The yetzer hara, usually translated "evil impulse," is an elusive rabbinic concept. The words derive from God's observation in Genesis 8:21 (paralleled earlier in 6:5) that "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth." In Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible, the word yetzer itself—the Hebrew root means to fashion or create—is neutral, denoting human thoughts and impulses of all kinds; much later, the notion became prominent that there were two main inclinations, one for good (yetzer hatov) and one for bad. But during the rabbinic period, from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. to the final redaction of the Babylonian Talmud in roughly the sixth century, the yetzer came mostly to be seen as a force specifically for evil. Invoking it was a way of answering the question of why good people do bad things.
In Demonic Desires: "Yetzer Hara" and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity, the Israeli scholar Ishay Rosen-Zvi has given us a taxonomy of the yetzer in its rabbinic understanding. Although his study is not the first to center upon this concept, researchers in the last half-century have devised remarkable new critical tools for reading rabbinic texts, and he has made good use of them. In the meantime, especially recently, the yetzer has become a leitmotif of academic discourse in such fashionable areas as the study of gender and sexuality, rabbinic anthropology, and the "rabbinic body."
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