Where Evil Comes From, According to the Kabbalists

Most people assume that Jewish tradition treats good and evil as opposites, two forces of equal weight pulling against each other across the cosmos. The Kabbalists thought this was exactly the wrong way to see it. The mistake, they argued, is imagining that evil has its own source, its own root, its own independent claim on existence. It does not. And the difference between a thing that draws its existence from its own root and a thing that borrows existence from something else is, according to the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, the entire explanation of why evil exists at all.

Cordovero, known as the Remak, lived and taught in Safed in northern Palestine from 1522 to 1570 CE. His Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah, "138 Openings of Wisdom," is one of the most systematic treatments of Kabbalistic cosmology ever written. In the thirtieth section of that work, he takes up a question that had preoccupied Jewish mystical thought for centuries: if God is the source of all existence, and if God is wholly good, then where does evil come from?

Two Sides, One Source

Cordovero begins with a distinction that runs through all of Kabbalistic literature: the Sitra d'Kedushah, the Holy Side, and the Sitra Achra, the Other Side. These are not equal and opposing forces. The Holy Side flows directly from God, from the Eyn Sof, the Infinite, which has no boundary, no limit, and no beginning. The Holy Side required no new root, no separate origin. It springs from the Infinite the way light springs from a flame, inseparably and continuously.

The Other Side is different in kind. It did not spring from the Infinite the way the Holy Side did. It was, in Cordovero's formulation, permitted to exist. The divine light flowed outward through the Sefirot, the ten channels of divine emanation described across centuries of Kabbalistic thought from the Sefer Yetzirah, composed sometime between the third and sixth centuries CE, through the Zohar, compiled c. 1280 CE in Castile, Spain. And at a certain remove from that source, in the outer reaches of emanation, a space opened where something could exist that was not directly animated by divine light. The Other Side settled into that space, not as a rival to God but as a consequence of God making room for creation at all.

Why Evil Cannot Sustain Itself

This distinction carries a consequence that Cordovero presses. Because the Other Side lacks its own root in the Infinite, it cannot sustain itself independently. It borrows the vitality it needs from the Holy Side, drawing on the overflow of divine light the way a parasite draws on a host. This is not power. This is dependency. The Kabbalistic analysis of evil's origins insists that evil is structurally incapable of genuine self-existence. It persists only insofar as the divine light permits it to persist.

This means that evil, for all its felt weight and devastation, is not co-eternal with good. It is not a second god. It is not a permanent feature of reality. It is a feature of this particular configuration of creation, one that exists because creation requires distance from the source, and distance creates the conditions in which the Other Side can take hold. But distance is not permanence. The light can close the distance. And when it does, the Other Side has nothing left to borrow from.

What This Means for the Human Being

The Zohar, which Cordovero spent his career systematizing, describes the human being as the site where this drama plays out most visibly. Every human action either draws divine light further into the world or provides the Other Side with more material to work with. The yetzer hara, the evil inclination, is not a foreign invasion. It is the Other Side operating through the gap between what a person chooses and what the divine structure calls them toward.

Cordovero's contemporaries in Safed understood this not as a reason for despair but as a reason for precision. If evil is dependent and derivative rather than independent and original, then it can be diminished. Every act of genuine righteousness does not simply add a good thing to the world. It withdraws something from the Other Side's supply. The Kabbalistic tradition across the centuries from the Zohar through Cordovero to his student Rabbi Isaac Luria, who arrived in Safed the same year Cordovero died, was ultimately a project of understanding how this withdrawal worked, how the light reclaimed what the darkness had borrowed, and what human beings could do to accelerate the process.

The Holy Side did not need a new root. It was always there. The Other Side borrowed what it could and called it power. The Kabbalists called it temporary.