Impollutable Pogo by Walt Kelly, 1970
It is now the eve of Yom Kippur and I
have evil on my mind.
I return now to our Evil Son. I say
'our' because despite the fact that the midrash comes to
exclude the Evil Son from the community, he is paradoxically included
by the mere fact that he is recognized and discussed. No matter how
many times we read the haggadah, the Evil Son is always
present if only to be dismissed.
Why do Chazal go out of their way to
bring the Evil Son to the seder table?
I raised several questions regarding
the Evil Son in an earlier post. We can make more
sense of possible answers by first addressing this fundamental
question of the inclusion of this son at the table if only to tell
him to pack it up and leave.
We noted earlier that the Evil Son
comes to contrast mainly with the Wise Son. Whereas the Wise Son
wants to know in depth about the rituals being performed, both the
how and the why, the Evil Son dismisses what is going on as being
personally irrelevant.
The Evil Son is, in some essential way,
the dark side of the Wise Son. In Jungian terms we can say that he
represents the 'shadow' of the Wise Son-- perhaps of all the other
Sons.
In other words: We are all the Evil
Son, just as we are all the Wise Son, The Tam and the One Who Doesn't
Know How to Ask.
The more we try to push the Evil Son
away, to claim that he has ousted himself, that he doesn't belong,
the more he stays.
The Evil Son is the part of us that we
find so distasteful, so far away from our idealized selves that the
only way we can relate to this dark shadow is to find it in and
project it onto others.
The liberals and the conservatives who
decry each other, the Jews who hate the Arabs, the xenophobes who
despise the aliens, all of these recognize in the 'other' that which
is within themselves which they cannot access, cannot touch.
The world that allowed Jews, the
Eternal Other, to be slaughtered in the Shoah and those who would
delight at the destruction of the State of Israel project upon us
that which they despise in themselves.
All of us have a shadow. All of us
cannot easily touch it much less be aware of it. But when we begin to
comprehend what we so hate about the other, we have a clue to what is
darkest inside of us.
Erich Neumann, a Jewish student of
Jung, elucidated this notion of the shadow in his book DepthPsychology and a New Ethic. I will bring up more
of the substance of the book in later posts.
Neumann himself quotes the Talmud:
תלמוד בבלי מסכת ברכות דף
נד עמוד א ואהבת את ה' אלהיך
בכל לבבך וגו'. בכל לבבך -
בשני יצריך, ביצר
טוב וביצר הרע
Babylonian
Talmud Tractate B'rachot 54a: “And you shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart...” with all your heart: With both of your
inclinations, with the good inclination and with the evil
inclination.
Chazal recognized that we are comprised
of both good and evil. Part of our personal struggle is not to
repress the evil, but to bring it into the picture; to use it along
with the good and in this way truly love ourselves, mankind and
thereby God.
We will delve into this more next time.
So we find the Evil Son at the seder
table every year because he is always part of us. We can try to
distance ourselves from him, say that we are different, exclude him
from the redemption while blaming him for the exclusion. But he is an
inextricable part of our being.
May we merit on this day of Atonement
to be truly at-one with ourselves, our fellow humans, all of creation
and with the Lord.
