Jay Michaelson
October, 1999

The Psychological Serpent:

Dualism and The Reality of Evil in R. Nachman of Bratzlav

1. Introduction

The dualism of R. Nachman of Bratzlav suffuses his theological ideas. In an earlier paper,⁽¹⁾ I commented on how this dualism affects R. Nachman's general view of the ontological status of the world: that its content is relevant, because it provides material for engagement, psychomachia, and consequent conversion of the apparently evil into the good. For R. Nachman, I argued earlier, a beautiful field is religiously different from a tar pit, because while both are tools for realizing the omnipresence of the divine, their content renders them very different tools. Unlike the "leveling" dualism of R. Schneur Zalman, which sees everything as participating in the divine and everything as thus somewhat equal as a means to recognizing that divinity, the dualism of R. Nachman is more engaged with the specificity of objects in the world, because the process of that "recognition" is for R. Nachman the consummate religious activity and the recognition process varies depending on the degree to which something appears close to or distant from God. Since the progression from darkness to light is more important for R. Nachman than the mere understanding that all is light, the qualities of the starting-point are important religious topoi.

I would now like to propose a somewhat more radical view of R. Nachman's dualism by examining how certain of his texts treat the question of evil. R. Nachman inherits two relevant traditions from his Kabbalistic and Hasidic progenitors: the reality of evil as a mythological entity on the one hand, and the Hasidic psychologization of theosophical Kabbalah. What R. Nachman does is combine these two traditions to psychologize the mythological understanding of evil, a move that may seem almost obvious but which has subtle consequences for R. Nachman's understanding of reality more generally. The crux of the matter is that for R. Nachman, evil is very real and yet at the same time entirely psychological. R. Nachman's writings and utterances are peppered with references to the "Other Side" and the "husks," and yet in the vast majority of instances, the "entities" being referred to in this way are psychological, not material or even "spiritual" in the conventional sense. After looking at three related streams of R. Nachman's thinking on the subject of evil, I suggest in conclusion that R. Nachman's dualism is so pronounced that it approaches the anomian: the battleground of good and evil is not the world of the law, but the inner world of the soul. Of course, the categories of the mitzvot continue to form the subject matter of those battles, but the context has shifted entirely from the magical-material or theurgical-spiritual realms to the ecstatic-psychological.

In this light, we can see that R. Nachman's understanding of evil is in some ways the complement of his conception of the world. For R. Nachman, the world is a series of obstacles that may seem to be evil but which in reality are sent from God to test or improve the Hasid or Tzaddik. (See e.g. L.E. 66:4 ("All the barriers and obstacles which confront a person have only one purpose: to heighten his yearning for the holy deed which he needs to accomplish.")) What seems to be real evil in the world, in other words, is actually good in disguise, sent from God. At the same time, what seems to be non-real -- one's thoughts or attitudes -- may be the incarnation of the Other Side. For R. Nachman, to say that "evil exists in the mind" is true, but misleadingly incomplete. It is really a twofold statement: first, that what we think about evil in the world is really all in our mind, but second, that evil really does exist -- and it is in our minds and souls.

2. The Forces of the Other Side

To begin, we must acknowledge that R. Nachman is not a systematic thinker, and he uses the language of Kabbalah in many different ways. Sometimes, the "forces of the Other Side" are seemingly real demonic forces out there in the world, disguised as heathen nations or wicked Jews. R. Nachman expresses concern, for example, that true wisdom sometimes "falls into the hands of the heathens and the forces of the Sitra Achra, the Other Side" and "gives them power and dominion." (L.E. 30:6) Elsewhere, he states that Edom, with its historical connotation of Rome and Christianity, is the root of sin and the "first of the first on the Other Side." (Sichot 89) These are not particularly innovative understandings of the Sitra Achra, and depart little from earlier Kabbalistic or Jewish folk traditions. It is also true that R. Nachman often discusses "evil" psychological states in ways that are not particularly interesting -- the "evil inclination" or "evil urge," for example, is a concept that had been part of mainline Jewish thinking for at least a millenium before R. Nachman. What I wish to focus on, then, is more limited than the entire set of R. Nachman's utterances on evil. I want to narrow the investigation here of times when R. Nachman seems to relate the concept of evil to something originating within the psychology of the Hasid.

a. Intention and Result

R. Nachman states many times that the type of wisdom or other reward that is received will be of the same type as the intention of the acquirer. For example, R. Nachman advises that "boldness" is necessary to "find new horizons in Torah. But a person whose boldness stems from arrogance will not discover truly original Torah concepts. The Torah he receives will be drawn from the forces of the Other Side." (L.E. 30:8) In other words, something in the corrupt nature of this person's enthusiasm arouses the forces of the Other Side and poisons the teaching he receives. Similarly, "All inspiration comes from the place associated with the seeker. If one seeks secular wisdom, then it does not come from the Holy, but from the Other Side." (Sichot 5) Presumably, even if the "secular wisdom" one obtains is of the type noted earlier -- genuine wisdom that happens to be among secular subjects -- one is still doomed, because the intention of the seeker towards secular wisdom means that the intention is irretrievably evil, and thus any Torah received will be as well. Rather than the substance of the wisdom or 'Torah' in question, the psychology of the student imparts moral valence.

This quality also affects ideas and even melodies already "out there" in the world to which hasidim may be exposed. On the subject of melody, R. Nachman writes:

A holy melody gives strength to the forces of holiness. But the music of the Sitra Achra, the Other Side, damages these forces and lengthens the exile. It makes

people stumble and traps them like birds in a snare. Be very careful never to listen

to this kind of music at all. The musicians and singers who produce it have no

religious intentions whatsoever. On the contrary, they only want to make money or

become famous. Listening to this kind of music can seriously weaken your devotion

to God. But the melodies played by a truly religious, God-fearing musician can be

very inspiring. They can strengthen your devotion immensely.

(L.M. 1:3)

It is interesting to note that R. Nachman does not differentiate between good and evil melodies on the basis of their tonalities or other discernible qualities. Rather, the moral-mythic valence of a melody seems to stem entirely from the purity of the musicians' intentions. The hasid is in quite a precarious position; it seems to be impossible to judge whether something is a precious devotional tool or a demonic snare without knowing all sorts of information about the musician. Clearly, such a hasid would rely on the Tzaddik to evaluate this kind of information for him, but my main point here is that the quality of good or evil that pertains both to knowledge received and even to "objects" in the world (insofar as a melody may be called an object) does not inhere in the content of the knowledge or the object but rather originates from the intention of the person(s) involved.

We should note as a non-trivial aside that this basic doctrine of R. Nachman is absolutely critical for the verification of the true Tzaddik's teachings. Countless times in Breslov literature, R. Nachman speaks of hearing voices that may come from God or from the Other Side. (See, e.g., Sichot 7: "A confusing thought may enter your mind, but if you stand firm, God will send you another thought to encourage you.") How is the hasid, or even R. Nachman, to know which is which? Since both voices sound persuasive on the merits, it is impossible to discern from within the content of the teaching itself whether it is divine or demonic. But because R. Nachman postulates that a certain intention necessitates a certain Torah, he need only reflect on the purity of his intention to discern the truth. One can review one's psychological states at the time each "voice" was heard and, by reference to those states, determine the goodness or evil of the voice in question. Of course, with the "perfect Tzaddik," this procedure is quite brief, because one assumes that his kavvanah is either perfect all the time or will soon correct itself. But for those less pure, this sort of checking-procedure provides a critical stoppage along what could otherwise be a slippery slope of prophetic claims and utterances, especially since it is likely either that the Tzaddik does the checking for the hasid or that, in the Breslov context, that this "checking" is in fact a pained engagement in self-analyzing hitboddut. R. Nachman's intentionalism functions in a way similar to R. Dov Baer of Lubavitch's complex delineations among forms of true and false ecstasy on the basis of self-delusion and self-awareness. Both systems check what could otherwise be an infinite potential for sham prophecy.⁽²⁾

b. Evil thoughts and their origins

Thoughts in R. Nachman have a way of seeming like demons in Kabbalah. R. Nachman says that "a thought can literally take on a life of its own" (L.E. 46), migrating around from place to place, spreading good or evil, and taking up residence. Like demons, thoughts also come with their own genealogy. In addition to ideas being in some way generated by the intention of those who acquire them, thoughts themselves may come from the side of God or "from the side of death." (L.M. 5:4) As before, this is not necessarily related to the content of the ideas; Indeed, demonic ancestry may attach to non-cognitive mental states. Depression, for example, "comes from the Other Side and is hated by G-d. But a broken heart is very dear and precious to G-d." (Sichot 41) Even certain kinds of worries may come from the other side: "The Evil One and the forces of the Other Side grab people by their clothes. They burden people with all kinds of worries about clothing." (Sichot 100) So too may certain desires be linked directly to evil: "This 'face' of the Other Side is the craze for money and materialism which is a form of idolatry and the source of the darkness, depression and heaviness in the world." (L.E. 23:2) These psychological and emotional states are described in mythico-magical language, and, I would argue, fill very similar roles to the demons and spirits of earlier magical traditions. R. Nachman advises his followers to constantly beware of these newly psychologized "demons." They lurk everywhere, and can sow destruction if not properly addressed by careful hasidim. And of course, the Tzaddik and the quasi-magical practices of his hasidim (how linguistic contemplation can be magical is discussed in the next section) are essential to dispel the forces of evil. But of course these demons are not abstract, esoteric entities; they are familiar, and inside every hasid.

In fact, at one point, R. Nachman goes so far as to say that the "Evil One" himself lives inside everyone -- "there is a philosopher in every man's heart. He is the Evil One, who raises questions in one's mind" (Sichot 32) Although the novelty of this point should not be overstated, given the long tradition of the "evil inclination" within each person that tempts the person to do ill, the formulation does take on a somewhat more intense flavor in light of the foregoing material. In sum, R. Nachman carries forward the basic concept of an evil entity living within each human, but seems to combine it more energetically with the mythological terms of the Kabbalah to produce a psychologization not (just) of theosophical speculations but of the magical and folk traditions regarding the Other Side. Once again, the forces of the Other Side do not operate on the material objects in the world or even the spiritual forces in a supernal realm; the battleground is the heart and mind of every hasid.

c. Sexual evil and the value of mental states

Finally, it would be impossible to discuss the question of evil and internality in R. Nachman without at least mentioning "the comprehensive evil ... the root of all the different kings of evil found in the seventy nations of the world": Sexual desire. (L.E. 19:3) For R. Nachman -- and I shall refrain here from Green-esque excursions into psychoanalysis, tempting though they are in this context -- sexual evil is the primary form of evil in the world. What is interesting is that, following the Zohar, not just sexual acts but sexual desire itself is an evil. "More than anything we must guard ourselves against sexual desire which is the sum of all evil," R. Nachman writes. (Id.) The sum of all evil, not the source or the root or the cause, but the sum of all evil is a desire, not an entity or an act or a mistake. Like Paul before him, R. Nachman sees sexual lust as an evil in itself, to be combatted at all costs. "The serpent which beguiled Eve and corrupted her is the embodiment of sexual lust." (L.E. 19:4) Not sexual misconduct, but lust itself.

This seemingly slight distinction rises in importance when viewed in context. R. Nachman appears in several related texts to have little interest in the distinction between "lustful thoughts and fantasies" (L.E. 8:2) -- which in the halachic model are relatively minor in importance -- and the carrying out of those fantasies, which halachically speaking could be quite significant. If one were to make a charge of anomianism against R. Nachman, as I shall discuss in the final section, such relative valuations would provide important evidence.

More provocatively, it is noteworthy in this regard that the antidotes for sexual desire are linguistic in orientation. "The key to subduing and breaking your desires, and especially sexual desire, which is the main challenge, is to strive to gain mastery of the Holy Tongue." (L.E. 19:3) R. Nachman at one point refers to King David, who used "words of holiness" to counteract his passion, and states that "The holiness of language is bound up with sexual purity." (L.E. 19:4) While we do not have enough textual evidence to make too much out of this linkage, it is still interesting in at least two respects. First, R. Nachman chooses a seemingly unrelated, entirely non-material cure for sexual desire, suggesting again that both the disease and the remedy are not material but something else. Second, R. Nachman chooses a mode of cure that is dripping with magical-talismanic connotations and effective spiritual power. As is well known, R. Nachman specifies the language that is to be used to curb sexual desire -- the Tikkun Klali, consisting primarily of several psalms. But the non-apparent relation between this tikkun and the sin to which it is addressed suggests that it is quasi-magical in origin. If that hypothesis is at all correct, it represents the consummate union (no pun intended) of mythological and psychological evil: a variant on a magical-mythical cure is being used to counter the effects of a psychological-mythical Evil One. Just as ancient Jewish magic would use letter combinations and magical spells to dispel mythological demons, so R. Nachman uses precise magical "formulae" (the psalms) to dispel psychological ones. And, significantly for R. Nachman's view of reality generally, the entire transaction takes place on a plane far removed from the material.

3. Consequences

I have tried to sketch three streams of thought within Breslov -- that the valence of an idea or object depends not on its own content but on the intentions of its originator; that within every potential 'originator' there exists an active, mythologized force of evil; and that the thoughts of each individual, perhaps even more so than actions, are moral quantities. In each case, the space in which value is articulated -- for good and for evil -- is a "spiritual," or more particularly, a psychological one. It is not that the world outside does not matter for R. Nachman. Certainly it does. But it matters in a very particular, and to some degree unique, way: the outside world matters in the ways that it effects the real domain of good and evil, the human soul. Everything that God provides in that world is grist for the internal moral mill.

Although I eschewed psychoanalyzing R. Nachman's emphases on internal struggle and the place of evil in the human heart and libido, I would like to make one sociological remark before moving on to my theoretical conclusions. I think it is not unreasonable to see R. Nachman's theories as speaking to the social conditions of his times, in which many of his followers were subject to external "obstacles" well beyond their control. If persecution, poverty, and the ordinary vicissitudes of 19th Century peasant life were indeed evil, then the philosophical "Problem of Evil" would loom quite large: why, indeed, would God allow such suffering to go on? If, on the other hand, these external phenomena were merely stimuli against which moral judgments were to be formed, then the "Problem of Evil" exists only insofar as the internal agents of the Other Side -- doubt, philosophy, depression -- allow it to grow.

Barriers that come from outside are divine: they increase the desire of the Hasid to do the mitzvah he is attempting to perform. He should thank God for sending them, and recognize that "the greater the goal for which you yearn, the bigger the obstacles and barriers which are sent in order to strengthen your desire," (L.E. 66:4) because by so strengthening that desire, God enables the individual to summon the necessary motivation to perform the task and at the same time provides a larger opportunity to go through the painstaking but precious activity of self-improvement. "God is to be found in the barrier itself." (L.E. 115) What seems to be evil is in fact a gift.

Barriers that come from inside are demonic: they try to discourage and depress the Hasid, decreasing his desire to perform mitzvot and alienating him from God. Whether these barriers are in the form of emotional distress, or philosophy, or arrogance, they are all from the "Other Side." What seems to be a response to evil (or even, in the case of philosophy, a response to the world) is in fact evil itself.

Briefly, I would like to address the consequences of this view of evil for some larger questions in Hasidic mystical thought. First, if we take R. Nachman's terminology seriously and not as a mere rhetorical flourish, we see that the Sitra Ahra is constantly involved in the internal life of the Jew. The battleground of the forces of evil and those of good remains to some extent the external world -- we should recall the exceptions noted earlier in which R. Nachman does speak of external forces like the Christian world in terms of mythic evil -- but it seems to me to have shifted its primary focus to the individual soul of the Jew. Ironically, we are much closer here to a Christian understanding of the devil, who works by tempting the individual soul, than to the earlier Kabbalistic Sitra Achra, an inverse sefirotic tree, or the shattered husks of the primordial vessels.

I am not suggesting that R. Nachman has co-opted Christianity's Satan, or even that the two figures share a precise phenomenological affinity. But I do want to suggest that R. Nachman's discussions of evil flow directly from his basic orientation towards sin and saintliness generally, and I want to suggest, perhaps provocatively, that whatever phenomenological similarity exists between R. Nachman's Other Side and the Protestant devil follows the same contour lines as the similarity between their views of the Good. Paul internalized Goodness, changing its focus from the ontological, external fulfillment of the letter of the law to the mind's and soul's embrace of the spirit of the law, combined of course with faith in the grace of a mediating figure between the individual and God. R. Nachman internalized Goodness, changing its focus from the ontological, external fulfillment of the letter of the law to the mind's and soul's embrace of the spirit of the law, also combined with faith in the gace of a mediating figure between the individual and God.

In both post-Pauline and R. Nachman's theologies, the locus of value is not so much in what is done but how it is done. To be sure, R. Nachman reiterates the need to actually perform the external mitzvah if at all possible and "transform the thought in the mind into a practical reality."⁽³⁾ (L.E. 66:4) He does not take the Pauline step of discarding the "letter" of the law entirely. But R. Nachman does greatly weight the value of internal struggle over external achievement (not to mention his agreement with Paul on the "inborn evil nature" of human beings; Sichot 40). This relative valuation is bound up with R. Nachman's ontological stance, which sees only God in the barriers and obstacles of everyday life. Evil is banished to the within.

Primary Sources Cited

R. Dov Baer of Lubavitch, Tract on Ecstasy (Jacobs trans. 1963)

R. Nachman of Bratzlav, Likutei Etzot ("L.E"), Avraham Greenbaum trans., available at http://www.breslov.com/core/etzot.html.

R. Nachman of Bratzlav, Likutei Moharan ("L.M."), Breslov Research Institute trans.

R. Nathan of Nemirov, Sichot HaRan ("Sichot"), Aryeh Kaplan trans., available at http://www.breslov.com/core/wisdom.html.

Notes

1. Hasidism and Nature: Between Negation and Affirmation.

2. On this point, see Louis Jacobs, introduction to Tract on Ecstasy (1963) at xii ff, and my own Paths to Divine: Ecstatics in Theology in R. Dov Baer of Lubavitch.

3. Contrary to some readers of R. Nachman, I believe this utterance and ones similar to it indicate that he was well aware of the potential anomianism of his teachings. The above-quoted line is surprisingly Mitnaggdic, particularly in the context of a teaching which is devoted almost entirely to the importance of intention rather than (mere) action and which cites the famous line from Berachot that "If a person intended to do a mitzvah but was prevented from doing it, it is accounted to him as if he had done it." It strikes me as significant that R. Nachman found himself in such a position that he even felt the need to reiterate such a fundamental idea of halachic theology.

Email the Author       Back to Library     Back to home page