Q:
Why is the evil inclination so prevalent in the world today and seemingly on the increase recently?
A:
That’s a good question and listen to one answer.
Today it becomes very difficult to be an apikores. Once upon a time, the world was in darkness and people thought life was just a vital quality and that’s all it was. They didn’t investigate anything; not much at least. Today we know so much about the processes of life, the processes of chemistry, of physics, and we see miracles of miracles.
The truth is, it’s impossible today not to be a ma’amin in a Creator. If you walk into a house and you see everything is in order, everything is clean, everything is neat, you know there’s some baalebuste around here, even though she’s not there right now.
And since this world is so perfectly in order in every detail, the machinery of this world is so complicated, that without any effort at all, you recognize a Borei today.
If you think about the human body, that when there’s an infection that enters the body, let’s say through a crack in the skin, then the lymph nodes, the nodes of the lymph, begin to produce little bodies that march out from those nodes and start growing and become macrophages. And they start speeding through the body directly to the pace of the infection unerringly!
How could that happen? Each macrophage is as efficient, more efficient, than a police squad car. A police squad car needs information, it needs a radio to tell him where to go. They need nothing. That’s chemotaxis. There’s a certain chemical that the germs when they come in, they put into the blood and the macrophages smell that chemical and they speed towards the source without any error.
Now in the blood streams, there are millions of chemicals, millions of cells. Millions of cells! So how can a macrophage discover which cell is the invader? He has his mechanism for knowing. Without any mistake! And he pounces upon the invader and he eats him up.
You can see pictures of how a macrophage works! It’s an ameba. It looks like it’s impossible to be in motion; it has no hands or feet, but it crawls like a caterpillar. It moves its outside surfaces and contracts and retracts and it speeds through cells, it speeds through veins and arteries, until it reaches its destination. And it, without any error, discovers the invader and swallows him up.
How does that happen? It all came from the original ovum.
So you see it’s like putting together some chemicals in an empty yard and some old metals and some pieces of paper and going away and after a few hundred thousand years, you come back and find a huge beautiful airplane that was blown together by accident by the winds and the storms. An airplane with motors, with wheels, with wings. The truth is the most beautiful airplane is nothing compared to the human body, nothing at all.
And so today, it would be impossible not to be a ma’amin. And therefore Hakodosh Boruch Hu, in light of all the discoveries of science, found it necessary to continue to present the world with a test. Otherwise, there’s no purpose of being in the world, if it’s so easy to be a believer in Hashem, and that’s why He made the yetzer hara greater.
The lies of the media have become more powerful. The colleges have become more powerful in publicizing their lies. And therefore, even those books that tell you about these miracles, every few lines they say, “It developed, how we don’t know exactly, but fortunately it developed in this-and-this manner.” Every few lines, they try to remind you of evolution. And therefore, the propaganda becomes stronger and stronger in order to blind people to the evidence that’s before their eyes.
So today the yetzer hara has to be bigger than ever before. If we had the little yetzer hara of the previous generations, it wouldn’t be able to contend with the discoveries of science and people would laugh at the apikorsim. That’s why Hashem created the newspapers today and the colleges and the libraries and the radio and TV and they’re all busy, day and night, pumping foolish lies into the public, in order to blind the public to the truths that today are so obvious and would certainly convince them of the fact of a Borei who created the world with wisdom.
January 1990
