The people took to seeking complaints; it was evil in the ears of Hashem… The multitudes among them cultivated a craving and the Israelites wept again, “Who will feed us meat? We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt for free… The wrath of Hashem flared greatly. (Bamidbar 11:1-10) 

After departing from Mount Sinai, some of the Israelites started to tire of their holy lifestyle and looked back on their Egyptian slavery with rose-colored glasses. Anyone who has made such a drastic lifestyle change, whether becoming religious, eating healthier, or quitting smoking, probably has looked back and yearned for the good old days. It’s human. Why is Hashem getting so angry? Well, the Or HaChaim strongly disagrees that this is understandable behavior and takes a remarkably stern approach. 

The reason Hashem’s wrath flared greatly is that in general, anyone who does something evil, due to powerful temptation… can be considered… as having acted under the compulsion of the evil inclination (yetzer hara). But those who wanted to return to Egypt were not exposed… to the tempting pleasures of Egypt. They were not overcome by desire but were… willingly entering a situation that intensifies their desire. There is nothing more evil than that.

Nothing more evil than that? What about murder? Idolatry? The infamous lashon hara? Those aren’t worse than romanticizing your past indiscretions? Well, in order to understand what the Or HaChaim is condemning, we have to look at how Judaism views evil. Which can be very perplexing given that in Shemos (32:14) it says, “Hashem reconsidered the evil that He had said He would do to His people.” How can Hashem, the very source of good, do evil? It would be sacrilege for me to write it if it weren’t in the Torah. 

In English, evil is associated with deliberately causing harm or doing actions that will cause harm. Other synonyms include immoral – but that requires a definition of “right and wrong” – or wicked which doesn’t give us much more nuance. So, broadly speaking, evil seems to be about disobeying rules or causing harm. 

When we look at the Hebrew word for evil, Rah (spelled with the Hebrew letters Reish and Ayin) we get a completely different concept. In Hebrew, words are built on core root letters, and this specific root carries the connotation of shattering, breaking, or malfunctioning. Forms of rah (Reish-Ayin) appear in the following contexts:

• Rashi comments on Koheles 1:14 that the word frustration is a re’ut ruach: a broken will. 
• When we hear the shofar one of the blasts is called a teruah (reish-ayin) which is a broken sound. 

So in Hebrew Rah is associated with shattering or malfunctioning. It might be more appropriate to associate Rah not with the connotations of evil, but of bad. If you have a chair that leans back too far and the leather cushions have cracked, you’d call it a bad chair. Lashon HaRA is colloquially translated as gossip. But literally it means the evil tongue. Not because you’re saying mean and untruthful things about someone, but because the intention is to break that person’s reputation. Then we have the Yetzer HaRA, the evil inclination. This is the voice that gets into our heads and breaks our rational thinking with broken information (lies). Finally, going back to Hashem in Shemos, it’s not that He was going to do evil, but that He was going to break the Jewish people apart because they had malfunctioned so severely. 

Now let’s go back to the verse from Bechalosecha and the Or HaChaim. Human beings are broken people living in a broken world and counterfeit solutions are peddled to us as the answer for our brokenness. We walk around with phones in our pockets that are specially designed to hijack our attention and capitalize on our weaknesses using intimately personal data. The only thing with more devastating tools at its disposal is the Yetzer Hara. The deck is stacked against us. Judaism recognizes this and has tremendous mercy. As Reish Lakish says in Sotah 3a “A person does not commit a sin unless a spirit of folly (or madness/insanity) enters them.” 

Judaism wants you to fight your Yetzer Hara and fail and try again. That is breaking but it isn’t a malfunction. In fact, it is the very purpose of being human. Passing a test is the only way we grow. 

But when we are in a good and holy place, we don’t have temptation around us at all. Then to look for reasons to complain when there’s nothing to complain about… to actively cultivate a craving when there’s no temptation present, that’s someone who isn’t struggling to be better. That’s someone who wants to throw it all away. The Or HaChaim isn’t saying these people are the most evil, he’s saying they’re the most broken. Because they don’t want to get better. As the saying goes, “you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to change.” 

It is impossible for our generation to imagine an existence without perpetual temptation. So the Or HaChaim’s harsh words can’t be applied today. The Israelites were in the wilderness surrounded by miracles, spirituality, and a clarity of purpose. At the first sign of spiritual contamination it was ejected from the camp. To seek out temptation in that environment is a malfunction that will be very difficult to repair. We, on the other hand, have no shortage of temptations. If we fail and fall and shatter, that isn’t evil. We’re only broken if we decide to stay that way.