If you haven’t watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, it’s likely that none of this will make a lick of sense to you. Head over here so that Katara can explain the gist of it.
My favorite character on the show is Azula, the princess of the Fire Nation. She’s precise and deadly like the lightning she shoots out of her fingertips. Underneath her poised, calculating exterior is a deeply troubled and lonely girl starving for unconditional love.
What’s interesting about Azula is that she’s a polarizing character in the fandom for Avatar: The Last Airbender. Many fans of the show believe that Azula is purely an active and willing agent of evil who was born bad then made worse by the way she was raised. But some fans, like myself, believe there’s more going on with her beneath the surface.
The third season of the show, Book Three, does a lot to humanize Azula. We get brief glimpses into her psyche, revealing that she’s been struggling longer and harder than she lets on. Near the end of the show, as her sanity starts to unravel, her conscience catches up with her and forces her to reflect on her behavior. Finally, she completely unravels.
We could read this as a simple narrative of a girl losing her mind because of all the pressures acting upon her. But there’s an alternative reading that offers something a little more interesting.
To discover it, we have to go back about 2,000 years, give or take a few centuries, and look at what the Rabbis who created the Talmud had to say about how we become moral beings.
Did you know that according to many rabbis, we’re not born with a yetzer hatov (the good inclination)? According to them, people are ruled by the yetzer hara (the evil inclination) until the age of thirteen. Incidentally, this is the same age as a boy’s bar mitzvah. Halachically speaking, this is the age he becomes responsible for fulfilling all his moral, legal, and ritual obligations.
We like to think that understanding this only came with modern psychology. It’s amazing to consider that two thousand years ago, there were people who understood that moral reasoning is a stage of human development and built a legal code around that. Two thousand years ago, there were people who understood that our capacity for ethical behavior doesn’t just flip on like a switch. It has to be learned and cultivated. Indeed, they understood that prior to the point when a child fully develops their moral compass, even their acceptable behavior is driven more by desire for reward and fear of punishment than the ethics of a course of action.
What does this have to do with Azula?
What if, instead of Azula merely spiraling into madness, we’re witnessing the awakening of her yetzer hatov? What if her struggles with her own mind is a symptom of her moral consciousness starting to shift from the desire for reward and fear of punishment to acknowledging and taking responsibility for the ways her behavior affects others? Yet, because of the distorted and conflicting messages she received from the adults in her life, this transition is a lot rougher than it otherwise would be. As of the end of the show, that process is still incomplete, but the fact that she starts it on her own, without substantial support or guidance, ironically says some good things about her.
Bizarro Torah 