A person is built with two inclinations, and neither is a devil.
Yetzer hatov and yetzer hara. The rabbis said that without the evil inclination nobody would build a house, marry, or start a business — so they locked it up, and the hens stopped laying. There is no original sin here and no fallen nature, only an appetite that has to be steered.
The two inclinations are the rabbinic account of human nature and they leave no room for a devil. The yetzer hara is not malice; it is appetite, ambition, the drive to build and to have. Bereshit Rabbah has the sages capture it and discover that nobody builds a house, marries, or lays an egg, so they blind it and let it out. The good inclination is commonly said to arrive at bar or bat mitzvah, which is why children are not held liable and adults are. Nothing is inherited: there is no fall, no transmitted guilt, and the morning liturgy states that the soul given to a person is pure. Sin is an act rather than a condition, so the remedy is changed behaviour rather than rescue. This is the deepest structural difference between Judaism and the religion that grew out of it.
Were it not for the evil inclination, no one would build a house, marry, or father a child.
Bereshit Rabbah 9:7 (rendered)The drive the tradition will not call a devil, because it needs it.
The same ground, other faiths
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