The Choral synagogue in Vilnius. Photo: Facemepls via Wikicommons.

There is a well-known quote from the Prophet Isaiah: “God says: Who creates light and creates darkness: Who makes peace and creates evil: I am the Lord Who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).

This appears in our daily prayers with a small change: “Who creates light and creates darkness, who makes peace and creates everything.” In the Talmud, there is another modification: “Who creates light and brightness” (TB Brachot 11b).

The Talmud goes on to offer various justifications of this change in the original source. Why did they make these changes from the original? Is it not accepted that if God is the creator, then everything comes from God, whether in the natural or the human world?

I can explain it as a response to Zoroastrianism.

Zoroastrianism is named after Zoroaster Spitama (624-599 BCE), who based himself on earlier Indian religious ideas. It only became the state religion hundreds of years later under the Sassanian Dynasty (224-651 CE). But it was a challenge to the Jewish world. Its adherents worshiped a deity of good, known as Ahura Mazda, in opposition to the evil enemy Angra Mainyu, the adversary of all good.

The word Satan in the Torah is used simply as a verb for anything or anyone who gets in the way (Numbers 22.22). Divine messengers occurred often in the Torah, but always acting on behalf of God, never as rivals. According to Judaism, everything in the world originates from the Divine Creator. And this is what Isaiah was referring to when he says God creates good and evil, in the quote above.

The popularity of such an idea outside Judaism during the Talmudic era and beyond, both in the East and the West, was why describing God creating evil seemed to support a dualistic concept and Devil worship. That is why, in my opinion, the rabbis changed the wording of the quote — to avoid the idea that God created evil.

Early Judaism as expressed in the Torah did not see evil as an independent force. Events we call bad such as floods, fires, and earthquakes are simply natural features of a material world. In human affairs, things go wrong — sometimes because of our efforts, and sometimes despite them.

What monotheism means is surprisingly hard to pin down, but there’s a reason it swept the world. Its thesis is that even so-called monotheistic religions are not entirely monotheistic because they all have sub-gods or angels or devils. He suggests that Judaism is the same. Many religious Jews at all levels take angels, voices, and oracles seriously. And Judaism has always used anthropomorphisms in talking about God. But no one, I think, would suggest that there are gods or sub-gods that rival the Divine uniqueness.

The author is a writer and rabbi in New York.