Quick Definition:

Yetzer here means an impulse or instinct. Ra means “bad.” The yetzer hara is an instinctive impulse for self-gratification (bad), embodied by the emotional responses of the beast within you. It’s opposed by the yetzer tov, a counter-force that pulls you towards the divine, embodied by the emotions of your divine soul.

Is There Something Wrong With You?

If you’re like the rest of us, you are at war with yourself. Part of you knows what’s right, and part of you doesn’t give a hoot. Part of you seeks a purposeful, meaningful life, and part of you just wants what feels good now.

Here’s what’s going on: As a human being, you are designed to have two divergent sets of instincts seeking two distinct forms of pleasure.

Your yetzer hara finds pleasure in all things that sustain and propagate the species—plus a lot of stuff it just grew into that doesn’t have to make much sense.

Your yetzer tov finds pleasure in reaching beyond itself towards its origin in the divine and transcendental.

You can see it all in the creation story of Genesis: “G‑d formed the Adam…”1 The word for “formed” there is ויצר. Only that it’s spelled with two yuds: וייצר. That’s to tell you that Adam, the prototype human being, was formed with two instincts—unlike all other creatures that have only one.2

Here’s how that plays out:

Why You Really Need a Yetzer Hara

An animal follows its instinct to survive. A human being who follows his raw instinct destroys himself—because that instinct is most often going to be the wrong one.

On the other hand, if you destroy your yetzer hara, you’ll also destroy yourself. The Talmud describes at length a one-time effort by the Jewish sages to capture and destroy the yetzer hara. Within a few days of its capture, they noticed that chickens had stopped laying eggs. They had to quickly release their captive before the entire world would become desolate.3

Turns out, the yetzer hara is essential for life on Planet Earth. In fact, the bad instinct is really not just good, but very good:

Rabbi Shmuel cited the verse, “And G‑d saw all that He had made, and it was very good.”

“Very good,” he explained, refers to the yetzer hara. For if it were not for the yetzer hara, no one would ever marry, no children would be born, no one would build a home, and the world would not endure.4

That’s the lynchpin in this game: The bad urge is not really bad—it’s actually very beneficial in crucial areas where the yetzer tov is inadequate. It’s just got this selfish bug to it. That’s really what causes all the trouble.

And that’s what we’ll get to in this article: How to perform that delicate surgery of removing the selfishness out of the yetzer hara without emasculating it.

But first, let’s get to know this critter a little better.

How Deep Does the Yetzer Hara Go?

Take a step back and look at a human. There’s a body, a bridging component called a neck, and a watermelon with eyeballs on top. It should be no surprise that we are intrinsically self-conflicted. That separation between head and body gives us a lot of advantages, but it also provides a challenge. Getting your brain and your body in sync with one another is not always fun.

The split goes deeper, down to the soul level. On the outside, we’ve got the soul of an intelligent beast. But look deeper and you’ll find a critter that looks up at the stars in wonder, craving to know what is going on up there, just how big it is, and how small am i.

Dig yet deeper and you’ll find a being that cannot go about life without pondering “Why am I here?” “What is life?” “What does it mean to exist?”

Your inside and your outside don’t match. We call that the battle between your divine soul and your animalistic soul.5 The yetzer tov is the emotional component of the divine soul. The yetzer hara is the emotional component of the beast.

Yet there’s still hope. The divine soul and the animal soul have a mental component, as well. That provides an interface between them. That’s your leverage. We’re about to get to that. But first:

How to Quickly Beat Up a Yetzer Hara

There are two ways to handle the yetzer hara. One’s a quick fix and the other a long-term solution.

The quick fix is brute force: More conviction, more guts, more self-discipline. Get tough. Tell yourself, “This is bad. This is stupid. I’m going to regret this. I don’t want to go to hell.”

You might call this the “just stop it” method.

And at times, you need to do that. At times, it’s the only thing that will work. It works because your mind is always stronger than your heart, as powerful as the emotions of the yetzer hara can be. They could be making a barbeque party in there, they could be burning like brushfire. Your mind can still say, “No, we’re not doing this,” and walk away.

But it’s not a long-term plan. You don’t grow from this strategy alone. Nothing really changes. It doesn’t make for a happy, healthy life. At some point, you’re going to burn out.

And besides, who says the yetzer hara hasn’t gotten to your mind, as well?

So we need an alternative, long-term solution.

The Secret Weapon for Long-Term Yetzer Hara Management

Shine a bright light.

We all have that light inside ourselves. We need to dust it off and switch it on.

That light is called “the hidden love.” It’s deeper than the yetzer tov and far more powerful. But it’s hidden, dormant, and awaiting you to awaken it. Once you wake it up, the yetzer hara doesn’t have a chance.6

As the saying goes, “A little light pushes away a whole lot of darkness.”7

The hidden love is the place where your divine soul connects to the Infinite Light (i.e. G‑d). It’s that sense inside that there’s nothing in the world that can disconnect you. The sense that there’s nothing so important, so tempting, or even so threatening, that it can trump holding on to that connection. As far as that love is concerned, cutting the cord is an absolute impossibility.

How do you awaken that love?

The tested and proven method is daily study and contemplation. You take time each day to learn and ponder the teachings of the great masters of the inner Torah. You contemplate them obsessively, groping for clarity of understanding, for true realization of what they mean and—most importantly—how all this applies in your life.

You get your head into a good space. You keep it out of bad spaces. And then all that you’ve pondered starts to become real to you. It hits your heart.

That’s the true meaning of mind over heart: Not the bullying kind of control of a master over a slave, but a state where mind and heart become a single entity, so that the thoughts of your mind become realities in your heart.

And the deepest of those realities is that you really don’t want to pull the plug on your connection. You just can’t knowingly do that. In which case, listening to the yetzer hara is just out of the question.

And yet, abstract contemplation is not enough. You need an inner dialogue. Here’s how:

How to Train Your Inner Beast

Like we said earlier, the beast within you may be mainly heart, but it has brains too. That could make it quite sinister, but it’s a redeeming factor, as well.

For one thing, it means you can talk to your beast. As you learn and ponder those powerful words of the masters, you can find ways to explain them to yourself—your childish, animal self. Bring it down to earth. Make it real.

Your contemplations need to become a sort of dialogue between your two souls.

Not a negotiation—there’s no point negotiating with a beast. It never loses. Ruminating over why your yetzer wants what it wants is a proven plan for pulling yourself into its mud. But a deep, meaningful conversation where you discuss your priorities in life. What true, long-term gratification looks like. And who you really are—that’s vital.

Your beast says, “I’m the center of the universe.” Your divine soul wants to snap back, “I am here only to serve my Maker.” As long as they just keep screaming at each other, no one budges.

But in the meeting place of your mind, it’s easy to say, “My dear little beastie, please take an objective look. Did you make this place? Do you control it? Don’t you realize how big it is? Aren’t you kind of embarrassed to think the way you do?”

And the beast has to concede, “Yes, that is kind of absurd. It’s just the way I feel. But I suppose that doesn’t make it reality.”

The meeting parlor of the mind is also a good place to discuss what a good life is all about. What sort of pleasures really last? What is it that is so satisfying about a mitzvah? How do I want to feel about my life when I leave this world? In what way is my contribution beyond time?

Again, not at the time when the beast is aflame. No point engaging it in conversation then. Rather, this all happens at appropriate times you make for yourself for stillness and contemplation.

Then we get to the practical, behavioral stuff:

Train, Rehearse, and Domesticate

Train your yetzer hara for impulse control. It’s simple. There’s food in front of you. Don’t eat it. Just wait a few minutes. Then decide to eat it. Wait a few more seconds. Then make a blessing over your food. And eat it.

Repeat at every meal until it becomes second nature.

Or there’s a choice of food before you. Say a yummy piece of cake and a dull cracker. You would rather have the cake. Eat the cracker instead.

Sounds useless? You wouldn’t believe how good this is for you. A little impulse training could save you from murdering someone one day. A little delayed gratification could easily change the trajectory of your entire life.8

Here’s another tried and true strategy: Mental rehearsals.

Say, for example, there’s some nudnik who gets on your nerves and triggers that yetzer hara every time. Rehearse your next interaction with this guy. Imagine saying all the right things to make the nudnik feel good. Imagine pushing all the right buttons. Rehearse again and again in your mind until you feel you’ve got it down pat.

Your next interaction is guaranteed to be on a whole new level. More importantly, you’ve got a much tamer yetzer hara out of all this. Thank the nudnik for providing the opportunity.

It’s the baby steps under controlled conditions that make the biggest difference. It’s hard to accomplish much when the yetzer hara is already out of control, but when you’ve got it in a clinical setting within the four walls of your imagination, you can move far real fast. Big changes come with small steps.

The Good Life

As you carry these thoughts and teachings of our sages into daily practice, slowly, slowly, the yetzer hara comes around to your side. It lets down its defences, begins to question its own self-centeredness. It consents, assists, and even begins to truly enjoy all the good and wonderful things brought to it courtesy of the yetzer tov.

Does that mean it will never bite again? Absolutely not. It could go up in flames any moment. All that’s required is some new temptation, or even just some natural, hormonal shift.

So don’t throw out the leash. Never trust that the quick-fix, just-stop-it method has become obsolete.

But one thing is for certain: Taking this longer, inner route through mind and heart makes for a far happier, pleasurable, and rewarding path through the garden of life. More peaceful, as well.