Why Da'at Tevunot Said God Creates Evil Without Doing It

A student once asked his rabbi how a God who is wholly good could make a world that contains evil. The rabbi opened Da'at Tevunot, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto's eighteenth-century dialogue between Intellect and Soul, and pointed at a single Aramaic distinction. The Holy One creates negativity. He does not do negative.

The student looked at the page and asked what that could possibly mean. The rabbi closed the book and began at the beginning.

Two Streams of Light

Da'at Tevunot describes creation as the simultaneous emanation of two streams. One stream is bathed in widespread divine light, overflowing with goodness. The other stream is dimmer, less illuminated, less touched by the original spark. Both streams come from the same Holy One. The brighter stream is creation in its evident perfection. The dimmer stream is the same creation seen from below the threshold of full illumination.

The Ramchal's Soul in the dialogue protests. If everything emanates from the same Holy One, how can one stream be dimmer than the other? The Intellect answers in a single phrase. Each stream is the same generosity, calibrated for a different recipient. The brighter recipients receive without obstruction. The dimmer recipients, by their own constitution, can only absorb a portion. The light is the same. The receiving surfaces differ.

This sets up the technical move that will resolve the theodicy. Evil, the Ramchal will argue, is not an opposing stream. Evil is what the dimmer recipients experience when they cannot fully absorb the same light the brighter recipients receive.

The Distinction Between Creating and Doing

Da'at Tevunot 38 sharpens the move. The Hebrew of Isaiah 45:7 is famously difficult. I form light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil. The verb the prophet uses for evil is bara, create. The verb for peace is aseh, do. The Ramchal seizes on the asymmetry.

God creates negativity, the Ramchal teaches. He does not do it. The difference is not grammatical decoration. It is the line between bringing something into existence as a potential and enacting it as a positive deed. The Ramchal explains. If the Holy One had not created the category of negativity, there would be no possibility of it at all. The category had to exist for moral life to be possible. But the Holy One never performs the category. The performing is left to creatures who choose between brightness and dimness.

The student in the parable might object that creating the category is enough. If the category exists, evil will follow. The Ramchal's Intellect anticipates the objection. The category, He insists, is the precondition for the brightness too. Without the possibility of darkness, the brightness would not be chosen. The dimmer stream is what makes the brighter stream meaningful.

The Verse That Closes the Argument

The third passage in this cluster lands the whole thing on a single Hebrew verb. Da'at Tevunot 120 reads Psalm 111:4. He has caused His wonders to be remembered. The verb the Psalmist uses, zakhar, has a precise meaning in Lurianic vocabulary. To remember is to bring forth from latency into manifestation.

The Holy One, the Ramchal teaches, did not invent goodness during creation. Goodness was already a fact of His own essence. What He did was cause it to be remembered, that is, brought forth from the unmanifest into a world capable of receiving it. And the same applies, in reverse, to negativity. The Holy One did not invent it. He created the category in which it could be remembered, by the brighter stream as the absence the brighter stream had been spared, and by the dimmer stream as the experience it would have to learn to traverse.

The verse becomes, in the Ramchal's hands, a small Kabbalistic credo. Reality is not the Holy One's choices. Reality is what the Holy One has brought into rememberability, leaving the actual remembering to the creatures who live inside it.

The Closing Image

The rabbi in the opening parable closed his Da'at Tevunot and looked at his student.

The Holy One, he said, did not place evil into the world the way a baker places yeast into dough. He created the possibility that some recipients would receive less light than others. He left the receiving to them. The brighter stream and the dimmer stream both come from His goodness. The brighter stream remembers without effort. The dimmer stream remembers by struggle. The struggle is the prayer. The prayer is the act of remembering. The remembering, in the end, is what brings the dimmer stream back into the brighter one.

The student opened his mouth to ask another question. The text in his hands had taken its place in the long shelf of Kabbalistic answers to the same question. The rabbi handed him the book and walked out of the room. The student began reading at chapter one.