A Road to Hell?
We’re all familiar with the axiom, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It reminds us that a willingness to do something is not the same as actually acting. But what road encompasses bad intentions toward a seemingly unqualified good?
In this week’s Torah portion, Sh’mini, we encounter the pair of PITs—Priests in Training—Nadav and Avihu. In a cryptic and tersely described episode, we learn that they are incinerated by God for bringing esh zara—alien fire—in sacrifice at the altar. Our tradition confronts this ambiguity with a host of explanations, attempting to justify why their punishment was so severe and why it is even characterized as an affirmation of God’s holiness.
One of the most compelling interpretations cites the pair’s excessive ambition. They are imagined to deride the aging Moses and Aaron and to careen carelessly into the sacrificial process with their own unmoored approach to worship. They are definitively dispatched in a manner meant to deter any future deviations from established practice.
The rabbis of our tradition imagine human beings as possessing two primary impulses: a yetzer ha-tov, or good inclination, and a yetzer ha-ra, or evil inclination. But the rabbis complicate this classic binary, teaching that the yetzer ha-ra is necessary if anyone is to have a family, build a home, or pursue any purposeful trajectory in life. Thus, the yetzer ha-ra is perhaps better understood as the quality of selfish ambition which, when channeled, can produce much good for the self and for the world.
Through this lens, the PITs’ transgression was an intent toward self-promotion at the expense of both respect for their elders and adherence to communal standards—an anarchic threat to the transmission of tradition. And the ultimate remedy: a profound humility—which we later learn Moses possessed to a rare extreme—that enables us to balance pride with concession to greater need and the greater good.