It’s a question that has plagued humanity for millennia. The simple answer would be that God created it. But that answer is simply not congruent with the concept of an all-good, all-perfect Creator. So where did evil come from?
The Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah, a Kabbalistic text whose title literally means "Thirty-Two Gates of Wisdom," offers a fascinating perspective. It suggests that evil wasn’t some instant creation, a sudden eruption of darkness. Instead, it emerged gradually, almost imperceptibly, through a series of concealments of the original, inherent perfection.
Imagine the world as initially, flawlessly perfect. A complete and utter good. Then, something shifted. A “certain concealment of perfection” occurred. Think of it like a dimmer switch slowly turning down the light.
Now, what remained after that first dimming? Good, of course! But what was missing, what was now obscured from that initial perfection? That was the beginning of what we perceive as bad.
Here's the crucial point: at the outset, the text argues, this deficiency was minimal. Think of it less as a gaping hole and more like a tiny shadow. So minimal, in fact, that we could even say there was no actual deficiency, only a preparation. A potential. It was a state of concealment, a veiling of the perfect light. Evil wouldn't have developed from the perfection alone. It needed this initial hiding.
Think about it like this: imagine a seed. The seed itself isn't the full expression of the plant, but it contains the potential for it. The concealment, the diminishment of perfection, was like that seed, holding the potential for something other than pure good.
Then, according to the Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah, a second concealment occurred. Another dimming. Even now, after the second veiling, much of the original perfection still shone through. The deficiency, the "bad," was still relatively minor.
The idea here isn't that God created evil. Instead, it’s that evil arose from a gradual distancing from the Divine, a slow obscuring of the original, perfect light. It's a subtle but profound distinction, and it casts a whole new light (pardon the pun!) on how we understand the nature of good and evil.
This concept is often associated with the Kabbalistic idea of tzimtzum (צמצום), often translated as "contraction" or "self-limitation." Tzimtzum describes how God, in order to create the world, first had to "withdraw" or "conceal" a part of the Divine presence to make space for creation. Some interpret this withdrawal as the very first "concealment" that the Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah is discussing.
It's a comforting thought, in a way. That evil wasn't baked into the cosmic equation from the very beginning, but rather emerged slowly, almost reluctantly, from the shadows of diminished light. It begs the question, what can we do to lift the veil? What can we do to bring more light into the world, to push back against the darkness that creeps in when perfection is concealed?