The following is a transcript of Episode 84 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hello, friends. This is Daniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from Jerusalem. And this is a special series within For Heaven’s Sake, entitled For Heaven’s Sake — Israel at War. And today is day five. And in this series, Yossi and I are going to try to delve into the emotional, intellectual, spiritual depth of Israeli society at this time, what we’re feeling and what we’re thinking about, and to share it with you, so that many of you from 6, 10 plus thousand miles away could have a window into what all of us are experiencing right now. 

In each session, which will be about twice a week every two or three days. We’re going to pick what we feel, at this time is at the center, or one of the centers of our conversation and our attention. And for today, we’ve picked the theme of evil.

As more and more of the stories are coming out, as the numbers are growing 1,200, and they’re just gonna go higher. Tragedy, war, fear, are all part of our emotional universe. We’re just looking straight, straight at what, for many of us, and maybe it’s a part of our privilege, is just this unfathomable evil, incomprehensible evil.

And what does it mean to live with that? What does it mean to see it? And how do we understand it? And how do you build life in the midst of it? 

And yesterday, President Biden used the word. And as Israelis, he connected to us so deeply because he used words that reflected our deepest feelings. And there were times when, in the political divides, which president do we prefer? His speech, I’ve never seen an American president’s speech which moved Israelis so deeply. Because he was speaking to an experience that we’re all trying to come to terms with. And in his speech, he was trying to give words to it. And you saw it on his face.

I am so grateful to him for his speech and grateful to him for his humanity. I feel like you saw his humanity. He was struggling. How do I live with this evil? I’m not talking about the political consequences of it, which were also comforting, but that’s for me. I felt I was in the presence of a great man because his humanity, Yossi, may be an antidote, you know, in the midst of this evil, there was decency and there was a willingness to see it and to struggle with it. And I just, from my little place, I just want to express my deep, profound gratitude. You know, I was crying and I’ve heard that from many people.

Yossi: It’s also not so hard these days to be crying. It doesn’t take much.

Donniel: That’s true. Did you hear the speech? Yes, of course you did.

Yossi: Yes, I read it. It was extraordinary. Extraordinary for exactly the reason you said. And he felt overwhelmed by the stories that he was hearing.

Donniel: Because evil is overwhelming. So, you know, go back, you know, how do you make sense of this evil? This, this senseless, maybe it’s an oxymoron, how do you make sense of it, Yossi?

Yossi: You know, people can do evil, they can lapse into evil-doing, but they’re still not necessarily inherently evil. But there’s something that we saw emerge on Shabbat that was very familiar, and very familiar to the Jewish experience. And I am so reluctant to invoke Holocaust comparisons. 

I, and this is something you and I have argued about over the years. I feel that the Holocaust is in some ways a kind of an anti-sacred space that needs to be treated as untouchable in the same way that the sacred is treated. And I am also very reluctant, extremely reluctant, to make connections between Israel’s situation and the total helplessness of the Jews then. I actually hate that comparison.

At the same time, when I forget who it was, compared Hamas bands going from house to house, murdering collectively and he compared them to the Einsatzgruppen, the SS who massacred Jews mostly in the Soviet Union and at the killing pits. I didn’t viscerally cringe at the comparison. 

And I don’t compare us to them. That’s not it. Because we’re not victims. Israelis despise victimhood. And if anything, we prefer to be condemned and pitied. That’s so deep in the Israeli ethos. But there’s something about what Hamas did and the way they did it that puts us before absolute evil.

And we don’t know what to do with that. You know, there’s this wonderful song that came out by an Israeli singer called Aya Feiglin this past year. And she’s singing about the Shoah and about her high school trip to the camps. And it was half funny and half trying to look back and understand the experience. 

And she said, I can’t understand that. They were trying to make me understand the Holocaust, but I can’t. I don’t know any evil people. And the line really stayed with me because we don’t know evil people. We may know people who occasionally do bad things. Maybe we know people who’ve done something terrible. But they’re not defined by evil. They’ve made serious lapses in behavior and judgment. What do you do when a person is taken over by evil, becomes evil?

Donniel: You know, Yossi, I love this conversation. And, you know, we’ve said it before to our audiences that we’re providing our insights, but you and I both know how important it is to us personally and how much we grow from it and just this, just,

Yossi: Absolutely, absolutely.

Donniel: As I’m thinking about it, this distinction that you made between evil act and absolute evil. I want to digest it because I always see evil action. I almost deny the existence of absolute evil. I don’t see it. I don’t think about the Holocaust in ways that you have. I certainly didn’t experience it, not second or third-generation. And you’re right. You know, I see terrorists, and you could hear a lot of this conversation. You know, they did something, but then you’re looking for why.

When it’s an evil act, then there’s, you know, you did this to instigate this. And you’re into a different type of conversation. Who started? Are you also responsible? Evil actions, and I’ve looked and included, the truth is, I have included terrorism as evil acts, as acts in which normal people within a certain context are moved to do something. They’re responsible for it. I’m not taking the blame for it. But it’s still is, it’s within the context of the human race as I know it. 

And almost all of the people who I’m even willing to fight, go to war, it was evil acts. And then a lot of the political conversation makes sense. Maybe this is also why it’s so hard for us when people are putting this in the context of an occupation or putting it in the context of a blockade of Gaza. And just your simple category just makes it all clear for me now why I was so uncomfortable. When you’re talking about absolute evil, there’s no context that explains or justifies. And I wanna thank you for that. 

Yossi: So, Donniel, we know, well, thank you. Thank you for that response. And I so much appreciate the distinction you’re making between acts that can be contextualized, understood, however appalling they may be, and however the need remains to resist them, as opposed to acts that defy any contextualization.

But my question to you, Donniel, is how do we know? Okay, instinctively, instinctively we know. But is there some objective way of measuring when an evil act becomes itself the embodiment of evil?

Donniel: It’s a, we don’t, Yossi, and it’s gonna be time soon for us to talk about this too even though right now we’re so focused on what we’re experiencing and that is to know that what one person may seem as in may define as an evil act another might define as absolute evil and Some of the people, the lens through which they are looking at what Hamas did, they look at it as an evil act.

I don’t try to convince people. There’s a difference between knowing something and being able to prove it. And I appreciate that somebody might see it in another context, come from another place. There are people for whom death is so much more of a regular occurrence, a murder. Barbarism is a regular occurrence. 

For us, you look at it and it’s not the magnitude, it’s not the numbers. There were no human beings. These people had lost their humanity. And I can’t, and if you don’t see it, Yossi, I can’t convince you. If this doesn’t do it, and that’s okay, and I wanna, like I’d almost wanna say to some of our friends around the world who, and we’ll talk about this at another time, for whom so much of their experience of Israel is connected to, or in the context of people attacking and delegitimization. 

And it’s just, they live there so much more than you and I do, even though we travel, et cetera. That, I appreciate, if someone doesn’t see it, you know, our rabbis say, just as it is a mitzvah to say that which will be heard, so it is a mitzvah not to say that which won’t be heard. And I don’t know, these were not human, this was not humanity.

And again, maybe that’s, I have this romantic notion of what humanity is really about. I could accept that humanity engages in evil acts, but this absolute evil is outside of the parameters of the human race. And I can’t prove it, but I know it.

Yossi: Yeah, yeah, I’m wondering if absolute evil is defined in some sense by the critical mass of the evil that’s committed, by the delight that the evildoer takes in the action, by the nature of the atrocity. I mean, there are all of these categories one can raise, and yet none of that feels quite adequate.

There’s another dimension. And you know, here it’s interesting because in Judaism we don’t really talk about evil or Satan, the Satan. Not very much. It’s there, it’s there in Hasidism, it’s there in Kabbalah. The mystics speak more of evil. But there is this concept of the sitra achra, the other side. It’s a very mysterious and elusive idea. 

And there is this notion of the other side breaking through, that we have a certain protection because we’re created in the divine image. There’s a certain wall of protection around our humanity. And yet something breaks through that then takes over and erases the divine image. And that’s what we were in the presence of. 

And again, people instinctively know it. And I think that that’s what in some way we’re responding to, whether we believe there is such a thing as a sitra achra or not. Use it as a metaphor if you prefer. But there is something, some intrusion that erases the other side, that erases our divine image.

Donniel: That other side.

And you know, this is, I would say this is the real shock. You know, there’s the shock at how it happened. There’s the shock at the mourning and we’re all now, every one of us, you know, I have about 15 shivas that I have to now go to of Hartman Institute students and faculty and their children. 

So there’s shock at all of that, but I like there’s, you know, when you look at the streets, I feel maybe that people aren’t walking in the streets, not because of the missiles, they’re just, there’s a daze at encountering this.

Yossi: Absolutely.

Donniel: This evil, what you call the sitra achra, the other side, that other. You know, and maybe, maybe what’s most frightening is that in order, most of us, in order to live, we assume that decency is the norm. We assume that people will do evil actions. 

But this level of evil, we’re not wired, we choose not to see it. And maybe, and again, for us to talk more at another time, that’s why it’s also motivating people to a completely different response. Because you don’t contain it. You don’t ask how do you live with it? You almost feel a mitzvah to eradicate it. Last words, Yossi.

Yossi: Yeah, yeah, you said something very powerful before, which is that Israeli society today, all of us, are stunned. And I know it’s so hard for me to do anything in an efficient way these last days. And time itself seems confused, malleable. There’s something unreal about this time. 

And I think it’s what you touched on earlier, that when you come face to face with absolute evil, and all of us this week came into the presence of absolute evil, it disorients you. It makes it impossible to just pick up daily life because daily life itself has been violated. And that’s what I think we all feel with all the mourning and the anger and the determination, we feel violated.

Donniel: You know, people could debate, and we’re not debating. We’re just trying to mirror. For us Israelis, our life has been shifted and changed by our encounter with this other side, this absolute evil. How you progress from here, we’ll talk about more. This is For Heaven’s Sake — Israel at War — Day Five.