The Poem of Evil

The parashah This week's reading is called Shlaj – Send. The main story is about twelve spies whom Moshe decides to send to the Land of Israel to see it and analyze the best place to enter. Moshe asks them to observe the cities, the people, the land itself, its produce, and its qualities.

Ten of the twelve spies return with a fantastic report about the land itself, saying that the people living there are giants and powerful. They conclude that it is impossible to enter, which generates tremendous despair among the Jewish people who clamor to return to Egypt. The other two spies contradict them, saying that it can certainly be conquered. The story ends with the death of the ten spies and the decree that they wander for forty years in the desert, so that all those who had said they did not want to enter the Land of Israel would die.

Throughout this story, the Torah mentions the Hebrew word several times. rá, "Bad" or "evil," referring to the ten spies, their attitudes, their slander of the land and of God Himself. It's not a word that is repeated so often in the rest of the Torah... Clearly, the Torah is showing us a picture, so to speak, of something bad. However, one might ask: were these ten spies, at the time they were selected to carry out the mission, tzaddikim, righteous (see Rashi Numbers 13:3). How can it be that tzaddikim Give a report like that? And what if they weren't really tzaddikim, How could Moshe not have noticed?

To answer this question, I'd like to share a poem that came into my hands through Seymour Mayne, a Canadian Jewish poet who was giving a series of talks in the city of La Plata, under the auspices of the National University of La Plata. One of his talks was about Jewish poets in Canada, and that's where we met, and he shared this poem with me. The poem is by Leonard Cohen, originally in English, and this is a free translation.

Everything you need to know about Adolf Eichmann

Eyes: medium.

Hair: medium.

Weight: medium.

Height: average.

Distinguishing features: none.

Number of fingers on the hands: ten.

Number of toes: ten.

Intelligence: average.

What did you expect?

Claws?

Oversized incisors?

Green saliva?

Craziness?

That's the whole poem. It's fairly self-explanatory, but just to clear up any possible confusion, Adolf Eichmann was one of the top Nazi leaders who conceived and carried out the mass murder of millions of Jews in concentration camps during World War II. He was tried in Israel in 1961, sentenced to death by hanging, and hanged in 1962. The poet is obviously describing an average, ordinary person. Despite being a monster on the inside, what we see is an average person.

Perhaps we can say the same about the spies of the parashah This week's reading, and we can certainly say this about the general concept of evil according to the Jewish perspective. Who said that evil is inherently bad? If something could be clearly seen as negative, why would anyone choose it over good? The system of free will that God gave to humankind is such that evil doesn't seem inherently bad, and good doesn't seem so good either. And therein lies our free will. And to help us choose, God gave us the Torah, which shows us the good and blessed path to follow, what things are good and what things are not.