Torah teaches that you are created in the image of God, the One beyond Yesh and Ayin, Being and Emptiness, that is the Source and Substance of them both.¹ From the Jewish mystical perspective, being created in the image of God means that you are God manifest in a particular time and place. Being a manifestation of God, you, too, must contain both Yesh and Ayin. And so you do.

In human beings Yesh and Ayin appear as two distinct modes of consciousness: Yetzer ha-Rah and Yetzer ha-Tov, the human inclinations for doing evil and for doing good, respectively.

Yetzer ha-Rah is your capacity to perceive uniqueness, differences, otherness. It is your ability to focus on yourself alone and to separate yourself from everything else. Your Yetzer ha-Rah sees every living thing as an entity unto itself, as unique and apart from the whole. Why call it rah, evil? Because without the balancing insight of the Yetzer ha-Tov, the inclination for unity, the Yetzer ha-Rah’s insistence on separate self and independence pits one life against another, destroying any hope for community, justice, and compassion.

Yet a world without Yetzer ha-Rah is no less evil. Yetzer ha-Tov is your capacity to perceive the interdependence of things, your inclination to bridge differences, to build community, to effect harmony. Without the balancing vision of Yetzer ha-Rah, however, it is also the capacity to overlook diversity, to ignore uniqueness, to work toward a homogeneity that can be quite dull, threatening, and ultimately lifeless. Without the ability to recognize and respect individual differences, justice is reduced to totalitarianism, compassion to pity, and community to conformity.

A healthy world needs both Yetzer ha-Rah, with its welcoming of and respect for individuality, and Yetzer ha-Tov, with its insight into interdependence and harmony. The human mind contains both inclinations and must use each to balance the other. In this way the mind becomes whole. When the mind is whole the human becomes holy.

As long as you live under the dictates of the Yetzer ha-Rah, the illusion of separateness and independence, you will forever seek to control what happens to you. You will strive to hold on to pleasantness and avoid pain. You will go to great lengths to fulfill your desires, and when you are frustrated in your efforts (which must happen since you are not in control of what life brings) you will become angry or depressed or both.

As long as you identify one-sidedly with Yetzer ha-Rah, you will be unbalanced, selfish, isolated, anxious, and prone to all sorts of physical and mental diseases. The cure is to balance your perspective by tapping the Yetzer ha-Tov.

There is nothing wrong with the Yetzer ha-Rah’s sense of self as long as you realize that self is temporary, changing, and without independent existence, all of which is taught by the Yetzer ha-Tov. Only a self that knows its own transience is healthy, for only such a self can honor both Yetzer ha-Rah and Yetzer ha-Tov.

Yet if you were to identify too strongly with the Yetzer ha-Tov, you would seek to impose the absolute oneness of Ayin on the relative diversity of Yesh. You would insist upon a homogeneity among the things of this world and eliminate free will and choice. Justice and compassion would be of no concern to you, for you would see everything as the unfolding of fate. You would no longer see the other as an other, respecting differences and acknowledging boundaries. Everything would be seen as an extension of yourself, though you would not recognize this megalomania, but rather assume that your view must be God’s as well.

There is nothing wrong with the Yetzer ha-Tov’s sense of oneness as long as you realize that oneness is only half the story; that diversity, too, is a part of God’s completeness. The healthy self must know its value and its limitations. It must honor itself as a self and others as separate selves through the conscience and balanced use of Yetzer ha-Rah. And it must recognize its fundamental emptiness of permanence and its interconnectedness with all life and God through the conscientious and balanced cultivation of Yetzer ha-Tov.

Among the many texts that articulate this truth, I find this poem by Reb Nachum of Chernobyl to be the most striking:

If I am I and you are you,
then
I am I and you are you.
But if I am I because you are you,
then
I am not I and you are not you.

The Yetzer ha-Rah sees the I as I and the you as you: separate, distinct, independent. As long as this is the dominant outlook, you and I are in conflict. The Yetzer ha-Tov sees you and me as interdependent; we arise together and make no sense without each other. When this becomes the dominant outlook, the I is no less I, but, on the contrary, far more than I; it is you as well. And the you is no less you: on the contrary, it is more; it is I as well.

It is the aim of spiritual practice to balance your two inclinations and in this way channel your capacity through self to unity. Nothing is lost or rejected; rather, everything is integrated and lifted up. The next time you ask yourself, “Why am I here? Why was I born?” think of this: You are here to unify the Yetzer ha-Rah and the Yetzer ha-Tov in yourself in order to recognize the greater unity of Yesh and Ayin in God.

From the perspective of Yesh the world is a collection of diverse, separate, and transient beings competing with one another for survival. From the perspective of Ayin, the world is a homogeneous oneness without time, space, and separate beings. To become attached to either perspective is to miss the greater completeness of God.

God as God, however, cannot “know” this completeness, for “knowing” requires that one is separate from that which is known, and nothing is separate from God. Yet the completeness of God requires that knowing. Thus it is inherent in the very nature of God to manifest a being capable of perceiving both relative and absolute and that which includes both—that is, the Greater Unity of God. The human being is that being.

You are created to know the Greater Unity of God. You are not here to amass fortunes. You are not here to win wars or competitions. You are not here to earn rewards or make for yourself a great name. You are here to know God. You are not an accident. You are a necessary extension of God’s Greater Wholeness.

It is this Greater Wholeness that lies at the heart of all spiritual awakening. The question is: How do we awaken to it? There are many fine and powerful answers. The one I offer here, the one that defines my rabbinate and my daily life, is called Minyan, a tenfold path of Jewish spiritual practice.