I have gotten myself into trouble on more than one occasion for vaguely suggesting that I don’t really believe in evil. The response has been an eye roll, at best, but more often a sharp expression of disgust. My interlocutor inevitably points out that I must believe that something like the Holocaust is evil. I concede — but by then I realize that not only am I making a losing argument, I am upsetting someone. So I have learned my lesson: It is never helpful for a rabbi to undermine the concept of evil.
Yet there are rabbis who have come before me who, in more subtle and sophisticated ways, seem to be doing exactly that. One of them is the fourth-century talmudic sage Rava, who is the source of the surprising teaching that when we celebrate Purim next week, we are obligated to get drunk. Even more startling is his description of the drunken state: “A person must get intoxicated on Purim to the point where one does not know the difference between cursed is Haman and blessed is Mordecai.” (Megillah 7b)
Rava seems to be instructing us to alter our perception to the point where Haman, the villain of the Purim story, and Mordecai, one of its heroes, are indistinguishable from one another. In this form of Purim consciousness, we are no longer able to evaluate the world around us in positive and negative terms. Everyone is the same and all has become one.
Could it be that Judaism is actually encouraging us to disregard the categories of good and evil, if only for a day? Is this a call to transcend all binaries and thus to leave morality behind? This is a position we associate with Nietzsche and nihilism — not with rabbis and religion. Yet a teaching from another rabbi elsewhere in the Talmud also seems to support the vision of a world beyond good and evil:
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Rabbi Aha bar Hanina said: The World to Come is not like this world. In this world, upon good tidings one recites: Blessed is the One Who is good and does good, and over bad tidings one recites: Blessed is the true Judge. In the World to Come one will always recite: Blessed is the One Who is good and does good. (Pesachim 50a)
Rabbi Aha acknowledges that in the present reality (“this world”), we cannot help but see things in terms of good and bad. That is natural and appropriate. But he projects a future (assuming we understand the World to Come as the messianic age rather than the afterlife) in which we realize that everything is God’s doing and it is all for the good.
This may provide a key to understanding Rava’s charge to drink to the point of losing a hold on the distinction between blessings and curses. He is asking us to push our perceptions into the future and, with some chemical assistance, to briefly glimpse the World to Come. In that world, there is no longer a distinction between good and evil because we have come to understand that goodness is the fundamental nature of reality.
The critical difference between these two visions of the world is not the nature of reality itself, but where one stands in time. As long as we are still in the midst of our journey through history, the world will always appear to be divided into good and evil, friends and enemies, triumphs and tragedies. But one day, when we have reached the end of this world’s history and arrived at some new phase of existence, we will be able to look back and recognize that everything was for the good.
That distinction can also help us make sense of a somewhat cryptic explanation of Rava’s call to intoxication by the 16th-century mystic philosopher Rabbi Yehudah Loew, also known as the Maharal of Prague: “‘One must get intoxicated to the point where one does not know the difference between cursed is Haman and blessed is Mordecai.’ When a person is in this state, they are in completeness (shleimut) with no lack. And when one gets there, this is itself the end.”
The purpose of our drinking on Purim is to gaze (with somewhat blurry vision) into the future, all the way to the very end of time, and to see a world that has reached a state of completeness. All the battles will have been fought, all the enemies defeated, and we will be at peace. There will no longer be a need for blessings or curses, or for concepts like good or evil. Those stark moral binaries helped us navigate our way through history, but we aspire to one day leave them behind.
On Purim, we imbibe a taste of the World to Come — and it is intoxicating. But in the sober reality of the day after Purim, we wake up to realize: We are surely not there yet.
So I no longer say that I don’t believe in evil. But if you overhear me late next week muttering something to that effect through slurred speech — forgive me. I’ll be back from the future soon enough, with a bad hangover.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on March 8, 2025. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
