Destroy, Destroy It All

 Another day, another holy revelation.

And I am honestly getting sick about encountering watered-down Torah.  In an effort to make it palatable for modern sensibilities, Torah, I find, is often watered down to feel-good universal messages.

Which is obviously - to be clear - a part of Torah.  And it is not wrong to interpret it that way.  

But there are so very many parts which are so downright frightening that we don't talk about these.  Take, for example, the discussion of idolatrous cities, in which the command is to destroy the entire city, including its inhabitants, take all the spoils, burn them in the middle of town, tear it all down as if it never existed, and never, ever re-build.  We just don't like to talk that way anymore, and maybe there is some importance to that.

But even if we're not comfortable in terms of applying it to, say, people and places where people live (that is, after all, quite literally genocide and scorched-earth warfare), at least we can be honest and apply it to our own lives in a spiritual context.

Take, for example, conversations regarding the yetzer harah - a phrase which appears absolutely nowhere in Torah.  I don't know exactly its origins, but this is essentially "the evil urge" or "the evil inclination."  There are many wonderful discussions out there regarding this being a creation of G-d which enables us to have free will and which is always present and must be tended to and watched or else it will swallow us whole.  But, again, where the heck did this come from?  Certainly the Torah, to state an obvious point, addresses man's baser nature in commanding us what not to do.  But a discussion of some seemingly independent, extraneous urge - huh?  This simply isn't the case.

Instead, what we find here is that if it does exist, it is also capable of being totally destroyed, and I mean totally destroyed, and, perhaps more importantly, never to be re-built.  Ever.  And that, much like constant joy, not only is this possible but is actually a mitzvah.  We Jews love our mitzvot - why isn't there more focus on this?  Why the constant focus on "the struggle" and its inevitability - as opposed to looking into the Torah and reading, quite literally, that there is no need for the struggle?

I have many theories, including outside influences, which I believe to be the real culprit here, but I'll leave that for another day.

For now: ever-present joy is possible and its "evil urge" opposite is absolutely capable of being destroyed.