Where Does Evil Come From If God Made Everything

There is a verse in Isaiah that most people skip over because it is too uncomfortable to sit with. It appears at (Isaiah 45:7), and God is the speaker: I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil. The King James translation softens the last word to calamity, but the Hebrew is ra, the same word used throughout the Torah for what is bad, wrong, and harmful. The verse does not say God permits evil. It does not say God allows evil to exist as an independent force. It says God creates it.

Jewish mystical thought, to its credit, has never tried to explain this away.

The Question the Soul Asks

Da'at Tevunot, the Kabbalistic dialogue composed by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto in eighteenth-century Italy, stages this question as a direct challenge from the Soul to the Intellect. The Soul does not ask the question apologetically. It quotes Isaiah 45:7 and presses: if peace and evil both come from the same source, what does this mean about the nature of that source? The question is not rhetorical. The text treats it as a genuine philosophical problem that deserves a genuine answer, not a deflection.

The Soul's willingness to pose the question sharply is itself significant. One of the persistent temptations in religious thought is to resolve the problem of evil by making it smaller, by describing it as merely the absence of good, or as a category error in human perception, or as a force so marginal to the divine plan that it barely needs to be accounted for. Da'at Tevunot refuses these moves. The Soul has read Isaiah. It knows what the verse says. And it wants to know what a person is supposed to do with that knowledge.

What Klipot Are

The Kabbalistic framework that the Ramchal inherits from the Zohar, compiled c. 1280 CE in Castile, Spain, uses the term klipot for the structures or forces in reality that are opposed to the flow of divine light. The word literally means husks or shells, and the image is of the protective outer layer of a fruit: the klipah surrounds and contains the inner substance, separating the edible from what encloses it. In the Zohar's cosmology, the klipot are not simply evil in the way a villain in a story is evil. They are structures that serve a function in creation, even when that function involves concealing or opposing the divine light.

The Talmud Bavli, in tractate Sanhedrin 91b from the sixth century CE, records a tradition that God made both the yetzer hatov and the yetzer hara, the inclination toward good and the inclination toward harmful choices, and built both into the human being. The evil inclination is not an intruder in human nature. It is a designed component. Its purpose, the rabbinic tradition consistently argues, is to make genuine choice possible. Without a real pull toward what is harmful, choosing what is good would not be a choice at all. It would be the only available movement.

The Structure of a World With Real Choices

This is the answer Da'at Tevunot builds toward, but the Ramchal is careful not to make it too tidy. The existence of genuine evil as a created feature of reality is not simply explained by the necessity of free will. The Ramchal acknowledges that evil appears to operate with something like its own momentum, that it spreads, that it compounds, that a world containing genuine darkness is categorically different from a world where darkness is merely a word for reduced light. Isaiah's verse is not just about human choice. It is about something in the structure of creation itself.

Midrash Rabbah on Genesis, from fifth-century Palestine, contains a tradition about the original separation of light and darkness at creation. When God saw that the light was good on the first day, the text notes what God did not say: the darkness was good. The light was separated from the darkness, not abolished, not destroyed, not subordinated to nothing. It was set apart. The darkness was kept as part of the system, given its domain, given its time. This is not a comfortable picture, but the midrash does not try to make it comfortable. It keeps the tension in view.

Does God Turn Evil Toward Good?

The Ramchal's distinctive contribution is an argument about directionality. Even if evil is a genuine feature of creation and not merely an absence or a perception, its existence within a divinely governed world means it cannot ultimately escape the arc of divine purpose. The Zohar describes this as the role of the left hand in relation to the right: the left hand, associated in Kabbalistic symbolism with the attribute of strict judgment and the structures of limitation and darkness, is always subordinate to the whole of which it is a part. It cannot operate outside the system that contains it.

The Soul's question in Da'at Tevunot does not receive a neat resolution. The Ramchal ends not with a solution but with a reorientation. The question of where evil comes from is answered by the recognition that wherever it comes from, it exists within a world that is moving toward total rectification. The klipot will not persist forever. The darkness God created at the beginning of creation serves a purpose that will eventually be completed, and when it is completed, the darkness will have been, in retrospect, part of the path toward the light rather than its permanent negation.

Why Isaiah Said Both Things in the Same Verse

The structure of Isaiah 45:7 is deliberate. Peace and evil are not in separate sentences, assigned to separate moments, attributed to separate sources. They appear in parallel in a single declaration from the same speaker. The prophet was not confused about this. He was insisting on it. The tradition of Kabbalistic interpretation builds from this insistence a picture of divine governance in which the apparent opposites are held together, not because the difference between them does not matter, but because both ultimately serve the same end. The God who creates peace and creates evil is the same God whose final intention, according to every strand of the prophetic tradition from Isaiah forward, is a world in which the wolf and the lamb dwell together and the earth is full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. The verse that unsettles is the same verse that insists the unsettlement is not the last word.