The Heart's Inclination: Thirty-Two Paths of Torah

1“For the inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth, and I will no longer strike all living things as I have done.”¹² Notice the wording: why does the verse speak of the inclination of man's heart? It could simply have said, “for the inclination of man is evil”; the word “heart” seems unnecessary. We must also ask: how does this explain why He will no longer strike all living things, when man is liable to sin against Him again, Heaven forbid?

2We may explain this by way of allusion. The Gemara says: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said: I created the yetzer hara, and I created the Torah as its antidote.”³ That is, the yetzer hara is very powerful, especially in the years of youth, and a person cannot be saved from it unless Hashem helps him. How did Hashem give us “a helper against it”?⁴ He prepared the cure before the blow and gave us His holy Torah. When a person fills his mind and his heart with words of Torah and delves deeply into them, the yetzer simply cannot rule over him, for the Torah is its antidote.

3This is what the verse alludes to by placing the yetzer in the heart, the lev. To stand against the yetzer, a person must use the thirty-two paths of wisdom,⁵ which are the study of the holy Torah, and the number thirty-two, written lamed-beis, spells lev. The same idea is hinted in what is written about the receiving of the Torah: Israel was “like one man with one heart.”⁶ Before receiving the Torah, Bnei Yisrael reached the level of “like one man,” of unity, and they reached it through lev echad, “one heart”: through the lev, the thirty-two paths of wisdom, which are the Torah. The main time for this is youth. Then a person has no worries weighing on him at all, and it is then that the yetzer hara works with all its strength and every kind of scheme to bring him down “to the pit of destruction.”⁷ So that is just when he must strengthen himself and hold fast to the stronghold of the Torah.

4This answers our second question. Since Hashem saw that man has a remedy in the thirty-two paths of wisdom, the verse continues, “and I will no longer strike all living things as I have done.” In the merit of the Torah, from then on every person would have the strength to stand against the yetzer's enticements. It would never again be as in the generation of the Flood, when “every inclination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil all the day.”⁸ As we find in the Midrash, Shem the son of Noach had a yeshivah where Torah was learned,⁹ and the learning went on until Avraham Avinu, of whom the Gemara says that he “was an elder and sat in the yeshivah.”¹⁰ From Avraham on, the light of the Torah spread to all generations through the holy Avos and their descendants.

5It follows from all we have said that Hashem's whole covenant never again to bring a flood upon the world rests only on the merit of Torah study. Each person must therefore root this idea in his heart, and take great care that not a single day passes without Torah. This is especially true in youth, when a person needs a great deal of help from Heaven to be saved from the yetzer hara, and only the power of the holy Torah, its antidote, can save him.

6May Hashem help us be privileged to attain the thirty-two paths of wisdom, and through them we will surely bring the redemption near, with the coming of our righteous Moshiach, speedily in our days. Amen.