Bruce Lee’s Oak and the Success of Evil

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Bruce Lee's Oak and the Success of Evil 
Bruce Lee taught: “The oak tree is mighty, yet it will be destroyed by a mighty wind because it resists the elements; the bamboo bends with the wind, and by bending, survives.” This is the foundation of Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee’s approach to martial arts and to life, the motto of which is: “Using no way as way; having no limitation as limitation.” Instead of clinging to a fixed set of techniques and rules, naively believing they will guarantee success in every situation, the true martial artist is fluid “like water,” constantly adapting and responding to the dynamism of combat without any rigidity or imposition of systems.
This afternoon I was thinking about a number of people – people I’ve met, as well as famous figures I haven’t met – who were both rigid and highly successful, and were successful precisely because of their single-minded rigidity! I’m talking about people like Steve Jobs, Douglas MacArthur, Robert Moses, etc.
This led me to notice a nuance in this particular version of Bruce Lee’s statement: “The oak tree is mighty, yet it will be destroyed by a mighty wind because it resists the elements; the bamboobends with the wind, and by bending, survives.” The oak tree is described as “mighty,” but the bamboo is not. The quality that makes the oak tree mighty is the same quality that guarantees its destruction; the quality that precludes “might” in the bamboo is what guarantees its long life.

This, in turn, led me to an epiphany about tzadikim (righteous people) and resha’im (wicked people). There are many pesukim (verses) in Sefer Tehilim (The Book of Psalms) and Sefer Mishlei (The Book of Proverbs) which compare the short-term success of resha’im with the long-term flourishing of tzadikim. For example: “when the wicked bloom like grass, and all the doers of iniquity blossom, it is to destroy them forever and ever” (Tehilim 92:8) is contrasted with: “A righteous person will flourish like a date palm, and like a cedar in the Lebanon he will grow tall. Planted in the house of Hashem, in the courtyards of our God they will flourish. They will still be fruitful in old age, vigorous and fresh they will be” (ibid. 92:13-15).

The rasha (wicked person) seeks to forcibly impose an artificial, ambitious, self-serving system onto reality with the goal of attaining absolute power and greatness at any cost. A basic tenet of Mishlei and Tehilim is that such an individual is destined to fail for the same reasons that Bruce Lee stated: the more tenaciously the rashaclings to his self-aggrandizing schemes, the more inevitable and more catastrophic will be his downfall. It’s only a matter of time before his plans clash with reality, and reality always wins.

My insight into Bruce Lee’s quotation added a new dimension to my understanding of this phenomenon. I had previously focused on the fact that the "oak tree"-like rasha“will be destroyed by a mighty wind because he resists the elements,” but the “oak tree”-rasha “is mighty.” In other words, the rashawill attain great success and strength because of his wickedness. Look no further than Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, and the other great resha’imthroughout history. It is true that reality eventually caught up with them and destroyed them, but see how mighty they became up until their downfall! Thus, when we see resha’im enjoying great success, not only should we view this as a sign of their impending collapse, but we must also recognize that they have purchased a superlative level of success by paying the price of ultimate self-destruction.

This also sheds a new light on the type of success we can expect to see from tzadikim. The tzadikwill not be mighty like the rasha. Rather, his success will be his steady flourishing and bamboo-like endurance.

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