears in its purity. And everything we encounter around us is some mixture of these two ideal poles. Those are the two archetypes, if you like, or two ideal figures, these ideal and pure forces—pure not in the sense of positive, but in the sense of distilled. So Amalek is the distilled pole of evil, and Israel is the distilled pole of good. And again, this does not mean the nation of Amalek and the nation of Israel as such, but rather some spiritual root behind them. There is evil in the people of Israel too, and there is good—I would think so at least—even in Amalek. “Descendants of Haman studied Torah in Bnei Brak.” So in their concrete appearances there is some mixture of evil and good. But at the root, the ministering force of Amalek, the ministering force of Esau—that rabbinic expression referring to some angelic entity expressing the… in the Hegelian conception, which Rav Kook is, I think, very close to—behind every nation there sits some collective soul, some idea, of which that nation is a concrete expression.

There is, in the world of ideas, an idea called Israel and an idea called Amalek, and that is what animates the body called concrete Amalek and the body called Israel. And these ideas are pure ideas: pure evil and pure good. In the world itself, of course, everything is some mixture; everything in the world, including the concrete Amalek and concrete Israel in the world, are different mixtures of these two poles. That is what creates the spectrum from ultimate good to ultimate evil. In between there are many things, and everything we know lies somewhere in the middle. We don’t really know, I think, pure evil and pure good. It’s hard even to imagine such a thing. These are two poles defined for the sake of completing the map. But in the concrete world, as with Platonic ideas—when we talk about horseness in the Platonic world of ideas, that is some ideal horse. Any concrete horse we see in front of us is never entirely identical with the ideal horse. There is some perfect ideal horse that appears in one way or another in the concrete horse, but in every concrete horse other things are mixed in too, crowding out the ideal horse and preventing it from appearing in its purity, in its completeness.

So likewise, the pure idea of evil and the pure idea of good—the pure ideas, or pure good and pure evil—do not truly appear in the world. But when we speak of Amalek and Israel from the elevated perspective, looking at their spiritual root and not as concrete phenomena in the world, then it is pure evil facing pure good. “Amalek, first among nations”—the pole from which all the nations, all the peoples, are fundamentally derived and conducted, the more negative side; and Israel is the more positive side. “Amalek, first among nations,” versus “Israel, the first-fruits of His produce,” God’s produce.

Now the throne is not complete until the seed of Amalek is blotted out, as he says: until evil is erased from the earth and its name is gone; or, the throne is not complete until Amalek is erased. As long as there is wickedness in the world, until the seed of Amalek is blotted out, as Rav Kook writes above. Because evil, in its metaphysical sense, and the concrete manifestations of that metaphysical evil, need to become ultimately good. How can they become ultimately good? When the evil pole that forms some component of every mixture we know in the world disappears. The moment the evil pole itself disappears, the entire world changes, because that second component in all the mixtures is no longer there. What remains is just one pole, the positive pole, and the whole world thereby becomes good. Once Amalek is annihilated.

That is why there is an obligation to destroy Amalek, every trace of Amalek—not to leave any remnant at all. We are meant to annihilate that pole completely. Then all its manifestations among the nations or among people or creatures in the world disappear, and things become wholly good.

Maybe one more sentence about this metaphor of throne and Name. In the kabbalistic world, in kabbalistic terminology, this “throne of Yah,” what is called here the throne of God or the throne of glory in kabbalistic language, basically sits at the seam between the three lower worlds—Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah—and the world of Atzilut above them. In the usual kabbalistic division, the world of Atzilut and above are worlds of divinity. Atzilut—the Leshem explains that Atzilut is called Atzilut because there the divine name is present within it the way a soul is in a body. Just as in a person, soul and body create one whole and you cannot separate soul from body—their union is what is called a human being. In the spiritual worlds, God appears in different forms. The higher the world, the more fully united it is with God. You can no longer really see two separate components there; they fuse into a single entity. This culminates in the world of Atzilut. The world of Atzilut is the lowest level of the worlds called divinity. Therefore it is called Atzilut because there the divine name, or the Infinite Light, is present there as a soul within a body.

Below the world of Atzilut are Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. These are called the separate worlds. The separate worlds are the creatures created in the world, whose relation to divinity is the subject of a huge ideological, kabbalistic, philosophical dispute that I’ll touch on in a moment—but they are called the separate worlds. At the upper edge of the world of Beriah sits what is called the throne of glory. The throne of glory is the spiritual place that is the highest part of the world of Beriah in the kabbalistic map. What sits on the throne of glory is the world above Beriah, namely Atzilut. That means God sits on this throne, and therefore it is called the throne of glory. “Glory” is a place. God’s glory is God’s place. “Where is the place of His glory, to revere Him?” The glory of something is the place where it is situated, the place it occupies, the place it creates.

So the throne of glory is basically God’s place within the lower worlds—Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. It is the throne on which He sits. Of course, the world of Atzilut sits on the throne of glory, which is the highest part of Beriah, and below it are Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah—which is us, our worlds, the worlds we know here, mainly Asiyah, but really Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah—the created worlds, God’s creations. That means that the throne of glory is actually the gateway or connection between divinity and the world. And when the throne is incomplete, what that means is that divinity does not appear fully, because it appears in the world through the throne. This is divinity’s place in our world, the throne of glory. So if it is not “kisei” but only “kes,” the gate is partially closed, not wide open; the flow through it is not complete; it is partly locked. That means that God does not appear in full in our world. Therefore the throne is incomplete so long as evil still exists in the world. So evil is basically sitting on the switch of the throne of glory: the more evil is present, the less open the throne of glory is, and once evil disappears, the throne of glory opens wide.

Now I mentioned the dispute about the relation between the three lower worlds and divinity, and this is what in kabbalistic language is called “surrounding” and “filling,” and in philosophical language is called transcendence and immanence. The question is: is God basically outside the created world—say Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah, our world, human beings, animals, inanimate objects? Is God in some sense around us, watching us, perhaps resting upon us in some way, empowering us to function, but not identified with us, not inside us? Or does He fill—“filling,” or immanent—meaning, He is within reality itself: “There is no place empty of Him.” Meaning, He is in everything—not only in every place, but in every thing that exists in reality.

People always ask: where is God? In the place where you let Him in—that famous Hasidic saying. In this context you really see the concept of “filling,” or perhaps there is some work here of turning divinity from “surrounding” to “filling,” bringing it inside. Hasidism often sees it this way: turning God from something looking at us from infinity, from outside, enveloping us from around, into something inside us, something present in the world itself. Then in the more extreme Hasidic approaches, it is really just a matter of opening your eyes and seeing that it was always so, He was always here. The notion that He is not here, that there are other things that are not Him—that is a kind of blindness, a non-elevated perspective, in Rav Kook’s language here.

So there really is in Hasidism a move parallel to what happens here in Rav Kook: the repair is to a great extent a repair in our way of seeing. God was always here and “there is none besides Him.” This is what is called “contraction not in the literal sense.” The relation between God and the worlds, particularly the lower worlds—Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah—begins with contraction, meaning the Infinite Light withdraws, some sort of vacuum is created, and within that vacuum the worlds are created—us, the whole world, and the creatures within it—within the space that the Infinite Light vacates. And why? Because if all were Infinite Light, then all would be God. God leaves no room for anything but Himself to exist. His presence is so dominant and powerful that nothing can exist where there is divinity, so He has to make room for other things to exist. That is contraction.

Now Hasidism—there is a very interesting letter from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, though it’s just an extreme formulation, and really this is a Hasidic notion in general—says that the contraction is not literal, and he brings there four levels of “not literal,” and argues in the most radical way. “Contraction not literal” means no contraction happened at all. From beginning to end there is nothing here. The whole world is null and void like dust; there is no real world. It is all only divinity. Divinity did not contract, did not withdraw anywhere. It is just a kind of blindness on our part; when we become refined, when our gaze becomes more refined, we will see that everything has always been divinity. The well and the ram caught in the thicket—that is, I think, the fitting metaphor for the process he describes. In the end, the whole process is one of how we look at things. The things themselves are all divinity. There is nothing besides Him. Nothing exists except God. In a certain sense that is a bit like Spinoza, the pantheism of Spinoza. Only the identification between God and reality can be made in two ways: either everything is God or everything is reality. Spinoza went more in the direction of “everything is reality, I am matter,” which is basically atheism in disguise. Hasidism goes toward idealism: the material world does not really exist. It is spirit in disguise, not matter in disguise. But both identify divinity with reality.

One says there is basically no God, because “God” is just our name for the totality of reality, according to Spinoza. According to Hasidism, there is no reality: everything is really God, and this material facade we see, the concrete reality we see, is only a lower mode of perception. Our gaze is not refined and we don’t see the essence of the matter. You can see the similarity to the process Rav Kook describes here in this passage in Ein Ayah. But he really plays on the two strands, as I said earlier, and I think this also has to do with Rav Kook’s own biography. It is well known that he was very close to Chabad, even from a Chabad family background, unlike Rabbi Soloveitchik who studied with a Chabad teacher and that created some Chabad affinity in him; Rav Kook, by contrast, came from a home connected to Chabad, and of course also had a Lithuanian background and a connection to Lithuanian Torah. Rav Kook is a combination of both, and this essay too, I think, weaves together two strands: that Hasidic strand that says all repair takes place only in our perspective—if we look at the world rightly, then it is good; when we see evil there, that’s us, not it. That is one perspective. But on the other hand, “let sins cease from the earth and the wicked be no more”—that means some repair also happens in the world. Amalek is supposed to disappear; it is not just an idea. There is concrete evil in the world. So in Rav Kook these two moves apparently—if I understand him correctly—happen in parallel. He doesn’t choose one. The Lithuanians grasp the second strand, Hasidim grasp the first, and Rav Kook claims that both are happening together in parallel channels.

Now the big question that arises, once we get into this—and all this has been just prefaces and explanation of the metaphors and the move—is: let’s spell it out plainly. What exactly is Rav Kook claiming here? Rav Kook is describing a situation where there is evil in the world, and therefore the divine presence is incomplete, and when the presence is complete there will be no evil in the world. Then it will be possible to say “Hallelujah,” and His name will be complete and He will appear here in full; “kes” will become “kisei,” the whole world of Atzilut will penetrate Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah, and there will be full divine presence. But there is something a bit problematic here.

What does it mean that God created evil? Because evil is something very concrete. It is easy to flee into homiletic regions, but evil is something concrete. There are evil people. There are evil phenomena. And of course there is suffering, even natural suffering—plagues, tsunamis, whatever, all kinds of things like that—the suffering of human beings or animals, doesn’t matter, the suffering of various creatures. So there is evil in the world, and it is not only a matter of perspective. Where does this evil come from? Does it come from God? Does it come from human beings? Where does it come from? Because we have to understand: if it comes from God, what does that mean? Does that mean evil is God’s handiwork and we are supposed to fix it? Or He made the evil and He also fixes it? How does this work? It is a bit strange to say that evil comes from God and the repair comes from us. That would mean He created the evil and we are responsible for the good. A bit odd.

But the other side of the coin seemingly doesn’t let us say what Rav Kook says here either. Because the other side is that evil is us, and therefore good is us too. So then what does this have to do with God’s manifestation? What exactly is God’s side in all this? We are supposed to repair ourselves, to turn from bad to better, and then everything will be fine. But how is that connected to God’s presence in the world? Did His withdrawal create evil, and His presence prevent evil? Does He make things better and worse, or do we? There is a certain duality here which, as part of a standard religious worldview, we have become very accustomed to living with somehow: we have free choice, and our decisions determine whether there will be evil or good here. But on the other hand, everything is in God’s hands and everything that happens in the world is done by Him, and “there is no blade of grass below that does not have a force above telling it: grow.” Everything that happens in the world is basically brought about by God or His agents in the spiritual realms.

So there is a dual perspective on everything that happens in the world: is it our doing or God’s doing? Here too, the move he describes can be read as those same two readings I spoke about earlier, I think—or at least in some sense—but again, these are two parallel readings. The question is how to read this here, and here I think you can no longer read it doubly. Here you have to decide. Because if we are talking about a process of repair—say of the human being, for the sake of argument; with evil in animals it’s harder to talk, if they have no choice or if it’s irrelevant. Let’s talk about human beings, it’s simpler there. Human beings choose evil—that’s evil. They choose good—that’s good. Repair means that a person repairs himself and turns from bad to good. That’s called repair of the world. In this perspective, repair is carried out by human beings. Human beings have to repent, improve, rise, better their actions and their ways, and so on.

The second perspective is that we are marionettes and God moves us around on the board. First He creates evil here, then He will create good here; He plays with the world in such a way that He turns it from bad to good. That’s a very problematic perspective, even though people sometimes speak that way, because then we are irrelevant. Then we are puppets, and the puppet-theater director—I don’t know whether to call him the director or the puppeteer—plays with us and creates evil and good here. So where are we in all this? What is our role in creating evil, and what is our task in doing good? Why are we punished or not punished? This whole perspective, which focuses only on God bringing about everything—He alone truly exists here and everything else is just our perspective—turns us into something irrelevant.

I’ll say more than that: even in the metaphysical sense, the perspective I described earlier in the name of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, according to which only divinity exists in the world and everything else is just our perspective, is not philosophically logically consistent. What do you mean, our perspective? Who is this “we”? Who are we, who are looking here and can look at it either as though there is evil here or as though there is good here, as though there is divinity here or not? We too are Him, according to that view. After all, we too are creatures in the world, we too were created. So if you take this thesis of “contraction not literal” all the way, so that everything is divinity, basically the transcendent and the immanent are one—everything is immanent—and in truth that means there is no immanence at all, because everything is infinite. Nothing happened. Infinity never withdrew; it is always here filling the whole space. So who is the deluded creature? Who is the creature who needs to correct his perspective from a low one to a high one, who needs to notice that divinity is here or fail to notice it when he is in a lower state? There has to be someone to whom this whole business is addressed. If you deny the existence of that someone and say he too is divinity, then the whole game turns into an empty game.

So what, God is playing marbles with Himself, and the marbles are also Himself? What is the meaning of that? I think to speak about “contraction not literal” literally is nonsense. You cannot talk about such a thing, because who is speaking? Who am I? When I think about these things—whether contraction is literal or not literal—that means: I think, therefore I am, Descartes. If I think, then there is someone thinking—that is me. Now the content of my thoughts can be good or bad, higher or lower, seeing evil, seeing divinity, seeing good—these are all modes of my perspective. But first of all there has to be someone whose modes of perspective these are. Someone who is looking.

You cannot deny the existence of that someone—not only his existence, I’m talking about metaphysics, about sheer existence. And now I’m also talking about his role in the events of the world. Do I have no role in this evil? God created it, so He created evil, He will fix it, and it is all really His game? I am basically just the marionette, He moves me around the board and thus evil happens or good happens? Then I have no significance. What is punishment? What is reward? What are commandments? It’s all just some game. In deterministic conceptions one often ends up looking at it that way. When things are deterministic, then the commandments and transgressions and everything are just a game. We have the illusion of choice, but really we have no choice at all; we are only commanded to do or not do as part of the deterministic mechanism that moves us to do or not do. But it’s all God’s game.

Only, and ironically, in a deterministic world there is only God. We usually associate determinism with materialism, with the idea that there is no God, everything is physics. But in spiritual-theological determinism, where God is really turning all the wheels, where man has no possibility of taking part because everything is God’s handiwork, that determinism thinks there is no world, only God—unlike physical determinism. You see how these two threads I’ve been describing keep coming back all along. There are two threads running in parallel, but they are opposing worldviews. And here I think you can’t play with two threads, because either God really does everything or we do evil and good. These are two perspectives that exclude one another. You cannot say: no, no, it depends how you look at it—there is one perspective in which God does everything and another in which I do everything. There is no such thing, unless you say that I am He, and then once again we are back to the nonsense of “contraction not literal.”

But if I exist—if I am some entity to whom claims are addressed, who is commanded—then what does it mean? If I did it, then I am responsible for the evil, not God. I decided, I acted, and therefore I also have to bear the consequences; the responsibility is mine. If He did it, then let Him bear the consequences—what does He want from me? So this can’t be solved by saying, okay, there are two modes of perspective, choose whichever one you like. Here we have to decide which perspective is correct and which is not.

And here the accepted assumption really is, as the Sages say, that no evil comes down from above. Meaning, the evil in the world does not come from above, it comes from us. And how is it generated in the world? After all, supposedly—or at least this is the accepted view—there cannot be things in the world whose root is not above; how would they exist? Everything that exists in the world must have some spiritual root, some source of power that animates it, gives it strength, directs it. So the claim is that evil truly has no spiritual root. By the way, again in the kabbalistic world, demons are creatures without a root. They are creatures of evil. In kabbalistic thought demons are creatures without a root, meaning they have no root in the world of Atzilut. They are creatures that exist in the lower worlds and have no part belonging above. Rootless creatures. What does that signify? I think what it signifies is a kind of solution to the problem of evil.

Some say all of Kabbalah was created to solve the problem of evil. How can evil come down from above, contrary to what the Sages say, as I cited earlier? After all, everything that exists here exists by the power of God. If it exists by God’s power, then the evil here also exists by His power. How can that be? Is He responsible for evil? He is supposedly perfect good, wholly good—how could that come from Him?

It seems to me that translated into philosophical language, the model called for here is this: evil—I’m leaving natural evil aside for the moment; I’m talking about human evil. Natural evil means suffering, plagues as I said earlier, diseases, earthquakes, things like that. I’m setting that aside. I’m talking at the moment about human evil, evil brought about by people. We received the capacity to choose from God, completely. The capacity to choose obviously allows us to go right or go left—that’s what choosing means. We have two options: good or evil, and we can decide. Or several options, but yes, there have to be several options if we’re to be able to choose.

It is impossible for God to give us the capacity to choose while all the options among which we choose are only good. If it’s only good, then that’s not choice; we are compelled to do the good. If we are meant to choose the good, that means we must also receive the option of doing evil. Without the option of doing evil, there is no value in our having chosen the good—we did not choose it. So once God creates or implants in us the capacity to choose, then of course evil will potentially come into being. Meaning, He effectively created evil, because the possibility of choice means the possibility of doing evil and not only doing good. But on the other hand, only this gives meaning to our choice to do good. If there were no option to choose evil, what importance or value would there be in our doing good?

And so it follows that no evil comes down from above. Evil is a product of our own actions. When we choose evil, evil is created. When we choose good, good is created too, by the way. A natural event is not good either—it is neither good nor bad, it is neutral. Good or evil can apply only to an act that results from choice. Usually people think only humans have that, I don’t know, but for human beings at least, choice. What is God’s role in the world? The ability to choose. The contraction God performed, His withdrawal from the world, is the granting of the possibility of choice. Because if He were present here, He would determine everything. There would be nothing besides Him. It would all be Him. Then of course everything would be good—but of course everything would also be meaningless. Because if everything were good and there were no possibility of doing evil, then what would be the point of the whole game?

The whole meaning of the good draws from the potential possibility, at least, of doing evil. And when you give billions of people the potential possibility to do evil, then here and there evil will actually get done. You can’t stay only with the potential to do evil. You can theoretically, but it doesn’t happen. The concrete possibility of doing evil will probably in some cases be realized. And from that comes evil. So evil is our handiwork; it has nothing to do with God. People ask: where was He in the Holocaust? I don’t know where He was in the Holocaust, but the Holocaust was carried out by the Nazis, not by God. When they decided to do evil, they did evil. The power to decide to do evil they received from God. So He is not entirely off the hook in that sense. One can still ask why He gave them that power in such a catastrophic situation, why He did not intervene, why He did not take that power away. Fine. Those are other theological questions. But in principle He does not actually generate evil. Evil comes from us.

And good too comes from us. What He does is grant the very capacity to do evil or to do good. That comes from Him. And what that means is that what comes down from above is wholly good. What is wholly good? The possibility of choice. The possibility of choice is indeed the possibility of choosing between evil and good, but the possibility of choice itself is entirely good. Because without the option to choose evil, our choosing good would have no meaning. Therefore the world could not have been complete without our having the ability to choose, because only then can it be good. But what can you do? The possibility of choice sometimes also produces actual choice of evil.

And so it turns out that evil comes from us and evil is a necessary evil, and indeed only because of it can the world be regarded as good. Quite apart from the proportions, whether most is good and little is evil as Rav Kook writes here—his optimism or not—that can be debated. There’s the discussion of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, after all: “It would have been preferable for man not to have been created than to have been created.” I’m not sure that’s related, but maybe. In any case, regardless of proportions, God’s act is to give us choice, and that is wholly good. The use we make of the power to choose is what creates good and creates evil. But this whole structure, the whole complex—the existence of a crossroads and the possibility of turning right or left at that crossroads—is all good. There is nothing bad in it. It is wholly good. Because without the crossroads there would be no good.

True, as a consequence, when there is a crossroads there will be people who go left—or right. The metaphor of left for evil and right for good already has connotations. But there are those who go toward evil and not toward good, and that is how evil is created. This connects to what Rav Kook writes here, that in the end evil is a servant of good. Without evil, good has no meaning. But he says more than that. Not only does the possibility of evil serve the good, but actual evil serves the good. Why? Because he argues—and I discussed this in one of the previous passages, I don’t even remember whether it was on Zoom or before that, I think before that—that, for example, we know from the Sages that a penitent is greater than a perfectly righteous person. “Where penitents stand, even the perfectly righteous cannot stand.” The Talmud says a penitent is preferable to the perfectly righteous. Why is that? A penitent, after correcting all his ways and becoming perfect, has become perfectly righteous. That’s as far as one can go. How could there be something beyond a perfectly righteous person? What could be better than that?

The claim is that a penitent has gone through a path of descent and ascent. And one who passes through descent and ascent, when he rises to the same level where the perfectly righteous person always stood, is in a better spiritual state. Because a vessel that was broken and repaired is a more complete vessel. There is nothing more complete than a broken heart. A broken heart that was repaired afterward—not a broken heart still broken, but a heart broken and then repaired—there is nothing more complete than that. Even compared to a heart that was always whole, it is better. Because a heart that was broken and repaired contains some value of action, of progress, of repair. And that is the significance of the existence of evil. And now I mean concrete evil, not the possibility of doing evil, not the fact that we have the option to choose between evil and good—which I already explained earlier is wholly good, because without the option to choose evil, choosing good has no meaning.

Now Rav Kook makes a more radical claim. Actual choice of evil also has positive value. Not only the option to choose evil, but actual choice of evil. Why? Because without evil there would be no process of repair. Suppose there were a situation where one could choose between good and evil, but all of us always chose good. The world would still be problematic. True, the good would have meaning because there was an option to do evil, only we chose good. For giving meaning to good, the option to do evil is enough; there is no need to do evil in practice. Okay? Once we have an option of doing evil, if we do not choose it but instead choose good, then that choice certainly has value as good, because we could have chosen evil and did not, we chose good. But there is no value of progress or repair here. There is value to repair not only because it brings me to a more complete state; there is value in the very act of repair. Repair is not merely a means, such that after I repair things the result is repaired and therefore good. No, repair has value in itself, not only as the route to a repaired condition.

That is the whole move of the kabbalists, which I certainly mentioned one of the previous times, I think—though I don’t remember anymore—the “awesome plotter” idea. There is that midrash where God decrees death upon Adam, and Adam says to Him: You are coming against me with a pretext. Like a man whose wife spoiled his dish, and he pulls a bill of divorce from his pocket, with two witnesses, and gives it to her and divorces her. Then she says to him: you are coming against me with a pretext; the divorce document with the two witnesses was already in your pocket before you tasted the dish. Meaning, are you telling me that you’re divorcing me because of the dish? You prepared this in advance. The dish is only a pretext. That is what Adam says to God: after all, in the Torah that preceded the world, it already says, “When a man dies in a tent”—man dies. So why are You telling me it’s because of my sin? That was Your plan all along.

And indeed, in this kabbalistic view, Adam’s sin—the basic corruption that all of us are trying to repair—according to certain commentators was a deterministic sin. Meaning, it was not even by his own choice, because he did not yet know good and evil. They became “knowers of good and evil” only after the sin, so how did he choose to do evil? Rather, it was a rigged game, essentially, a pretext. God broke something here so that this breaking would become a long process of repair and then the world would reach its fullness. Why is that good? Because a vessel that was broken and repaired is more complete than a vessel that was always intact. That is the principle Rav Kook writes here. It means that not only is the possibility of doing evil necessary in order for our actions to receive the significance of good, but actual evil is necessary. There need to be wicked people who choose evil—not merely people who can choose evil, not merely an option of being wicked. The wicked themselves are necessary. Because only when “the wicked are no more” and “sins cease from the earth”—sins and not sinners, if you want; it doesn’t matter—but once sin disappears from the earth, then the world is truly repaired. Because then it is a world that was broken and repaired, not a world that was always whole.

A world that was always whole doesn’t need to be created. God was complete and remained complete; He doesn’t need the world for that. He needs the world so that there will be some sort of corruption that passes through a process of repair. And if I complete the process, I return to Rav Kook’s starting point: the Name is not complete as long as Amalek is here. The point is ultimately that Amalek is a creature that had to appear here, evil had to appear here in actuality—not merely as a Platonic theoretical possibility, but as a possibility that gets realized—so that reality can undergo some repair. And after that repair, it will be more repaired. What this means is that the process of breaking and repair is not a process generated by God; it is a process generated by human beings. Whether God’s Name is more complete or less complete and whether the throne is more complete or less complete—that is not the cause of evil’s existing and then disappearing. It works the other way around. Once there is evil, the throne is incomplete. When evil disappears, the throne will be complete.

We are not asking God: come back and appear here so that evil will disappear. We have to eliminate evil, and then God may appear. This is not “don’t say the day will come”—bring the day. Don’t ask God to appear here and deal with evil. Evil comes from you—from us, all of us—and our task is to repair it. And if we repair it, then His Name and throne will be complete and He truly will be with us, present in the world. But He will be present in the world through us. Not that He will be present in the world and then automatically evil will vanish and good will flourish and everything will be wonderful. Such a thing has no value. Then God turned evil into good, not us. And I already said, you have to choose here. There are not two perspectives that can dwell together; there is no such thing. Either we carry out this process or He carries out this process. There is no meaning if He carries it out.

And if we carry it out, then contrary to the simple perspective in which God’s presence allows more or less evil, or makes the world better or worse, the claim seems to me to be the opposite. The claim is that when the world is worse, there is less room for God’s presence—it does not allow God to be present. If the world is better, then there is more enabling of God’s presence. That is, the causal direction is actually reversed.

Maybe, if you’ll allow me a few more minutes, I’ll show you another passage from Rav Kook that basically says this. It’s the famous passage about perfection and perfecting. I’m bringing it here from an article I wrote that quotes it. Rav Kook in Orot HaKodesh, part two, raises a kind of philosophical difficulty that sounds a bit artificial, I don’t know, some kind of pilpul, philosophical pilpul. But when you think about it, I think it has a lot of depth. There in Orot HaKodesh—I won’t read the whole thing—but he describes exactly what he discussed in our passage. He says, look at the highlighted sentence: things are always filled with greater and more exalted value until the form of complete perfection and the form of unceasing perfecting that comes from the primordial deficiency become equal together. Rav Kook here speaks about perfection versus perfecting. Perfection is a static condition: a perfect world is a perfected world. A world that is in process of perfecting is a world that is becoming better and better.

Now his claim is that there is value to the process of perfecting, exactly as we saw in the passage here. There is value to perfecting in itself, not only as a means of arriving at perfection. We do not have to perfect ourselves only so that at the end of the process we will be perfect—not only that. Rather, the process of perfecting itself has some value. Therefore he says: “unceasing perfecting that comes from the primordial deficiency.” There has to be deficiency so that one can perfect. Then in one of the later sections—this one here, again, I won’t read it, I’ll just state it briefly—Rav Kook asks a kind of philosophical question. He says: if perfecting itself is one of the perfections, then how can God, who is perfect, possess that perfection? In order to perfect yourself, you have to be lacking and then fill the lack or repair it. But God is perfect; He has no deficiencies. So He cannot perfect Himself. But perfecting is not merely a means of reaching perfection; it is itself a perfection. One of the perfections is the state of perfecting oneself, not only being a tool for arriving at a perfect state. Well then, God cannot have that perfection, because He is perfect; He cannot perfect Himself. That is the question.

And the gist of his answer—and there is a lot to say about it; I once wrote an article about it in philosophical analysis that connects to physics and differential calculus, there is a lot there and one can look at it in very interesting ways—but in a nutshell his claim is that for the sake of that, we were created. God perfects Himself through us. What he calls “service for a higher need”—an older expression, but he uses it here too. The claim is basically that God needs us. He needs us because we are the ones who can experience deficiency or be in a deficient state and then perfect ourselves, improve ourselves. God cannot. He is always perfect, and therefore cannot improve. So that He can also possess this perfection of improvement, of perfecting, we were created.

Then there is deficiency in the world and it is incumbent upon us to repair it. The whole process of creation is explained this way: there is some break here which it is our task to repair, and the whole story is in order to complete God, who in a certain sense is lacking. He lacks the possibility, or lacks the ability—He cannot perfect Himself. He cannot perfect Himself because He has no deficiency, and in order to perfect oneself one needs deficiency. For that purpose we were created, or this deficient world was created, and we are meant to repair it. Then it turns out that we, as expressions of God’s perfection, manage to bring Him also this perfection of perfecting. And I think this is exactly what stands behind what he writes in our passage. In our passage he says that evil is required so that we can repair it, and then the world can be more complete, because only a world that was broken and repaired is truly complete.

And when God wants—now I’m saying more; in that passage in Orot HaKodesh he says more than this—thus God too becomes truly complete. Not only the world. In a way that some would perhaps say may not even be permissible to say, the world basically makes God complete. Without us He would not be complete. And that is what is written also in the passage we discussed, that the throne is not complete as long as Amalek is here. As long as we have not repaired evil in the world, God is not complete. But then this means not only that His manifestation in the world is incomplete, as seems from the verse and from the earlier passage of Rav Kook, but that God Himself is incomplete. Something is missing. It is almost a contradiction in terms—something missing in God. But that lack is built in. Because one who is perfect cannot perfect himself. It is a lack from which a perfect being cannot escape—unless He creates deficient beings who, by His power, somehow manage to perfect themselves and thereby complete in Him as well this aspect of the capacity to perfect. And through that He Himself becomes complete too. This is what the earlier writers called “the secret of service for a higher need.” It is a secret because one should not say such things—that God needs us and is lacking—statements that sound, well, intolerable. But in truth this is the secret of service for a higher need. Our service serves God’s need. Not only do we need Him; He needs us. That is why He created us.

Once, in this context—and with this I’ll maybe finish—I brought the a fortiori argument of the gourd in Jonah. God says to Jonah: “Are you so greatly grieved over the gourd?” And he says, “Yes, I am greatly grieved, unto death.” Meaning: “You had pity on the gourd, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow, and shall I not have pity on Nineveh, that great city…” The obvious question is always: Jonah did not pity the gourd. He needed it. He had pity on himself. So what kind of a fortiori argument is this? God says to Jonah, you pitied the gourd and I should not pity Nineveh? This is a plant and that is a whole city. What kind of argument is that? Jonah did not pity the gourd; Jonah needed it.

There are two ways to explain this, but one of them is that there is a mistake in the question. God also needs Nineveh. He does not merely pity Nineveh. He needs it. If He did not need it, He would not have created it. And what does He need in Nineveh? He needs exactly what is involved in the mission for which He sends Jonah to Nineveh. What does that mission do? Nineveh is a sinful city before God, and Jonah is sent to cause them to repent. Why? Because repairing evil is precisely the reason God created us and needs us. So if we do not repent, what would be the point of destroying us? How would that help Him? What would it help to destroy us? He needs this evil to be repaired, not to disappear. If that evil simply disappears, that is worth nothing. Therefore God says to Jonah: you had pity on the gourd. What does that mean? You need the gourd, you want it for yourself. I want Nineveh for Myself. And that is an excellent a fortiori argument. It is not that Jonah needs the gourd and God merely pities Nineveh. Both are concerned for what they need. And therefore they are on the same plane.

And He needs Nineveh precisely because of the repentance they do, or the repair they do. That is why we read Jonah on Yom Kippur. The whole book of Jonah revolves around this very question: can sin be repaired? Is repentance possible? Jonah protests against it, and God sends him to Nineveh and forces him to get there, and in the end causes them truly to repent. And that is how God’s throne and Name become complete.

Okay, I’ll stop here. I’ll return control to the people—with all the connotations those words have these days. So I’ve given you control of the microphones. If anyone wants to ask something or comment, now’s the time. That’s it? Avi, I have a question.