Q&A: Evil in the World
Evil in the World
Question
The Rabbi, in the book Man Is Like Grass, comments in passing on the two goats, saying that evil is not truly real, and that the analytic way of thinking is the perception of evil. And if it had a fitting basis in reality, there would be room for a dualistic conception of divinity. I tried to think whether this fits with ordinary things that we are used to seeing as evil—for example, someone who traffics in helpless people for his own financial benefit. Is that too an illusory evil?
Answer
First, this is a bit homiletical. I don’t think that this is exactly what the Torah means, and even Nachmanides, who speaks about the Greek and his students who denied what was not within their reason, does not mean precisely this.
Second, when I say that evil is illusory, I do not mean that it is not really evil. I mean that its root lies in an illusion. Analyticity is a way of thinking that exists among people, but it is based on an illusion, and that is what causes people to reach bad conclusions. Likewise, people who do evil deeds are genuinely evil. But what brings them to that is a kind of unreal illusion. In order to become a criminal, a person has to fool himself a little.