We are just a few days before the start of Chanukkah but my sermon today is going to begin with a different festival – Pesach. How many different Haggadot do you have at home? Many families when they enjoy their Seder will use a selection to get them through, children’s Hagaddot, adults, an interpretative Haggadah etc.
If you have one at home open up your copy of the Hagaddah. Turn to the page where the story of the Pesach is about to told. There you will find this quotation from the Book of Deuteronomy (26:5-8) which every year opens our telling of the story and which ends with us singing Dayennu – it would have been enough. This passage starts with the words Arami Oved Avi.
Now, depending on the translation of this phrase, you will find what the worldview of your Hagaddah is. In many Haggadot this phrase is translated “A wandering Aramean was my father – he went down to Egypt and dwelt there in small numbers. There he became a nation.” Ok – who is the wandering Aramean? Perhaps Abraham, perhaps Jacob.
In many other Haggadot the phrase Arami Oved Avi – is translated “An Aramean sought to destroy my father. – he went down to Egypt and dwelt there in small numbers. There he became a nation” Ok – who is the destroying Aramean? Laban – and indeed in these Haggadot it is made explicit that Laban in our Torah portion was the most evil of all – more so than Pharaoh as Pharaoh only tried to wipe out the male Israelites whilst Laban tried to destroy us all.
Why the difference? The translation “A wandering or fugitive Aramean was my father” is what is used in most Torah translations” – because this phrase introduces a ritual telling of our history at the point when a person brings their offering of first fruits to the Temple in Jerusalem. Thus the Aramean must presumably be one of our Jewish patriarchs.
But in the Hagaddah, when we remember our experience of slavery and persecution, the compilers used the grammatical ambiguity in the word oved to say that instead this refers to the first persecution that the Jews underwent – Jacob at the hands of the Aramean Laban.
This is a worldview which says to Jews in every generation – there are evil people out there – do your best to avoid them.
When atrocities happen in the world – attacks by terrorists like the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester those years ago, now back in the news due to the inquiry on what was known about bomber before he acted, abuses of one person by another, they will often generate newspaper headlines to say that the perpetrators are pure evil.
What these people did was indeed ra evil. But what I have to do as a Rabbi and as a Jew is to challenge the notion put about on the front covers of the red top papers that these people were evil. Their actions were absolutely disgusting, awful. We cannot say that they are evil.
There is a reason for this which is core to Judaism’s understanding of humanity. It is because as far as Jews are concerned every one of us is made b’tzelem elohim. Every one of us is made in the image of God. Since has v chalilah God could never be said to be pure evil it is not possible for us to ever consider any one of God’s creations to be pure evil.
In Genesis Chapter 4 we find that right from the beginning people who perform the most evil acts are indeed created in God’s image. In Genesis Chapter 4, Adam and Eve’s own son Cain murders his innocent brother Abel. He spends the rest of his life with the mark of Cain so that all will know the evil and violent act that he performed – but at no time does God spurn him as his own creation – at no time does God say to him you are not my creation.
The generation of the flood, we are told were violent and corrupt before God – their society and its acts are never specified but whatever it was it could not survive. Yet never did God say that these are not my creatures.
We are all created b’tzelem Elohim – the murderers and abusers then make evil choices just as Cain did and they will carry the mark of Cain for the rest of their lives. This is why God requires of us that we create courts of justice – so that those who make their lives evil by their choices can be brought to justice. This is not only a law for Jews but is indeed one of the Noachide laws which Jews should expect of all people. These are laws derived by the Rabbis from the chapter at the end of Noah’s story when the earth is re-settled. And why? Because in, Genesis Chapter 9:6, God says that since mankind in made in God’s image there must be processes of justice in order to restore the balance when a person chooses to act evilly.
Isaiah tells (in Isaiah 45:7) that the potential for good and evil alike are there in God’s creation and all of it was sourced in the world which God made :
- I am the Eternal God, and there is no one else.
- I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.”
The question is what we do with the choices which have been given to us. We must choose life – the murderers choose death and, whilst they remain as much in the image of God as any of us commit a gross hilul ha’Shem by their actions. Once you say that these people are pure evil, not in the image of God, then they can say to you in the words of Cain “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and we would be bound to say to them God forbid “no you are not – for you are made of different stuff to us.”
If we say that people who commit evil acts, even throughout their lives, are the creations of some evil force then really we are bound to excuse their actions as simply being in accord with their nature. Judaism has explicitly rejected this way of thinking since its beginning.
What was the headline, Pure Evil, doing on the front of the Daily Mirror when that bombing happened in 2017? It is because there has always been a solution to the existence of evil which says that this happens because of some independent evil force. It informed Zoroastrian dualism and, to a certain extent, those parts of Christianity which derive more from Gnosticism than from Judaism. Blame it on Satan, on the Dybukk.
But if we go with this way of thinking that we fail to say these people made the choice to do this evil thing – we must bring them to justice, we must challenge this evil, we must challenge the circumstances by which they think evil is acceptable. We must help them to do teshuvah – to turn away from their evil acts. We must demand of them that they do so, as God demands – and we must be sure to challenge the tendency for evil in ourselves – for within each of us is good inclination, yetzer hatov and an evil inclination, yetzer hara.
At the beginning of the service we prayed exactly this in the yotzer prayer – you will find it on page 207 of Seder HaTefillot – We bless you our Living God, Sovereign of the Universe, who forms light yet creates darkness, who makes peace yet creates all. These words basically come from the Prophet Isaiah but our Rabbis felt that to say that God creates evil was too strong for a prayer in every single one of our morning services (Berachot 11a), hence the euphemism “creates all things” Oseh Shalom u’voreh et hacol.
If it is so clear to us that there is nothing which does not derive from God then we have to draw the conclusion that creatures in God’s image chose the utterly wrong path and did evil.
We must pray for support and care for those who have lost loved ones, who are injured, who are traumatised. We must challenge those who choose violence and bring them to justice. We must always work l’taken et ha olam – to repair this world so broken by people choosing to act evilly – but we must never allow ourselves to despair that there are places and human hearts where God is absent – even Laban the Aramean was created in the image of God. That’s why I always choose to use a Haggadah which translates Arami Oved Avi as a ‘Wandering Aramean was my father’ – demonisation of people has no place in my Judaism. And Jack’s Torah portion told us that even Jacob and Laban could make peace.
