Sukkah 52 - The nature of evil

The Talmud uses the following verse as the basis for separating men from women in the synagogue: "And the land shall mourn separately, the House of David and their wives." It then reasons: if in mourning they are separate, then on all other occasions, how much more so.

Then it wants to know, who do they mourn? Some say that it is the Messiah, the son of Joseph, who will come first before the Messiah son of David and be killed in battle. Others say that it is the desire to do evil that God will slaughter in the future. But if so, why mourn? - The righteous will cry when they recall how hard it was not to do evil - and they withstood. The unrighteous will cry at the thought that the evil was so easy to resist - and they did not.

Abbaye saw a man and a woman planning to go on the road early in the morning, and he decided to follow them and stop them from wrongdoing. After three miles, they parted with the words, "Nice travel, but short." Abbaye was upset because he knew that he would not resist wrongdoing in the same situation. A Sage came and consoled him with a rule: whoever is greater than his fellow, his desire to do wrong is stronger than that of his fellow.

What is the nature of evil? Is it external to a person or part of his make-up? At first, it is outside, as in "The spirit of wrongdoing led them aside." But after a while, it becomes part of their in-born nature, as in "the spirit or wrongdoing is within their midst."

Art: The Artist's Parents by Rafael Soyer