Father Nicolas has a very tough job. Part of it involves "saying a quiet prayer, holding someone's hand or applying a drop of holy oil." [NY Times, 6/15/98.] Not that these are difficult exertions, but the reason for them is. Rev. Claude Nicolas, who I'm sure none of you ever heard of, is the resident exorcist at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. “On an average day, Father Nicolas sees up to a dozen people who in one way or another believe they are pursued by evil. 'Of course,' he added, 'the evil spirit often disguises a serious mental problem.'” [Ibid.]

I've never been asked to do an exorcism, nor would I have any idea how to do one. Nonetheless, evil is real. It exists in the world. But in our Jewish orientation, we agree with the wise Rabbi who was consulted by one of his students:

"Rabbi," said the young man, " I have a terrible, burning fear in my soul."

"What is wrong?" asked the Rabbi.

"I fear that I am being pursued by evil."

"Are you sure," said the wise Rabbi, "that evil is pursuing you? Or are you really afraid that you are pursuing it?

On this Shabbat Shuvah, this Sabbath of Repentance, this Sabbath of Return and during these entire Yamim Nora'im, we confront the evils of our world. But rather than exorcisms, we want repentance. We want to turn from evil towards good. To do so we will need to know: Where do we find evil? How does it function? How are we to affix responsibility, blame, and fault?

One of the words commonly used to personify external malevolence is "Devil" which can also be heard as "D'evil." In the Christian world, the Devil can be a powerful force indeed:

There was a strange story that came out of Vinton, Louisiana… Police there stopped a car with twenty passengers packed in it ?? none of whom were clothed. No, this was not a college fraternity prank. According to news reports, Sammy Rodriguez, a Pentecostal preacher from Floydada, Texas, told police he and his family fled Texas in their four cars because the Devil was after them. Along the way they decided their clothes were "possessed" and discarded them along with three cars that had run out of gas. Squeezing five people in the trunk, they ventured on. When police tried to pull over the curious car, Sammy sped into the woods and struck a tree. At last report Sammy faces charges, while his family, having fled from a nearby shelter, was at large in the Louisiana woods. [NEWSWEEK, August 30, 1993, p. 6.]

Much of the Christian idea of d'evil and the Devil originates in the Jewish concept of Satan. The word itself comes from a similar-sounding Hebrew word, Satan, which means "prosecuting attorney." In Jewish legend, when the soul is judged after death, the Satan, the prosecuting attorney, is the one who will present all our misdeeds to the Heavenly Tribunal. As such, he is our opponent. In the Christian world, over time the prosecutor became the persecutor, the Opponent who leads us astray for nefarious purposes of his own.

While we Jews are very concerned about evil, we are much less so about the Devil. For us, there is something called the Yetzer HaRah, the Evil Inclination. It is a force within us that moves us to do evil rather than an external force doing evil to us. We also believe in an opposite force, the Yetzer Tov, the Good Inclination. It is exactly what it sounds like: the inclination within us to goodness, compassion, tolerance, love, and caring.

Interestingly enough, the two Inclinations are said to begin at different times. The Good Inclination begins at birth. The evil one begins at puberty, which closely reflects our experience even today. We usually don't hold people fully responsible for the evil they do until adulthood, which in the ancient world meant puberty.

As the onset of sexual maturity, puberty is also an apt metaphor for how evil works. It represents one of the powerful drives and instincts within each of us that often come into conflict with the demands of adult behavior. The others are the drives for power, survival, territory, and nurturance. [David L. Weiner, Battling the Inner Dummy, Prometheus Books (Amherst, NY, 1999) pg. 20.] The conflicts they cause with our rational judgment and decision-making is the source of much of the evil in our world.

Let's not talk tonight about the obviously evil such as the rapist or murderer. Let's talk instead about ourselves, the supposedly "normal" people..

[Remember] the series "All in the Family?" Edith, Archie Bunker's wife was, in her own way, kind of a saintly person. Archie is complaining, as Archie commonly did. He says to her, "That's you all right. Edith, the Good. You'll stoop to anything to be good. You never yell. You never swear. You never make nobody mad. You think it's easy living with a saint? Even when you cheat you don't cheat to win. You cheat to lose. Edith, you ain't human."

Edith says, "That's a terrible thing to say, Archie Bunker. I am just as human as you are." Archie retorts, "Oh, yeah? Then prove you're just as human as me. Do something rotten." [King Duncan, Mule Eggs and Topknots, Seven Worlds Corp. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1987),"Human Nature".]

Let's talk about how human we all are, and the rotten things we do to prove it. Let's talk about, as the subtitle of David Weiner's recent book, puts it, "The Craziness of Apparently Normal People." [Ibid.] It involves everyone from presidents who make stupid, self-destructive choices involving their sex lives to the driver who crawls up the tailpipe of the car that just passed him, or her, endangering everyone on the road, because "that miserable ----- isn't going to get way with that. I'll show him a thing or two." The craziness of apparently normal people, the stupid things we do that add significantly to the world's evil, involves every single one of us.

Why? Because of our brains, or more precisely, because of the way they evolved. In the animal kingdom, is killing evil? No. It is part of the way animals live. Is aggressively guarding one's territory, seeking dominance in the group, or mating whenever possible to ensure the survival of one's genes and one's species evil? No. They are simply the way animal instincts, which is what we call them, function.

What makes us human and makes them animals is the rational capacity, the decision-making abilities of the cerebral cortex that we alone evolved. But the instincts are still there. They are incredibly powerful and their demands often conflict with the demands of adult behavior and civilized society. Far more often than we'd like to admit, they win. Sometimes it doesn't matter, like when we bang our thumb with a hammer, utter a string of enraged obscenities and slam the hammer down on the ground. Other times it matters very much, like when we are so sexually attracted to someone who is not our spouse that we begin an adulterous affair.

Evil comes from within us, rather than being a force that pursues us from outside, and it is the result of our instincts overwhelming our reason. Do we blame people for this? Do we find fault? We most certainly do. We also draw a careful distinction between responsibility and blame. No matter what the cause, we are responsible for everything we do. We may sometimes be excused from blame, or punishment for the evil we caused, but we are still responsible.

We blame, though, those who don't do enough to repent, to lessen the likelihood of primitive instincts overcoming our higher capacities. We blame those who don't seek knowledge of how our own internal conflicts work, which means most of us. As evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson pointed out, people know more about their automobiles than their minds. [Ibid.] We find fault with those who, finding their own behavior and emotions problematic, or being told that they are by people who care abut them, refuse to avail themselves the many avenues of treatment that could help them.

It is appropriate to speak of these things not just because this is the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Sabbath of Repentance, but because Shabbat is among our most powerful symbols of the process of overcoming evil:

Rabbi Wayne Dosick, in his book "Dancing With God" teaches us that:

Shabbat is such a precious gift to body and soul because, in essence, it says to us, 'You have control over your own life. You have the ability to stop work, to stop the unrelenting onslaught of time, to call a halt to the seemingly endless demands on your energy.' In modern parlance, 'You can run your business, your business does not have to run you.' [Hillel Cohn The American Rabbi, Spring/Summer 2000, pg. 220.]

The ability to choose among alternatives, to allow it to be the Good Inclination that moves us rather than the Evil one, is one of the highest capacities of human beings and one of the most consistent and profound teachings of our Judaism.

Not just tonight, but throughout the year, may we remember that evil comes from within the souls of even apparently normal people, it is the result of our reason being overwhelmed by our instincts, and though we are always responsible for our actions, we are to blame when we don't do whatever we can to see to it that it is our highest selves, our Shabbat selves, through which we act.

If we do, we will have gone a long, long way to putting much of the world's evil out of business.