In Mesichta Sukkah on daf nun beis amud alef the Gemara talks about the various names by which the yetzer hara is known in the kisvei hakodesh. There’s a list there of names, seven names of the ‘evil inclination’ that we find in our holy Scriptures.
What’s the purpose of the Chachomim giving us that information? It’s because the yetzer hara is a subject which the world ignores, and that's exactly what the yetzer hara prefers. Imagine a spy is trained in Moscow and now he comes to America. He doesn't want any headlines announcing his arrival because he succeeds only when he is incognito. And that’s why the yetzer hara likes when people don’t talk about him; that’s when he’s most successful.
And that’s why you find so much in the divrei Chazal that is spoken about him. Because the more we think about him, the better off we are; the more we know about him, the more suited we are to protect ourselves. And so if our Sages are telling us names of the yetzer hara it’s not merely letting us know information, like a concordance going through the Tanach and saying various names. Each one is a big limud, a very important lesson about how to deal with this enemy, how to defeat him.
The Real Enemy - Not the Arabs
Just to give an example: מֹה קָ רְ אוֹ שׂ וֹנֵ א שְׁ ל – Shlomo Hamelech called him ‘enemy’. What does that mean? It means that the yetzer hara is the enemy and that you have to get your mind off of all other enemies. If you think you have other enemies in this world, you’re making a mistake. And if you waste your efforts hating anybody or fighting anybody, you are expending efforts that could have been better utilized if you had recognized the real enemy.
I remember I was once in the little town of Tzitavyan in Lithuania on Tishah b'Av. We had just finished saying kinos and the Shavler Rav was present, and he was speaking to us unofficially, informally. At that time they were making protest demonstrations all over the world against the Arabs for something that the Arabs had done, some atrocity against the Jews. And the first thing he said then was that we need to make protest demonstrations against the yetzer hara.
Youthful Arrogance
Now I was a young man, just recently married, and I thought I knew a lot. And so when I heard those words, even though I respected the dictum of this great man, but actually it didn’t enter my head. It was something interesting, a witty remark, but I didn’t really accept it so much.
But as the years went by I began to understand more and more that it’s not just words, that it’s actually so – the yetzer hara is the real sonei. Because whatever happens in this world it’s the yetzer hara that’s manipulating it. If not for the wickedness that people were moved to do because of the yetzer hara, there never would have been any Arabs making trouble; they wouldn’t have done anything. And so the Shavler Rav wasn’t just saying something cute; he was saying the truth the way it is.
But that's not our subject now; we'll take up that name one day but right now I just wanted to bring you an example of why it’s important to know the yetzer hara’s names; each name is intended to guide us, to make us aware of who the yetzer hara is. Now we don't have time for each one tonight but one of them, one that’s connected to our sedrah, we’ll talk about now.
The Stony Heart
The Gemara says יְ חֶ זְ קֵ אל קָ רְ א וֹ אֶ בֶ ן – the Navi Yechezkel called it a stone. He’s talking there about the days to come when the yetzer hara won’t be in power anymore; and he says in the name of Hashem, ְשַׂ רְ כֶם וַהֲסִ רֹתִ י אֶת לֵב הָאֶ בֶן מִב – I am going to remove the stone heart from you, ָשָׂ רִ י לָכֶם לֵב ב וְנָתַ ת – and I’ll give you instead a heart of flesh (Yechezkel 36:26). So we see that where there's a stone heart the yetzer hara is in power.
Now, if that name, ‘stone heart’, is what the navi calls the yetzer hara so we understand that there hangs in that name a very great mussar haskel that we have to study; at least we should make an attempt to understand what that name is teaching us.
Now, people who live only by superficialities and they translate Torah words into gentile idioms, so to them a ‘stone heart’ means somebody who is cruel. And when they see such a possuk they think it means, “I’m going to remove the cruel heart and in its place I’m going to give you a lev of basar, a soft heart.” They imagine that that’s what’s promised leasid lavo – in the ‘days to come’ you’re going to have a kind heart.
A Mind That Feels
But that's not the pshat at all because first of all in Tanach the word lev has nothing to do with kindness or cruelty. In lashon kodesh the word lev means mind. You’ll soon hear why that’s so but it’s an important piece of information you’re hearing now: The Torah language doesn’t express ‘thought’ by the word מ וֹ חַ, brain; it’s lev, that’s the mind.
And what is a stony heart? Why is the yetzer hara compared to a stone and why is the yetzer tov compared to a heart of flesh, lev basar?
The answer is a stone has no feelings, and successful living comes from feeling. To actually sense things, to feel the Torah ideals, that’s the summit of achievement in this world. And that’s precisely the reason that in Torah vernacular all thinking is with the lev; it’s because a person must train himself to feel his thoughts. The brain after all is just a computer; it’s the heart that measures the amount of feeling you have, how much your cold logic is translated into warm impulses.
The Jewish Heart
It’s the heartbeat that matters – the heart beats faster when you’re feeling – and therefore our language expresses ‘thought’ by the heart because the heart will indicate how much a person is involved, how much he feels the idea. An idea without heartbeat is nothing to us. A person who can teach, who can say lofty ideas from the lips outward but in his mind he doesn’t have it – he doesn’t feel it, he doesn’t sympathize with those ideas – among us Jews he has no place.
Let's say you have in the university somebody who is talking about social justice. He’s teaching a course on political science and he’s talking about the importance of affording every stratum of society opportunities to live with the maximum pursuit of happiness; and he’s preaching to his students about how the wealthier have to share their wealth with the downtrodden who have been pushed underfoot by the higher class, the capitalists. And this man is so enthusiastic about his ideals that he’s gushing; he waxes poetic without end on his subject. And of course, his gullible students swallow it hook, line and sinker.
As he walks out after finishing his lecture, he’s going to his car and he’s wiping his lips in happiness – ‘Oh boy, did I give it to them tonight’ – a poor man comes over to him. “Sir, I’m hungry. Maybe you can spare me a dollar and I’ll buy myself a sandwich.” So what does this paragon of social justice do? He gives him an angry look and he runs into his car and slams the door.
The Generous Poor
Now, how could such a thing be? He’s not ignorant about the plight of this poor fellow. The answer is that he has a mind of stone; he never assimilated the ideals that he himself speaks about. He knows all about it; he can explain very well the ideals he claims to believe but he hasn’t the slightest interest in practicing it. Actually he is only working for export. That’s called a ‘stone heart’, when you don’t translate your ideals into feeling. It’s cold knowledge, that’s all. When we talk about a lev of basar, however, a heart of flesh, it means not only to know but to feel and to live the great ideals.
That’s why when Jews learn about tzedakah, they don’t talk about it; they do it. I can prove it. Walk into a yeshivah. A yeshivah is not a place where millionaires' sons come. It’s mostly poor boys. Now here walks in a man from Eretz Yisroel who has to marry off his daughter. He goes over to the mashgiach and tells him his plight so the mashgiach appoints two boys and they go among the poor yeshivah boys. Now, what do they have already? Not much. Maybe a little allowance that they need for themselves; they need sometimes to take a bus or maybe buy a snack. But they take out their money and he leaves with hundreds of dollars from that beis hamedrash; hundreds of dollars from poor boys.
How could such a thing be? That college professor, he studied much more about the plight of the poor than these boys. He’s written a thesis on the subject!
The answer is that these boys are trained to live their ideals. It’s not only in their minds, in their stony hearts; they’ve already softened their hearts to the idea that tzedakah means giving.
The Printer’s Chiddush
You know tzedakah can mean righteousness too. Ahh! Righteousness; such a beautiful word. But you forget that it means ‘giving’. That's why in the machzor when it says the three things, בָ ה שׁ ו ת צְ דָ קָ ה ה ו פִ ל ת, that will rescue you from punishment, so what did the printer do? On top of the word tzedakah he put mammon. Not righteousness – mammon! Actual greenbacks.
In the gentile prayerbooks, the printer wouldn't have the nerve to do such a thing. It’s ‘righteousness’, that’s all. Don’t bother me with the results of righteousness. And therefore when somebody comes to those righteous people and asks for charity, he's directed to go to this and this address. “That’s where the headquarters are. They'll take care of you. The organization handles that. Don't bother us.”
And therefore when we talk about ideals we understand that it doesn’t mean only to know the right ideas. Of course, that in itself is also a very big thing. To know the right ideas is not a small thing but if it remains so, if it doesn’t soften up your heart too, then you’re remiss in your function in this world because your heart is a stone heart.
Getting a Fleshy Heart
Now, we won’t say it’s easy. It’s a big job because tzedakah is only one example. There are so many things, so many Torah attitudes and ideals, and if you only learn it in a stony way then it has no effect on life at all.
Even if you’re very learned, maybe you studied many seforim, but if you learned it just intellectually and you never practiced feeling what you learned, so you’re left with a stony heart, and a stony heart is not capable of functioning.
And therefore it's of the utmost importance to take all of the great Torah ideals and make them part of your personality; to feel the ideals, to live them, that's a lev basar. To make your heart a ‘fleshy heart’ means that it feels the great thoughts that you say with your mouth and it reacts to the world with those feelings and emotions.
