Shaul and evil spirits
Shalom and thank you for your question. You wish to understand better the story of why King Saul persecuted David. You say that G-d sent an evil spirit to enter King Saul so that he would kill King David, but actually Shaul never did kill David. Perhaps because of the righteous life he led before his pursuit of David, G-d did not allow him to fall so low. Nevertheless the pursuit in itself was indeed not a good thing.
To understand the matter of free choice, we will refer back to the Torah portions dealing with the enslavement of the Jewish people in Egypt, and the saga of how Pharaoh refused to let them go despite plague after plague, until the plague of the firstborn. You would think that most people would have given up long before Pharaoh did, and allow the Jews to leave Egypt. This was not to be, G-d had other plans for Pharaoh and Egypt. The world and the Jewish people themselves had to see that G-d is almighty, and the husks (shells) of spiritual impurity in Egypt had to be broken. There were ten plagues, and each plague was another stage in the process of purifying Egypt.
When we do not behave in accordance with G-d’s will, it makes a sort of callouse on our soul. Pharaoh was very calloused so to speak, spiritually, he had performed too many wicked deeds, such as bathing in the blood of Jewish babies, so that he was no longer a likely candidate for using his free choice. In the first few plagues he did not choose wisely and refused to let the Jewish people go. It was at that point that G-d hardened his heart, so that he continued to refuse to release the Jews, forcing G-d to send more plagues. In this way Egypt was rectified by witnessing the miraculous plagues which were a revelation of G-dliness. The consequence of Pharaoh’s previous wrong choices was the hardening of his heart that led to all the above.
King Saul was, unlike Pharaoh, a truly righteous person initially, “head and shoulders above”. (Book 1 of Samuel 9:2) Unfortunately, Saul became became open to the possibility of doing evil when he made the fatal mistake of not carrying out G-d’s instructions to the letter concerning the totally evil nation of Amalek who were supposed to be wiped out entirely. The one night that Agag, King of Amalek, had been left alive by Shaul after the war, he impregnated a woman and their descendant was the evil Haman, and possibly more wicked tyrants in history. Since Shaul made the wrong choice about that matter, he suffered spiritual deterioration, and thus was more open to making further wrong choices.
Just as there are spiritual beings in the supernal worlds, angels that are G-dly messengers and angels created by our good deeds, there are beings connected to the forces of impurity, such as the angel of death, and ‘bad’ angels formed by our misdeeds.
The demons we deal with today are the negative feelings that form a barrier between us and the fulfillment of G-d’s will. We can transform these forces of evil and impurity by channeling our emotions to the direction of loving G-d and seeking to do His will through joy, as opposed to allowing ourselves to be pulled down by the ‘demons’.
The sages of the Talmud teach us that stories of the Patriarchs are instruction for the children, and this means that when we learn Torah we have to see what we can ‘take’ for our daily lives, what lessons we can learn for our service of G-d. From the story of King Saul we can learn that even if we are gifted with naturally good character traits, we should keep up a connection with learning Torah and have a spiritual guide or mentor, from whom we accept guidance, as it says in Ethics of the Fathers 1:6, “Take for yourself a Rabbi and acquire for yourself a friend…” If we do this we are more likely to make wiser decisions that will help us reveal our spiritual potential and thus help bring the world to its spiritual completion. May it happen speedily in our day!
