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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Sat May 3, 2003 9:14 am
Subject: Magicians as Evil Inclination

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=57690

http://home.hawaii.rr.com/jmorse/sea_surface_full_of_clouds.htm

Good clown...One thought of Chinese chocolate

And large umbrellas. And a motley green
Followed the drift of the obese machine
Of ocean, perfected in indolence.

What pistache one, ingenious and droll,
Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery

And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo,

neat at tossing saucers--cloudy-conjuring sea?

C'était mon esprit bâtard, l'ignominie.

from "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" by
Wallace Steavens

===========
http://www.erickraft.com/markdorset/topicalguide/authorsimagination.ht
ml

...out of what one sees and hears and out Of what one feels,

who could have thought to make

So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,

As if the air, the midday air, was swarming

With the metaphysical changes that occur

Merely in living as and where we live.

- Wallace Stevens "Esthetique du Mal"

=================

One reader writes:

Dear Sitaram:

I am looking for the source that I can give for a quotation by Naham
of Bratslav: The evil inclination is to be compared to a conjurer who
runs among the people with a closed hand daring them to guess what is
in it. At that moment each one thinks that the conjurer has what each
one desires for himself hidden in the clenched hand. Everyone
therefore runs after him. Once the conjurer stops for a moment and
opens his hand there is nothing in it. Exactly does the evil
inclination fool the whole world. Everyone rushes after him, for all
imagine, in their error, that he has in his hand what they wwant and
desire. In the end the evil imagination opens his hand and everyone
sees that there is nothing in it. The very one who said to each
person "open your mouth and I will fill it," he himself is completely
empty. I wonder if you might be able to help me?

===================================

http://www.myjewishbooks.com/maddancers.html

The Mad Dancer

Reviewed by Pat Launer of KPBS-FM (Airdate April 6, 2001)

Excerpts...

Like the Kabbalah it invokes, The Mad Dancers is Jewish mysticism...
it is dense and complex, opaque and indirect, a parallel universe
full of symbolism and stories, where nothing is what it seems...it
could take you a lifetime to figure it all out, to unwrap all the
secrets and symbols, the messages and meaning. The best thing to do
is let yourself be spirited away, lifted by the music and the dance,
and magically, mystically, intuitively, you will lean the lessons of
life hidden within the text.... [it] is a comedy with magnificent
music and yes, even some mad dancing....

A highly assimilated Jew, Elliott has lost touch with his heritage
and his happiness. The Rebbe visits him in the person of Seven
Beggars -- one blind, one deaf, one without hands, one with no legs,
a Yemenite stutterer, an Ethiopian hunchback. Ironically, what each
is lacking turns into his biggest asset: nothing is as it seems. One
by one, they entice him along, on his path -- to find the garden, to
find fulfillment, to find bliss. At every step of the way, Elliott is
tempted by the Old Gentleman, the Evil spirit, what the Jews call the
Yetzor Hora, the dark force that will always try to lure you into
self-sabotage. Ten years in the making, loosely based on a story by
the influential, controversial Hassidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov,
this world premiere captures the fire and light of Jewish mysticism.
The story itself and the stories within are magical. If we
experienced it all uninterrupted, without an intermission, we would
be completely transported, just like Elliott. Though the play is a
bit protracted and prolix, Todd Salovey has directed with a deft and
dexterous hand, trusting the audience imagination and using low-tech
stage wizardry to create an enchanted evening, thanks to an
outstanding collaborative team.

The physically, intellectually and emotionally agile Yehuda Hyman
serves as writer, choreographer -- and Elliott Green. John Campion is
brilliant as the shape-shifting Rebbe Each of the other chameleon-
like cast members has at least one incandescent moment: Chaz Mena in
his hilarious turn as a Middle Eastern sex-club waiter; Jaye Austin-
Williams as the Deaf signing gardener; Steve Gunderson singing a
beautiful Yemenite ballad; Dimiter Marinov as the irresistibly
sinister Old Gentleman. Daniel Hoffman's original music is marvelous,
excellently complemented by the evocative set, lighting and sound.
The secret, mystical message? Act on your dreams. Trust the universe.
Seek the garden. Look for joy. Sing. Dance. Find your bliss. And
metaphors be with you.

http://www.geocities.com/jwnet.geo/jwquotes.txt

From each utterance of the Holy One an angel is born. - Jonathan ben
Elazar (Talmud: Hagiga 14a)

Every one entrusted with a mission is an angel...All forces that
reside in the body are angels. - Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed,
1900, 2.6

The Angel of Death is all eyes. - (Talmud: Avodah Zarah 20b)

http://home.utah.edu/~rfs4/jkm29.htm

163. What is this One Attribute? It is the Form of a Hand. It has
many messengers, and the name of them all is Evil Evil. Some of them
are great, and some are small, but they all bring guilt to the world.
This is because Chaos is toward the north. Chaos (Tohu) is nothing
other than Evil. It confounds (Taha) the world and causes people to
sin. Every Evil Urge (Yetzer HaRa) that exists in man comes from
there. And why is it placed to the left? This is because it does not
have any authority any place in the world except in the north. It is
not accustomed to be anywhere except in the north. It does not want
to be any place but in the north. If it remained the south until it
learned the routes of the south, how could it lead others astray? It
would have to stay there for [several] days until it learned, and
then it could not cause people to sin. It therefore is always in the
north, to the left. This is the meaning of the verse (Genesis
8:21), "For the Urge of man's heart is evil from his youth." It is
evil from his youth, and it does not incline [in any direction] other
than the left, for it is already accustomed to be there. It is
regarding this that the Blessed Holy One said to Israel (Exodus
15:26), "If you listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what
is upright in His eyes, and give ear to His commandments" and not to
the commandments of the Evil Urge "and keep all His decrees" and not
the decrees of the Evil Urge "[then all the sickness that I brought
upon the Egyptians, I will not bring upon you,] for I am God who
heals you."

164. What does the Evil Urge gain? What is this like? A king
appointed clerks over the lands of his kingdom, over his work and
over his merchandise. Each and every thing had its clerk. There was
one clerk in charge of the storehouse containing good food. Another
was in charge of the storehouse containing stones. Everyone came to
the storehouse containing good food. The clerk in charge of the
storehouse of stones came and saw that people were only buying from
the other [clerk]. What did he do? He sent his messengers to tear
down the weak house [so that people would need stones to rebuild
them]. They could not do so, however, to the strong ones. He
said, "In the time that it takes to tear down one strong [house], you
can tear down ten weak ones. People will then all come and buy stones
from me, and I will not be inferior to the other." It is thus written
(Jeremiah 1:14), "From the north will evil come forth, upon all the
inhabitants of the earth." The verse then continues (Jeremiah
1:15) "For I call all the families of the kingdom of the north says
God and they will come, and each one will place his throne at the
opening of the gates of Jerusalem..." Evil will be their business,
and the Evil Urge will also constantly strive. The word Satan
means "turning aside," since he turns all the world aside to the
balance of guilt. How is this indicated? It is written (Genesis
38:16) , "And he turned aside to her," and the Targum renders this
VeSata, [ Satah being the root of Satan]. It is likewise written
(Proverbs 4:15), "Turn aside (S'the) from it and pass on."

http://www.synagoguehamptons.org/rabbi.htm

"Standing Still"

Tonight I want to tell you two stories. The first is about Rabbi Levi
Yitzhak of Berditchev. Once, he saw a man hurrying along the street,
looking neither right nor left. "Why are you rushing so?" he asked
him. "I am after my livelihood," the man replied. "And how do you
know," continued the rabbi, "that your livelihood is running on
before you, so that you have to rush after it? Perhaps it is behind
you, and all you need do to encounter it is to stand still -- but you
are running away from it!"

The other story is about Rabbi Pinchas. One evening, when he entered
the House of Study, he saw that his disciples, who had been talking
busily, stopped talking and jumped up at his coming. He asked
them, "What were you talking about?" "Rabbi," they said, "we were
saying how afraid we are that the Evil Urge -- the yetzer ha-ra --
will pursue us." "Don't worry," he replied. "You have not gotten high
enough for it to pursue you. For the time being, you are still
pursuing it."

Both stories are about running after or pursuing, versus standing
still. We have been talking for weeks now about teshuvah, "turning."
Standing still -- stopping -- is the first step. It sounds simple,
but I think it's worth saying. Just stop. You can't change direction
without stopping. And you can't know which direction to turn in
without stopping. If we want to make changes, the first thing is to
stop doing whatever it is we're doing. Teshuvah is about deep
introspection, yes. But on one level, it's not so very complicated --
just stop.

Now, in the first story, the man is chasing his "livelihood." What is
a livelihood, but a source of life. And like the man in the story, we
run after that which we think will sustain us, keep us alive. In
fact, many of us don't feel alive unless we are in motion. But
perhaps it is stillness that will enable us to truly live. Maybe by
running, we turn our backs on the source of life.

In the second story, the students believe they're running from the
yetzer ha-ra, the evil impulse within. But it turns out that we have
to be at a very high level to actually flee from our own negative
impulses. Most of us should focus on trying to simply stop pursuing
them.

Now let's take the two stories together. In the first story, the man
thinks he's running toward something, but perhaps he's running away.
In the second story, the students think they're running away from
something, but in fact they're running toward it. So it turns out
that if we keep moving, it's not always possible to know when we are
running toward something and when running away. It seems like it
should be simple and obvious -- like we should know. Butt it is
neither simple nor obvious. On the contrary, it is very easy to fool
ourselves, with all kinds of rationalizations and intellectual games.

Now, it seems obvious that when we don't know the way, it is
sometimes better to stand still than to move in the wrong direction.
One might even stop and ask directions. And sometimes it's important
to stop not because we don't know the way, but because we don't know
the destination.

I remember when I was a kid, maybe I was 8 or 9, and I was riding in
the car with my mother, who was driving. We were on a straight road,
and my mother was making little adjustments with the wheel, as one
does when driving, but I asked her why. Why, if the road is straight,
did she still have to keep adjusting the wheel? Her first answer was
the answer that is almost always the best and most correct answer: "I
don't know." But then she thought about and said that maybe the road
isn't really as straight as it looks, and maybe the car isn't
perfectly aligned.

So it is with life. The road is never as straight as it looks, and we
are not perfectly aligned. And so there is a level of teshuvah which
we must do all the time, which is the equivalent of constant slight
turns of the wheel to keep us on the right path. But we also need to
do another kind of teshuvah. Because sometimes we're on the right
road, but going in the wrong direction, and we need to stop and turn
around. Other times, we're on the wrong road altogether, and we have
to stop and find the right road. Still other times, we may be on the
right road, but we're heading for the wrong destination, and we need
to stop and figure out where we really should be heading.

We should do it every day. Every day, we should find time to simply
stop, and ask ourselves: Am I doing what I should be doing? How am I
spending my time? How am I using my talents? Is the direction I'm
going in still the right one for me? We need to stop and think, to
take stock. We need to stop and receive guidance and information. We
need to stop talking, and listen.

Now of course, the stories are not just about physically running.
We're talking also about emotionally running, intellectually running.
Our minds is constantly going, our emotions are churning. I think of
it sometimes like a bicycle wheel that is spinning, and I want to
just put a stick in it and stop it.

And the question then is, why is it so hard? Why is it so hard to
stop, to be still, and not pursue? Think about the Amidah, the
standing, silent prayer. How hard was it to simply stand in silence
this morning or this evening? How many people this morning walked out
during that standing silence?

Is it impatience? Discomfort with self? Fear? Distrust of stillness,
and a need to constantly move? Have we succumbed to the dominant
culture which disdains the slow and patient path, and prizes
aggressiveness? Are we seduced by the chase more than the encounter?
Have we become incapable of being satisfied with what is, and we are
always looking for the possibility of something better just down the
road? Martin Buber said:

The Evil Inclination is like one who runs about the world keeping his
hand closed. Nobody knows what he has inside of it. He goes up to
everyone and asks: "What do you suppose I have in my hand?" And every
person thinks that just what he or she wants most of all is hidden
there. And everyone runs after the Evil Inclination. Then he opens
his hand, and it is empty.

We seem to always be chasing our future, always anxious to get to
next thing. And in doing so we miss the present moment.

Now certainly, there is a need for balance. If we are stuck, we may
need to move. But on the others hand, some of us are stuck in motion.

Now, we talk about kavannah in prayer -- kavannah meaning intention,
or aim. We also need kavannah in life. The Amidah is the core prayer
of every service -- it is called the service of the heart, and it is
most important for us to have kavannah in saying that prayer. Its
name comes from the word for standing, it is literally the standing
prayer. And when we pray it we are supposed to stand absolutely
still. Perhaps it is a way of teaching us that the truest offering of
the heart is utterly still, and that it is that stillness which God
truly desires of us. Perhaps also there is a recognition that the
physical stillness aids our kavannah -- when we quiet the body, we
can begin to quiet the mind. I've been playing a lot of tennis this
summer. Those who play know that you can't hit the ball well on the
run. To have good aim, one needs to stop. Standing still allows for
purposefulness in motion.

And so if I were asked for advice on how to begin to cope with some
of the things life has been throwing at us lately, how to begin to do
teshuvah, how to bring meaning back into life, I would
say: "cultivate the power to stop."

I'll end with the last lines of one of my favorite poems, Milton's
Sonnet number twenty. He wrote it when he had not yet written
Paradise Lost. He knew in his heart that he had a great gift, and a
great contribution to make. But he was already completely blind, and
could not imagine how he could do what he felt so strongly he was
meant to do. In utter frustration at being unable to move forward, he
wrote this sonnet, which begins, "When I consider how my light is
spent." And it ends: "Thousands at his bidding speed/And post o'r
Land and Ocean without rest:/They also serve who only stand and
waite."

http://theol.uibk.ac.at/cover/bulletin/xtexte/bulletin10-9.html

Judaism must of necessity reject secular Platonic and Hegelian
understandings of the true as aleitheia--as absolute being that which
lies beyond contradiction--and which we may approach in good Socratic
fashion only by reason and rational decision-making. Father Schwager
seems to think that if I give up Plato and Hegel, I become a nihilist
(as René Girard has characterized nihilism), that I commit myself
to "indeterminacy." I do not. Reason, faith, and conscious belief may
be sufficient for Christians. They are not so for Jews. Jewish
currents run deeper than that. The Jewish task is not to decide
whether a text of Torah or a rabbinic proposition is right or wrong,
true or false, but to own our own history within it and assume
responsibility for the other individual to who I am primordially
obligated by virtue of it. Here I am relying, of course, upon the
work of Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. René
Girard's work on mimesis and violence is powerful for me not because
it is true but because it is Jewish, because it offers me a
vocabulary for explaining my own history and allowing me to assume
responsibility. Plato needs things to be decided. Sophocles does not.
Nor does Dostoyevsky. Nor does Judaism. Father Schwager may decide
for himself whether or not Platonism is essential to his
understanding of Christianity or the continuation of his theological
work. Judaism does not commit me to being right but to being
responsible, to loving God with all my heart and all my soul, to
loving others in place of myself. That love and responsibility is my
task as part of my co-partnership with God in the creation of the
world (as such creation is revealed to us in Torah), and that task
will continue until the moment of redemption and the world to come.

Thus Job and his friends are both wrong and right successively and
the text enacts for the reader the passage from one position to the
other. The prophets may disagree diametrically with each other but
each text offers access to God from within a particular historical
hour and moment. One Jewish community proposes one understanding of a
text of Torah. Another proposes a different understanding of the same
text. But both accept Torah as the infinite within the finite,
however differently inflected within their individual tongues. If I
claim a distinction between the sacrificial and the anti-sacrificial
(or invoke René Girard's distinction), it is not because I find one
true and the other false but because I find the latter more
comprehensive, more ethical, more promotive of life, love, human
relation, and human responsibility than the former. The victim of mob
violence--whether in the Christian Gospel or Isaiah 52-3--is exposed
as innocent not by dogmatic declaration concerning true and false
interpretations but by close careful patient textual reading which
dismantles the positions of the persecutors, just as Jesus offers his
body to his disciples as a "teaching tool," both when he writes in
the sand before the would-be stone throwers in the episode of the
woman accused of adultery, or more generally when he offers himself
as a victim of sacrificial expulsion to show us where our violence is
leading. I leave aside Father Schwager's question about the politics
of the state of Israel--and in general the relation between the
political and the ethical--for another occasion.

http://theol.uibk.ac.at/cover/bulletin/xtexte/bulletin10-9.html

2. If all the world finally will be shown to be a part of
the "blueprint" which is Torah, then God will in retrospect turn out
to have acted through Cyrus as well as through the "suffering
servant." God does not take sides between us but within us. He takes
the side of the victims we are all capable of becoming or have become
against the persecutors we are all equally capable of becoming or
have already become. Judaism is not a Manichaeism (however attractive
it is for Christians to read it as such) but a monism of the deepest
order. All the world--both the evil inclination (the yetzer hara) and
the good inclination (the yetzer tov)--will be shown finally to be a
part of the divine plan which Torah has simply seen in advance.

(Sitaram interjects -

http://membres.lycos.fr/jacquesvigne/english/b1p1ch2.htm

In the Bible, God is sometimes clearly presented as being beyond
contradictions: 'There is no one but me.... I create the light and
the darkness, I make happiness and unhappiness, it is I, Jehovah, who
create all this.' (Isaie 45, 6-7). (The literal translation from
Hebrew is,' 'I make peace and evil').

)

http://www.neveh.org/winston/parsha60/shoftim.html

When you come to the land which G-d, your G-d gives to you, do not
learn about the disgusting ways of the nations. No one among you may
pass their child through fire, use divination, divine auspicious
times, divine by omens, or practice witchcraft; use incantations,
consult mediums or oracles, or communi-cate with the dead. (Devarim
18:9)

Mitzvah #510 in Sefer HaChinuch comes from this posuk, and, it is the
mitzvah not to divine, which means that:

" a person concentrates intensely in order to use one of the kinds of
mental ability that all the expert [psychics] use, so that they can
predict the future; indeed, it comes true for them, since the power
of the mind and their ability to use it are strong."

The Hebrew word for "diviner" is the word "kosem," which, you may
have recognized as the same word we use today for a magician. Even
though today, the vast majority of the Western population (probably
due to science), do not believe that much in the supernatural (in any
obvious way), many know that supernatural "powers" exist. Certainly
to believe in G-d and the soul is to believe in a supernatural
reality.

As the Torah, the Talmud, and all the seforim since then emphasize,
all power belongs to G-d and ONLY G-d. However, for the sake of free-
will, G-d has allowed creation to make possible the ILLUSION that men
can have power independent of G-d. It is a phenomenal and extremely
dangerous illusion, for the person taking advantage of it, and the
people he may impact.

Hence, we may ask the question: Is it permissible to perform magic
according to the Torah?

The answer is yes, providing, as the rabbis have make clear, the
magician himself declares that all he does is merely a "trick" --
"sleight of hand," as it is called -- and, actually reveal one of
his secrets to the people for whom he is performing. A magician,
according to halachah, must come only to entertain, not to delude
anyone into ascribing power to anyone other than G-d.

This doesn't apply only to magicians and the like; it applies to
anyone in whose hands G-d has entrusted abilities to work wonders,
including doctors. Certainly it includes people who heal using what
appears to be "psychic" powers, or, have an uncanny ability to make
accurate predictions regarding future events.

There is a story in the Talmud that sums up the attitude we are
supposed to have regarding this matter. It is a story that involves
the famous Rebi Chanina ben Dosa, for whom miracles constantly
occurred. According to the Talmud, a "real" witch once fell by his
feet and uttered a curse against him. Rebi Chanina responded with the
all-important phrase: Ain ode Milvado -- There are none other than G-
d.

Rashi explains that it was not that Rebi Chanina thought that these
words would completely protect him against the witch, who, like
Bilaam before her, had quite a track record of successful curses.
Rather, Rebi Chanina was declaring: Even should your words result in
something, it is not because you have any power, but, because G-d
wants me cursed, and you are merely the "messenger" for such a curse.

Keeping this in mind will help make sure that we serve our Master --
The Holy One, Blessed is He -- and not His messenger, be he or she a
good one or a bad one.

http://www.shemayisrael.co.il/dafyomi2/yoma/reviewa/yo-ra-35.htm

When a person will appear before the Heavenly court, and will proceed
to excuse himself for not studying Torah because he was ...

1. ... extremely poor and preoccupied with earning his livelihood -
they will ask him whether he was any poorer than Hillel.

2. ... extremely rich and preoccupied with all his estates - they
will ask him whether he owned more estates than Rebbi Elazar ben
Charsum.

3. ... too busy with his Yetzer ha'Ra, who would not leave him alone -
they will ask him whether his Yetzer ha'Ra molested him more than it
molested Yosef ha'Tzadik.

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~rs002/glosssz.html

http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/Book/Goldsmith/yla-intr.html

Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971), an early colleague of Leyeless, was the
twentieth century poet of Judaism par excellence. There was no aspect
of modern Jewish experience that did not find expression in his
deeply thought poems. Glatstein brought to Yiddish poetry complete
self-identification with Judaism and the Jewish people,
humanitarianism, wisdom, humor and genius. His work is a culmination
of all that is admirable in modern Yiddish verse.

His poems about Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, his odes to Yiddish, and
his poems of the Holocaust, of Israel reborn, and of American Jewry,
are among the major documents of the Jewish People's tribulation and
transcendence in the modern world.

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