In the evening service, we add a prayer—Hashkeveynu—for a safe night. It includes the following verse (translated literally): “Remove from us enemy, plague sword, hunger, and sorrow. Remove from us ‘Satan’ from before us and from behind us.”

As you might expect, there are a lot of Jews whose head explode at the mention of “Satan.” Many liberal prayer books omit it. Some include it in the Hebrew but fudge the translation. Our own Sim Shalom translates: “Remove the evil forces that surround us,” which, as things go, is about as good a non-literal translation as you’re going to get. Many prayer books follow Rabbi Hertz (as in, Hertz chumash, the one most of us grew up with) who suggests that the verse is a reference to a different kind of enemy, an internal enemy, the yetzer hara, the “evil inclination.” So they substitute the line, “Keep us from wrongdoing.”

Now it is true that “Satan” itself has an interesting history. It originally meant “accuser,” as in “prosecuting attorney.” In the Tanach, “hasatan,” “the satan/accuser,” is an angelic figure who speaks with G-d about human misdeeds. At a somewhat later date, hasatan, a “professional” description, becomes Satan, aka the Devil, a malevolent personality.

The idea of the Devil certainly doesn’t seem to match our current psyche. But unfortunately, tragically, it does indeed match our current reality, as the recent events in Israel clearly show us.

Satan is alive and well.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great French author and vicious anti-Semite, knew a lot about evil. Next time we want to play down the reality of Satan, or even Hasatan, we would do well to remember Céline’s words: “The greatest defeat, in anything, is to forget, and above all to forget what it is that has smashed you, and to let yourself be smashed without ever realizing how thoroughly devilish men can be. When our time is up we people mustn’t bear malice, but neither must we forget: we must tell the whole thing without altering one word, everything we have seen of man’s viciousness…”

If ever there was a time for hashkeveynu, it is now.