Years ago, our son served in the diplomatic corp of the US State Department and his first posting was in Yemen. Hanna and I decided to have an adventure and go visit them.
On the long journey there, I was reading a book about Yemen. In it, the author said that every word in Arabic means what you think it means, it also means its opposite, and likely has something to do with a camel. This sounded like a joke, so I asked an Arabic speaking person who said that yes, in a sense that statement had a certain truthfulness about it.
That started me thinking about Hebrew, being also an old semitic language or dialect. We, who are so influenced by the heritage of noun based languages such as English and German and the Greek idea of perfection being static, have less tolerance for ambiguities and favour precise translations which are consistent. But our Hebrew is more like that observation about Arabic than it is like English or German. Words have to be translated in context and the translation of the same word can vary significantly depending on context. Perhaps a simple illustration is the name of post-talmudic tractate about rituals and procedures around death which is called Semachot, though it has nothing to do with celebration.
Isaiah 45:7, which is the source of the blessing that opens the section of Shacharit called “the Shema and its Blessings, reads as follows:
יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֹשֶׁךְ עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם וּבוֹרֵא רָע אֲנִי ה’ עֹשֶׂה כָל־אֵלֶּה
Forming light, creating darkness, making Shalom and creating Ra.
I am Yah who makes all of these.
The story I was told back in the day was that they (the rabbis?) decided that to leave the verse unedited in the liturgy was to invite the possibility of dualism which, back in the day, was the Zoroastrian understanding of divinity, at least as far as the rabbis understood. Frankly, I don’t think this is a particularly modern concern.
Further, if the accepted translation of Shalom in this verse is “peace,” then to assert that God creates peace on the one hand implies that God creates war on the other. This is more problematic.
However, if we see shalom as wholeness, the consciousness of atzilut, then the opposite end of this continuum is more like separateness and fragmentation. Thus God is the creator both of wholeness and separation and we oscillate along that continuum according to our needs. These same rabbis also said that without the Yetzer haRa, the tendency toward self centredness, no one would build a house, put food away for the winter, marry and have children, all of which are ultimately about survival of the independent self. Carried to its extreme, it’s sinful. Properly balanced on the continuum, it serves a divine purpose.
If the continuum is modified so that tov is at one end, then it does make sense to see ra as the other extreme. In this case, ra would indeed suggest being understood as evil. Yet, even in this model, engaging the yetzer ha’ra in combat is self defeating. As Reb Nachman also noted, each time one rises a rung on the holiness ladder, a new yetzer ha’ra is created just for that rung. Rather, the goal is to understand this tendency toward making the self an ultimate and disconnected reality and then to invite/convince the yetzer ha’ra to harness its energies in facilitating divine service which aims for total immersion in God and which is fully attained only when we surrender our separateness with our last breath.
I believe this is what Reb Zalman pointed to when he spoke about letting go of the defence mechanisms many of us develop in childhood to protect us from abusive adults or situations. He suggested that once we realize that these mechanisms are no longer serving our higher selves, that we invite them in, drink a l’chayim, thank them for all they did to get us through difficult time, and then let them go. Surely easier said than done, but a good teshuvah process nonetheless.
So I have taken to reciting this brachah as Isaiah wrote it (except on Shabbat). Blessed is the Holy One who is the source of the entire continuum, from absolute light to absolute darkness, from undifferentiated wholeness to complete fragmentation. Perhaps it can even help me to embrace those imprisoned by their separateness and find ways to reach them.