need to be controlled, and can be, but only with difficulty. Desire itself is referred to as the "Evil Desire" because of this admixture of destructiveness and lawlessness that it necessarily carries, not because licit sexual desire and expression are evil in any way according to the Rabbis. This interpretation gives us important clues for the understanding of several seemingly mysterious rabbinic dicta.
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Several rabbinic sayings seem paradoxically to identify the "Evil Desire" with good. The most explicit is perhaps the following:
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 | | Nahman in the name of Shmuel [said]:
Behold it was good
[Gen. 1:31].
This is the Good Desire.
Behold it was very good
[ibid.]. This is the Evil Desire!
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| | Is the Evil Desire indeed good? Incredible!
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| | Rather, without the Evil Desire a man would not build a house or marry a woman or beget children.
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| | (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 73)
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This is an unambiguous rejection of ethical dualism, that is, of the doctrine that two forces contend within a human being, one for evil and one for good. In contrast to other religious formations around and among the Rabbis (including Jewish ones), which held that there were opposing forces of good and evil in the world, the Rabbis insisted that everything came from God, and since everything came from God, then everything was good. This interpretation of the passage is supported from parallel texts in its context, in which suffering, punishment, and even hell are identified as "very good." We must then interpret the Evil Desire in these Rabbis dialectically, as itself composed of constructive and destructive forces within its own singular existence and essence. My hypothesis is that the Rabbis inherited the
term
"Evil Instinct" from a first-century Judaism much more averse to sexuality than they were, and unable to dispense with it, they ironized the term"The Evil Instinct is very good" and rendered the concept itself dialecticalblind in one eye, as it were. Sexuality, according to them, neither is itself evil (as apparently many first-century Jews held), nor is it an uncomplicated good, despite the fact that it leads to building houses, marrying, procreation, and eggs! It is called the Evil Desire solely because of its destructive side,
from which it cannot escape,
but at the same time there is full recognition not only of the necessity for desire but of its very positive overtones.
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This interpretation is supported from the following text: "Rabbi Meir said:
You shall worship God with all of your heart
[Deut. 11:13]The word 'heart' is written with an extra letter, to teach that one should
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