400.10 EVIL AND POLARITY (pps.91-94)

hard cover page 91

Evil is the implicit flip-side, or converse, of good. Evil is anti-polar to good.³⁴⁰

All evils are negations.
-Maimonides³⁴¹

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——————- NOTES ——————-

³⁴⁰ See Berg, Kabbalah for the Layman, p. 85.
Cf. Bokser, Abraham Isaac Kook, p. 267. “there is a conception [in the Kabbalah] of a negative counterforce paralleling institutional religion, the ideal essence of religion.”
Cf. Zohar Parshat Tmmah 129b. “. . . the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, is more greatly exalted [by the Kaddish] than through any other prayer, because it causes the ‘other side’ to wane and its empire to decline.” As cited in Luban, “The Kaddish,” p. 2 10. Cf. Zohar 1:4a. We are here “to turn darkness into light.”
Cf. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 263. “Throughout this process the two tendencies of perpetual ebb and flow-the Kabbalists speak of hithpashtuth, egression, and histalkuth, regression—continue to act and react upon each other. Just as the human organism exists through the double process of inhaling and exhaling and the one cannot be conceived without the other, so also the whole of Creation constitutes a gigantic process of divine inhalation and exhalation. In the final resort, therefore, the root of all evil is already latent in the act of Tsimtsum.”
Cf. Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, p. 293.
There is a theme in kabbalistic literature that when the Ten Sefirot (of holiness) were created, alongside them came into existence Ten Sefirot of impurity (de-mis’avusa).

³⁴¹ Maimonides cites and approves this general proposition in Guide 3: 10 (Dover ed., p. 266).

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