The Yetzer Hara: Who is Your Master?

Fear is not supposed to be bad. Fear teaches us that something is wrong. Fear is there to protect us. Today, humanity is in a state of fear but fear can be instantly relieved when we know the truth. Fear is caused by the unknown. Once we know that we are safe, the fear goes away. Anxiety is a game to teach us something deeper about who we really are. God places us here on earth and we think that each day is just a day in the life but the truth is that each part of what happens to us in our day is there to teach us something new about who we really are.

In Judaism, yetzer hara (Hebrew: יֵצֶר הַרַע yēṣer haraʿ) is the congenital inclination to do evil, by violating the will of God. The term is drawn from the phrase “the imagination of the heart of man [is] evil” (יֵצֶר לֵב הָאָדָם רַע‎, yetzer lev-ha-adam ra), which occurs twice at the beginning of the Torah (Genesis 6:5 and 8:21).
Wikipedia

Every man has the choice to do evil. We live in a garden that is full of every kind of fruit that we can possibly imagine — some are good and some are bad. The earth is our garden. To learn the difference between good and evil we had to create evil first. It is not like we’re intentionally evil but in our ignorance in learning who we are, we’ve done wrong.

Do you know any child who never did a single thing wrong? Who just obeyed his parents and did everything they said? Of course not. Every person needs to be a child, first, and then we grow up because we learn what is good for ourselves and each other.

When we know what is good, we feel confident because our good choices are having a good affect on who we are — we become successful human beings because we are happy and we have made those around us happy too.

That is when we know.

We are here to fight a good fight. It is now the end of the day that man was created on. This day never ends until man understands that he is created by God and he is the image of Him. That means that humanity is good.

Now we are face to face with our counterpart who is evil.

We all have been evil so we can know that no one is better than the other. We all have been each other; therefore, it is now time to look at our counterparts with compassion.

We easily can fall back into our dormant sleep that has kept us in darkness if we fail to remember that we are creations of God and here to be in His image. When the yetzer hara is testing us, he will put us in a state of fear because there is something that we do not know how to react to. That is when our focus has to make a complete surrender to God; otherwise, we fall back into the dark hole, in which, we’ve been struggling so hard to stay out of.

It is okay to not know because that is when God is saying there is something to know. The more uncomfortable a situation is the greater the truth is that God wishes to reveal to you.

Faith in God

Humans have a hard time trusting. As a default, we trust our old paths that our brain has taken us to before. Even if we logically know they have not served us in a positive way we still want to continue to take them. We are creatures of habit but we need to be aware of our habits that need to be in line with our Creator. We need to go against our default and create new positive paths that will serve us and each other in a more functional way.

The yetzer hara is not scary. The yetzer hara isn’t even bad. The yetzer hara is our helper. If we learn to see him more as a friend then we can realize that when we are up against his next challenge, we can say to ourselves, “I got this!” because we know it is actually God in disguise trying to show us something deeper about who we really are.