Nitzavim-Vayelekh (Psalms)

Psalm 12 & 14: Images of Evil and of Goodness

Martin Buber devotes the first half of his book, Good and Evil, to the study of five psalms—Pss 12, 14, 82, 73, and 1—that he sees as presenting various images of the nature of evil, and the constant struggle within human society between good and evil men. The first two of these present particularly stark pictures of the nature of evil, and hence make a suitable text, both for the eve of Rosh Hashanah when each of us is hopefully asking where he or she stands along the moral continuum, and for Parshat Nitzvaim, which talks about choosing between good and evil, life and death.

Psalm 12 begins by speaking of a world in which there are no longer any good people: “the pious are finished, men of faith have vanished from among men” (v. 2). Instead, the world is filled with lying people: each man speaks falsely to his neighbor, with “smooth tongue” and “duplicity.” The phrase used for duplicity is interesting: belev valev yedaberu—literally, “they speak with a heart and a heart.” We are familiar with idioms describing a hypocrite as two–faced, or the phrase used by Hazal, “one thing in his heart and another in his mouth,” but here the malady is much deeper: the liar himself has “two hearts.” While speaking falsely, the person in some part of his being convinces himself that he really feels what he feigns. He has one heart which is, so to speak, warm, generous, giving, caring; and another which is selfish, mean, grasping, self-serving, filled with rancor and venom towards his fellow-man. Such a thing hardly seems possible. And yet, Looking around at life, at the world, at other people, it would seem that it is.

The main point is that liars and men of deceit gain a sense of power from their ability to glibly speak falsehood: “Through our tongues we shall be victorious; our lips are with us, who can be our master?” (v. 5). Speech, as a uniquely human faculty, is a central tool in thought, in culture, in the creation of community around an idea. But it is also a uniquely human source of evil. Buber’s words here are worth quoting:

The lie is the specific evil which man has introduced into nature. All our deeds of violence and our misdeeds are only as it were a highly-bred development of what this and that creature of nature is able to achieve in its own way. But the lie is our very own invention, different in kind from every deceit that the animals can produce. A lie was possible only after a creature, man, was capable of conceiving the being of truth. It was possible only as directed against the conceived truth. In a lie the spirit practices treason against itself. (Good and Evil, p. 7)

The second half of the psalm speaks of the evildoers getting their upcommance: God will arise and vindicate the weak and helpless, setting right the injustices committed against them. God sees their despoiling, hears their groans, and protects them. Unlike the words of lying men, God’s word is pure, “like silver purged in a crucible, refined seven times over” (v. 7). In the end, He will protect and vindicate the oppressed. But note: the last four words of the psalm, kerum zulat livnei adam, are extremely difficult, and may be interpreted in diametrically opposed ways: as referring to the dire situation in which evil reigns: “When vileness/baseness is exalted among men” or “when those who had been treated with contempt are [at last] lifted up among men.”

Psalm 14 (which, except for a few inconsequential changes, is parallel to Psalm 53) continues the theme of evil running rampant but, if such a thing is possible, raised to an even higher degree. Here, the evil ones not only trust in their powers of conniving speech to outflank God Himself, so to speak, but the scoundrel/fool (naval) denies the very existence or presence of God in the world. God looks down from heaven to see if there is anyone at all who seeks Him, and finds that all, without exception, are rotten, corrupt, abominable, foul (a unique root, al"h, in the word ne’elahu, appearing only here, in the parallel in Ps 53, and in Job 15:16); not a single person does good!

Interestingly, the evil man and the good one are contrasted on both the moral and intellectual or cognitive plane. The naval who denies God is both a scoundrel and a fool; counterpoised to him is the maskil—the man of understanding who seeks God and does good. The assumption is that evil is rooted in a cognitive mistake: denial of God. God’s presence in the world is so obvious that to deny Him combines foolishness with a kind of deliberate, willful denial of the obvious, to justify the evildoer casting off all ethical responsibility and “permitting” him to do whatever his baser self wishes.

Here, too, the psalm concludes with prayers and promises of vindication, God’s protection of the poor man and, in the final verse, a promise of joy and song that will mark the “redemption of Israel from Zion.”

On the peshat level, thus, this psalm speaks of social ills, contrasting the evil-doers, liars, and smooth talkers to the righteous, the poor, and the mistreated of this world. But it seems to me that one can also offer a “Hasidic” reading of this psalm, in which the entire conflict takes place within the soul of each individual. Such a reading seems especially fitting during the season of teshuvah, of heshbon nefesh and self-reckoning around Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Thus, there is a glib tongue, a master of evil speech, within each of us: a part of us that thinks he can find his way in the world by clever, superficial speech. We live in an age of smooth tongues, of sound bites, of celebrities, of “PR” experts and “image advisors,” of mass media which discourage serious thought or public discourse. We are so flooded with information, that every message must be packaged in easily digested “sound units.” A popular young rabbi told me that he had found that people nowadays are unable to concentrate on any one thing for more than two minutes, and he had learned to “package” his public speech accordingly.

But real truths cannot always be tailor-fit to the needs of an impatient age. True, on a certain level, the deepest truths can be summarized in short formulae: the first verse of Shema, often called the Credo of Judaism, is but six Hebrew words; there were those Sages who suggest that the quintessence of the Torah can be expressed in one or another pithy phrase, such as “the righteous man lives in his faith,” “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “these are the generations of man,” or “that which is hateful to you do not do to your fellow-man.” But Hillel’s golden rule was followed by the words zil gemor—“Go and learn.” That is, in order to internalize these maxims them in depth so that they leave a mark upon one’s personality, and to apply them to the multitude of situations encountered in life, demands much study, thinking, reflecting—as well as discourse, dialogue, listening and teaching.

There are other levels on which we lie to ourselves: typically, by telling ourselves that we are more of everything than we really are: wiser, braver, more concerned and caring about others. (On the other hand, there are also those people who lie to themselves in the opposite way, seeing nothing but faults, shortcomings, and inadequacies, when they may in fact be chock full of good deeds.) The Days of Awe are a time to try to measure ourselves against the objective yardstick that is embodied by God and His Torah—to abandon the post-modern glibness and smoothness that our culture inculcates, and to take a long, hard, honest look at ourselves. What about the denial of God spoken of in Psalm 14? Shlomo Carlebach used to ask: “Do you know God in your toenails?” That is, it’s easy to acknowledge God in your head and with your mouth: to pay verbal homage to religious principles, and even to assent intellectually to semi-abstract “principles of faith.” But the real question is: does a person feel the reality of God with all his being, with all his bones, with his entire body down to his toenails? Translated into concrete terms: when a person makes an important real-life decision, does he do so in such a way that his own self-interest is his only real consideration, or does he do so “With the fear of God.”

Before he died, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai blessed his disciples with the words, “May your fear of God be equal to your fear of flesh and blood.” The astonished disciples, no doubt fancying themselves on a high level of awe, responded, “Is that all? Only that much?” To which he replied, “Hallevai —Would that it were so!” He continued: “For you should know, that when a person sins he says to himself, ‘I hope nobody sees me.’” Any traditional religious Jew will tell you that God sees all our actions; but do they believe this “with their toenails,” or do they merely assent with their minds and their lips?

This point was brought home to me recently when an acquaintance came to ask my halakhic opinion on a certain sensitive and controversial issue. When I told him what I thought—namely, that I saw no substantive, inherent halakhic objection to his doing a certain thing—he said: “But what will my neighbors think? The Jerusalem I live in is a tiny village, where everybody pokes their noses into everyone else’s business.” In other words, his bottom line was that he cares less about whether his act is acceptable in God’s eyes, and more about the opinion of his self-righteous neighbors.

What was Buber’s conclusion? I cannot go into his analysis of the other psalms mentioned, except to say that he sees the Psalmist’s “answer” to the problem of evil encapsulated in the final verse of Psalm 73: ve-ani, kirvat elohim li tov—“but as for me, the closeness of God is good.” That is, he is not envious of the wealth or worldly success of others, because what makes him happy differs from what the world thinks. Not travel, fancy homes and furnishing, flashy clothing or cars, dining out, expensive whiskey, etc.—but something else: closeness to God.