Adam and Chavah
It was a beautiful garden. Lush foliage,
animals,[1]
perhaps some colourful birds, a literal paradise designed for two human beings,
Adam and Chavah, the original צלם אלקים
created by Gd and commissioned to implement Gd’s vision on Earth. But there
was, as they say, a serpent in the garden, a snake in the grass, and he identified
a defect in the human design. Although granted explicit permission to eat of
any tree save one, Chavah succumbed to the serpent’s invitation to eat from
that single forbidden fruit, and Adam soon followed suit.
What defect did the serpent discover? It
was not merely a weakness for attractive fruit, כי טוב
העץ למאכל וכי תאוה הוא לעינים. The serpent lured Chavah by promising that
if she and Adam would eat from the fruit, והייתם כאלקים,
they would be gods, like Hashem. This greed was the weakness. But what did
Chavah and Adam know about Hashem at this point? What
was the magnet for their greed? Rashi explains that they knew Hashem to be a
Creator of Worlds, and this was what Chavah and Adam wanted: to be יוצרי עולמות, Creators of Worlds, the capacity to
create life.
And then we arrive at a perplexing
part of the story. Hashem punished Adam and Chavah – but rather than take
something away due to their greed, Hashem only adjusted the challenges to
acting on their greed. I would have expected Hashem to punish Chavah and Adam
by inhibiting any capacity to create – but Hashem explicitly licensed to Chavah
and Adam the privilege of bringing life into this world. Hashem told Chavah:
You will bring life from your body! HaShem told Adam: You will bring life from
the ground! Painfully, to be sure. Frustratingly, of course. But Hashem allowed
them the ability to create worlds; why?
The Eigel
For an even stronger example of
perplexing punishment, look at what happened millennia later, in the events
which would lead up to the first Yom Kippur.
Moshe proclaimed the Aseret haDibrot
(Ten Commandments) to the Jews, and then disappeared up Mount Sinai. Day after
day, his followers waited at the base of the mountain, still wearing their
finery, still anticipating the return of the miracle-working leader who had
brought them out of Egypt, split the sea and delivered to them the Torah. One
week went by, then two, then three. Finally, after nearly six weeks, their
long-eroded patience gave way and they created a Golden Calf as an intermediary
via which to communicate with Hashem.[2]
Hashem told Moshe, “Descend, for your
nation has become corrupt.” Moshe took in the scene, smashed the tablets of the
Torah and punished the perpetrators - but what should have happened next? The
nation overstepped in seeking to communicate with Hashem, so should not Hashem
have cut off communication?
But again, just the opposite - according
to Rashi, Hashem commanded that we create a Mishkan to facilitate our access to
Hashem, and Hashem even inaugurated it in a grand and beautiful and joyous
celebration, with special sacrifices and gifts! And when Shlomo haMelech built
the Beit haMikdash, the eventual successor of that allegedly bedieved
Mishkan, the celebratory dedication overrode Yom Kippur that year; as the
gemara explains, the Jews ate and drank![3]
Even per Ramban,[4]
who contended we were always meant to have a Mishkan and Beit haMikdash and
these were not a response to the Eigel, the יום השמיני,
the final day of the dedication of the Mishkan, may have been added just to
make up for the Eigel – and this day was such a grand celebration that a
midrash identifies it as יום שמחת לבו,
the day of Hashem’s great joy![5]
How could the Eigel’s terrible sin, with its death toll in the thousands, lead
to יום שמחת לבו?
Level 1: Learning from Failure
On a simple level, we could suggest
that Hashem provides new opportunities for Adam and Chavah, and the Jews of the
Wilderness Generation, because now they are ready to learn. As psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
wrote, “There are no mistakes, no coincidences. Just gifts given to us to learn
from.[6]” Or
as a famous athlete[7] once said, “I've
failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I
succeed."
Level 2: Turning Failure Into Success
On a deeper level, though, Rav Avraham
Yitzchak Kook identified a second reason for Hashem to respond to our
transgressions with new opportunities: because recognizing our aveirot can
stimulate us to perform mitzvot.
Rav Kook was troubled by a classic
gemara, in which the sage Reish Lakish declared, גדולה
תשובה שזדונות נעשות לו כזכיות, teshuvah is so great that it converts
even intentional sin into merit.[8]
How could an intentional aveirah possibly become a source of merit?
In his Orot haTeshuvah, Rav Kook
explained that aveirot cause our sensitive neshamot (souls) to feel unsettled
and anxious, recognizing that we have left the proper path. This anxiety
triggers what he called העריגה והחפץ הקבוע אל השלמות, our inherent longing and desire to achieve perfection.[9] And
so the aveirah becomes not an instant of degradation but a long-term building
block, a catalyst for greatness, turning our intentional sin into an
opportunity for merit.
This phenomenon of ירידה לצורך עלייה, destruction which fuels growth, appears not
only in Torah, but also in nature. This is how muscles grow. When we exercise,
we inflict “micro-tears”, small rips in the muscle fibers. Soreness after a
workout is a function of those tears. Those tears are what enable muscles to
grow; in repairing the tear, we experience hypertrophy, the fibers grow. The
tears are our building blocks.
Level 3: Responding to Our Motivations
But let’s look closer, and we’ll see a
third level, a deeper genius the Torah is revealing in its comprehension of sin
and redemption, failure and possibility.
Chavah and Adam wished to be Creators;
that’s a potentially positive motivation. But they wanted to do it quickly and
cheaply, just eat a fruit and you become like Hashem. So Hashem taught them
that they could indeed create life, but it would involve time and labour and
pain. Hashem identified the creative desire that had been corrupted by their
greed, and transformed their aveirah into a building block.
The Eigel was born from a desire to communicate
with Hashem, but it was corrupted. So Hashem granted us an opportunity for
successful communication with the Divine, a building block for greater success –
a success which went on for many centuries of service.
In other words – transgression is
often born from a potentially good desire, poorly implemented. Hashem is
willing to provide additional opportunities to make good on those positive
desires.
Hashem has three reasons,
then, to reward our failure with opportunity.
·
First,
because we learn from failure.
·
Second,
because capitalizing on our feelings of guilt and discomfort can lead us to
success and growth, and justify the mistakes, the micro-tears, we endured in
order to get there.
·
And
third, because our failures often stem from useful drives.
And so Hashem
responds to Adam and Chavah by giving them greater opportunities to create, and
to the Jews of the Golden Calf with greater opportunities for access to Gd.
Of course, having
new opportunities also means we can fail in a greater way. Adam and Chavah’s
power of creation generated Kayin, who killed his brother. And look at the many
times we desecrated our Mishkan and Beit haMikdash, leading to its destruction!
And yet – Hashem gives us those chances.
The Goal of Viduy
We are going to recite viduy (admission of
sin) ten times today.[10] On
one level, viduy involves declaring to Gd that we are a hot mess, filled with
failure. We analyze the chain of events that brought us to this point, with an
emphasis on the bad: The vulnerabilities which made us susceptible to
destabilization. The actions of our transgressions. And the damage we created, for
ourselves and for others, with those transgressions. We declare sin and regret,
and we ask for forgiveness.
But viduy is also an appeal for opportunity.[11]
We declare ולא שוה לנו! (it wasn’t worth
it!), that we feel anxiety and upset as a consequence of our sins, testifying
to our innate yearning to achieve perfection. We recognize that our sin
involved desires to do something which could be good, which could generate
greatness if only we could address our vulnerabilities and interrupt the destructive
chain. We appeal for help שלא אחטא עוד,
that we never sin again. We ask Gd to reward
our failures, with the opportunity for success.
To give but one example: A chevra
man, who enjoys his role as a social leader, is vulnerable to the
excitement that comes with holding, and selectively sharing, potentially
scandalous information. He learns of someone’s personal mistake – and that
event leads him to share the information with other people in the community,
violating innumerable halachot against lashon hara, rechilut, lifnei
iver, and much more.
Before he ever gets to Yom Kippur, our
chevra man must find a way to make amends for all of the people he has hurt
– the subject of the scandal, that person’s family, the audience who heard the
news, their own audiences for their re-tellings, etc. And then on Yom Kippur,
as part of Viduy, our chevra man needs to acknowledge to Hashem and
express regret for what he has done, and describe how he is going to avoid a
repeat performance in the future. But he should also recognize the potential
good – his desire to connect, unite, organize and rally people together. His
horrible feelings from his wrongdoing. These can be strengths!
And this recognition can lead Hashem
to send more opportunities the way of our chevra man – information which
could lead him to corrrect, unite, organize and rally people for chesed, for
tzedakah, for Torah study, for prayer. Our chevra man can follow the
model of Adam and Chavah as positive creators, the Wilderness Generation
building a Mishkan, Shlomo haMelech dedicating a Beit haMikdash!
Yizkor
Many people here will be saying Yizkor
shortly, remembering relatives who have passed away. Yizkor testifies that our
opportunities never end. Even for those who have gone on to עולם האמת (the world of truth), their families, the
people they impacted through their lives and deeds, remember them, commemorate
them with tefillah and tzedakah and mitzvot, and appeal to Hashem to remember
them as well. The gemara states, אין ציבור מתה;
whatever mistakes a previous generation made, the community lives on and has
the opportunity to correct them.
Closer
Yes, failure is depressing – and
admitting it ten times in one day is a lot, enough to drag anyone down. But when
we recognize that our failure can point the way to our success, that viduy is
actually a request for the opportunity to achieve, we will be inspired to
follow Shlomo HaMelech’s counsel, כי שבע יפול צדיק וקם
– The tzaddik falls seven times, but each time he gets up.[12]
Or as Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith re-worded it: "Success consists
of getting up one more time than you fall down." And that success will be
well worth celebrating.
May our anxiety over
our sins move us to identify both our mistakes and our strengths, and
use those strengths to return to Hashem – and may Hashem return to us.
[1] Based on the
לעבדה ולשמרה
mandate
[2] See Kuzari
1:92-97, and Ibn Ezra to Shemot
[3] Moed Katan
9a
[4] Ramban to
Vayikra 9:3
[5] And see
Haameik Davar to Vayikra 9:1 on what יום שמחת לבו adds to יום חתונתו
[6]
https://www.wellbeing.com.au/kinship/parenting/10-steps-to-a-confident-child.html
[7] Michael
Jordan
[8] Yoma 86b
[9] Orot
haTeshuvah 5:6
[10] See Tur
Orach Chaim 620, Maharil and others for explanations of why 10.
[11] Ditto viduy
maaser; see Devarim 26:12-15
[12] Mishlei
24:16
