First, the word aveirah adds a clear spatial dimension to the act of sin. As mentioned, the word aveirah derives from the word la-avor , meaning to cross over. The physical imagery of overstepping presupposes clear boundaries that demarcate where one is and is not permitted to trespass. Perhaps sin was conceptualized in this manner, specifically in Mishnaic literature, to underscore the clear legal borders that were structured within the texts of rabbinic Judaism. As the rabbinic codifiers of the Mishnah and Talmud hewed the corpus of Jewish law, legal boundaries became clearer as well. Once the parameters were codified and canonized,31 violations of such laws could more aptly be described as an aveirah—a transgression.
Second, the word aveirah relates to the word avar, meaning “the past.”32 While this etymological connection is certainly more tenuous, the conceptual connection between sin and time is actually a much discussed theme in more modern rabbinic works. Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, known as the Vilna Gaon, posits a fascinating connection between time and failure. He notes that when God informs Avraham of the future exile in Egypt, God stipulates that the children of Avraham will be slaves for “four hundred years.” However, when promising the ordained redemption from Egypt, God affirms that it will occur in “the fourth generation.” Exile is foretold as a measure of time—four hundred years—while the redemption is expressed in terms of subsequent generations. Based on this distinction, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna states the following:
Destructiveness is a product of time—and constructiveness is from within mankind.33
Time, according to this construct, arches towards failure. The course of the world’s affairs can only be corrected towards redemption through the acts of people. Only mankind can correct the entropy of time.
Time’s connection to failure can be expressed in two ways. Maimonides in his Laws of Repentance describes those who are mired in sin and ignore the call to repent since “they forget the truth due to the vanities of time.” Time’s perpetual march forward obscures man’s locus of control. If someone decides to be totally passive, time will still continue making decisions for them. Failure naturally emerges from a passive approach to time. Mankind needs to assert its creative control over time in order to assure it is redeemed. When the absurd vanities of time eclipse man’s locus of control, entropy becomes the guiding force forward.
Another association of time with failure is the effect of the past on the present. Namely, past experiences can inform, enlighten, and educate, but they also contain a halting force. The memories of yesterday can distract from the responsibilities of today. In Sefer ha-Hinukh, an anonymous work about the Jewish commandments, the author warns that an overemphasis on past experiences can be a catalyst for a spiritually absent present. In the work, written as an educational curriculum for the author’s son, Sefer ha-Hinukh explains that many people living in the tenth through thirteenth centuries did not don tefillin (phylacteries) due to a misconception about sin; some believed that previous misdeeds precluded them from performing the mitzvah of tefillin.34 Sefer ha-Hinukh teaches that abstaining from tefillin because of other misdeeds is both an incorrect assumption about tefillin as well as a dangerous misconception about the observance of commandments in general. The author writes, “In truth this prevents many people from observance and is a great evil.”35 Past mistakes do not preclude present spiritual actions:
This is not how I operate with God in my home for I know that there is no one so righteous who does good and never sins. Nonetheless, they should never be inhibited from getting involved in a mitzvah in the moment that the spirit of God adorns them to do good. Who knows if perhaps they will continue on their path of goodness until death. And death comes fast.36
The Sefer ha-Hinukh warns people that ruminating about mistakes and failures can distract a person from performing mitzvot in the current moment. Guilt, shame, or spiritual malaise about the past easily misdirects a person’s present positive trajectory. Since dwelling on the past can discourage change, it is no wonder that the Jewish concept of repentance focuses so prominently on the future. Of the four legal qualifications for repentance, committing oneself to a proper future is the final step.37 If sin is becoming mired in the past, repentance is seizing control of the future.
Alan Lightman, an MIT professor, wrote a remarkable book on the varying concepts of time entitled Einstein’s Dreams. This work of fiction imagines how life would function with different conceptions of time. Lightman describes a town where time repeats itself. Another chapter envisions a world without time—only images. One story invites the reader to consider a world where everyone lives forever—infinite time. The small book contains many of the most profound perspectives on how time shapes our lives. One story describes a world where the passage of time brings increased order. In such a world, he writes: “Desks become neat by the end of the day. Clothes on the floor in the evening lie on chairs in the morning. Missing socks reappear.”38
Like all of the stories in Lightman’s book, this story presents an interesting thought experiment. How would people live if time, instead of being entropic, curved towards order? In many ways this description of time is the inverse of the idea suggested by Rabbi Elijah of Vilna’s conception of time as a destructive, exilic force in the world. When time is the force that creates order, there is far less pressure on man to be proactive in life. As Lightman describes in this story:
In such a world, people with untidy houses lie in their beds and wait for the forces of nature to jostle the dust from their windowsills and straighten the shoes in their closets. People with untidy affairs may picnic while their calendars become organized, their appointments arranged, their accounts balanced.39
Such a world, he explains, would also negate the meaning of much of man’s involvement in the world. By contrast, in the world described by Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, time increases disorder. The chaos and torment of time make failure more likely but also place added significance on human efforts. More socks may be missing, but they’ll never be found if we don’t search.
As discussed earlier, one of the metaphorical descriptions of sin is as a burden. Perhaps the term aveirah with its shared root with the term avar, meaning “past,” is a subtle reminder that our past sinful experiences must not hinder our will to repent. Sin at its worst warps our sense of time and burdens our ability to correct our future.
Sins as White as Snow
Franz Boas’ conjecture about Eskimo words for snow has long been discredited. Nonetheless, his idea still offers insight about how we think about language. Granted, the number of words for snow or sin may not be significant in one language or another, but the nature of the linguistic distinctions within each language is worth considering. As he writes:
Thus it happens that each language, from the point of view of another language, may be arbitrary in its classifications; that what appears as a single idea in one language may be characterized by a series of distinct phonetic groups in another.40
So it is with sin. Each word in biblical and rabbinic language for sin tells a different story about the nature of sin itself. Both the imagery of each term and the distinctions among them offer insight into how sin and failure should be considered in Jewish thought.
One of the most iconic rituals of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the scapegoat that is sent off a cliff to atone for the sins of the Jewish people. A Mishnah in Yoma (6:8) records that before offering the scapegoat the High Priest tied a strip of red wool around the animal’s horns. If the Jewish people were indeed forgiven, the red wool would turn white. This ritual, the Mishnah explains, was based upon a verse in Isaiah (1:18), “If your sins will be like crimson, they will become white as snow.” However many words Eskimos have for snow, we pray that our sins will eventually be described with one of them.
2
SIN’S ORIGINS AND ORIGINAL SIN
They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
—Donald Justice, “The Wall”
The
mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
When Sin Happens
The origin of sin occupies just twenty-five verses in the bible.41 Here is the basic synopsis: Following the story of creation, which includes nearly the entire first two chapters, the Bible presents the story of Adam’s sin. Adam’s sin begins in the final verse of the second chapter, “They (Adam and Eve) were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.” Enter the snake. Despite God’s earlier warning that eating from the Tree of Good and Evil will surely cause death, the snake reasons to Eve that God is just trying to prevent Eve from becoming like God. Eve eats from the Tree and proceeds to feed Adam as well. Immediately afterwards, Adam and Eve’s “eyes are opened” and they realize they are naked. After fashioning clothes for themselves, Adam and Eve hear the sound of God “walking through the Garden.” He calls out to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” They hide. Eventually they acknowledge their sin and God curses Adam and Eve each respectively with the pains of labor and the difficulty of child labor. The story concludes with Adam and Eve banished from Eden.
The only thing obvious about the story of Adam and Eve’s sin is how perplexing it is. Clearly, there are a host of questions that immediately present themselves to the reader. Firstly, what was Adam’s sin? Knowledge of good and evil seems like a helpful thing to possess, so why was it prohibited? Secondly, aside from what, how could Adam have sinned? Isn’t knowledge of good and evil a prerequisite for sin? How could he have sinned before eating from the Tree that gave him powers of discernment? These questions are of course just added to the myriad narrative riddles that appear throughout: Why did Adam try to hide? What was the nature of God’s punishment? What’s with all the nudity?
As intriguing as all of these questions are, there is another question, often overlooked, that may be even more central to understanding the nature of sin’s origin. Namely, when. When did the story of Adam and Eve take place? A cursory reading of the Bible would suggest that the story occurs immediately following creation. Structurally, the order of Genesis certainly would suggest that the story of the Tree occurs immediately following the conclusion of God’s seven days of creation. The creation story ends on Saturday with the creation of Shabbat, so it wouldn’t be far-fetched to assume Adam and Eve ate from the Tree sometime after the completion of creation. Perhaps Sunday morning brunch?
The importance of this question seems to be unknown to most scholars and thinkers. Christian chronology for the sin of Adam and Eve varies, though most scholars ignore this question altogether. Some depictions have the temptation to eat from the Tree lingering for an agonizingly long amount of time.42 One scholar, Archbishop James Ussher, was more specific. He dated Adam and Eve’s residence in Eden to be just short of two weeks. According to Ussher’s calculation, man was created on October 28 and expelled on November 10.43 The Jewish answer to when Adam and Eve sinned is actually quite clear. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 38b) presents the following chronology for the creation and eventual sin of Adam:
The day is divided into twelve hours—starting with sunrise and ending with sunset. The first five hours of the day were occupied with the formation and creation of Adam. During the sixth hour he named all the animals. During the seventh hour, Eve was created. Cain and Abel were born during the eighth hour. During the ninth hour Adam was commanded not to eat from the Tree, and during the tenth hour they all transgressed. During the eleventh hour they were judged, and during the twelfth hour—immediately before Shabbat—they were banished from the Garden.44
The Talmud’s chronology is startling. We are used to thinking about the sin of Adam and Eve as a perversion of God’s pristine creation—a post-creation act. That is how the Bible situates the story of sin. Creation is complete—sin destroys the perfect world. The Talmud’s chronology tells a very different story. The story of Adam and Eve’s sin was a part of the seven days of creation. Sin was an act of creation. What, however, did sin create?
The Creation of Sin
Imagine, for a moment, Adam and Eve moments after they were created. The creation process still not even complete, they stand in Eden as witnesses to God’s hand in the world. In such a world, creations and their Creator still remain tethered. Many descriptions of Adam prior to his sin go to great lengths in describing the lofty state of his connection to God. Milton poetically describes how Adam struggles in such a world even to conceive of the very concept of death:
So neer grows Death to Life, what ere death is,
Som dreadful thing no doubt; for well thou knowst
God hath pronounc’t it death to taste that Tree.45
According to Nachmanides, prior to the sin, Adam naturally reflected the will of God, like all His other creations:
…he (Adam) did whatever was proper for him to do naturally, just as the heavens and all their hosts do—“faithful workers whose work is truth, and who do not change from their prescribed course.”46
Adam, prior to sinning, was not autonomous. Rather, like the stars and moon, he innately reflected God.
The state of Adam prior to the sin, however, poses a problem. If Adam before sinning naturally followed the will of God, what possessed him to sin? In other words, how could Adam sin before he was given free will? This question has been addressed by many Jewish thinkers but can perhaps be best understood through an analogous lens of contemporary political debate. William Safire, who ran a brilliant linguistic column entitled “On Language” for The New York Times, discussed the difficulty of framing the two sides of the debate in the abortion battles of the 1970s.47 Those who opposed abortion aptly described themselves as pro-life. Their opponents were then faced with the dilemma. What should those who advocate for abortion rights call themselves? To simply take the inverse side of their pro-life opponents would leave them in the politically indefensible camp of anti-life. To describe themselves as pro-abortion also would be misleading. They were not advocating that people get abortions. Rather, as they eventually came to be known, they were pro-choice. Many members of the pro-choice camp in fact thought abortions were an upsetting solution; still, they reasoned, women should have the right to choose. Adam was not pro-sin, he was pro-choice. A world completely subsumed by Godliness, while sublime, would be missing a crucial component—a visceral sense of choice.
Herein lies the crucial importance of the question of “when.” A plain reading of the Bible presents the story of Adam as happening after the creation story. Such a reading suggests that sin was a corruption of creation. However, based on the aforementioned, seemingly undisputed view of the Jewish tradition, Adam’s sin occurred during creation. Sin was an act of creation. What did sin create? Sin created Adam’s sense of self. Following his sin, Adam emerged as an autonomous being with free will and capable of choice. No longer simply an extension of God, Adam emerged with an independent sense of self.
Sin and Self-Creation
Sin as an act of creation is most emphatically presented within the commentaries of the Hasidic school of Izbica-Radzyn. The Hasidic school of Izbica-Radzyn, no strangers to controversy, explain that the sin of Adam was an essential act in the process of God’s creation of the world. Here is Rabbi Mordekhai Yosef, the founder of the Izbica-Radzyn school:
Creation came into this world through the sin. As the Zohar says, “The First Man had nothing at all of this world.” And in the writings of the Holy Ari, before the sin, “he was barely anchored in this world.” After the sin, he became firmly placed in this world. That was God’s will, so that goodness could be attributed to the work of human hands.48
Rabbi Yaakov Leiner, the son of Rabbi Mordekhai Yosef, elaborates on the perspective established by his father. Adam’s sin was always a part of God’s creation plan. He writes:
There was profound wisdom in God’s design [eitzah ‘amukah be-ratzon Hashem]. How could shame [bushah] be placed into the human heart, to become an integral part of them? Indeed, the
world itself is founded on that quality [of shame and awe]. At this point, Adam, the creation of God’s own hand, still saw manifestly that nothing can happen without God’s willing it. Profound wisdom, then, was needed to invest him with shame. That came about, by God’s will, through the episode of the Tree of knowledge.49
This approach highlights the term bushah, shame, which appears in the introductory verse to the biblical story of Adam’s sin:
And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
Adam and Eve’s lack of shame is the pretext for the entire story of the sin. The goal of Adam’s sin was creating within man a sense of shame.
It is important to note that the term bushah is featured prominently in another biblical story of sin. In the thirty-second chapter of Exodus, we are introduced to the story of the golden calf. Following Moshe’s ascent to God on Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, the Jewish people begin to become restless. Moshe was only supposed to be gone for forty days, but according to the faulty count of the Jewish people, they believed that Moshe was still absent on the forty-first day. Moshe was late. Believing that their leader had abandoned them, the Jewish people fashion a new leader in the form of a golden calf.
This story, as presented by several sources, is a reenactment of Adam’s original sin. As Shaul Magid explains, “…the story of the exodus and Sinai is not only a story of failure but a story whose failure is prefigured from the beginning.”50 The Talmud, explains that initially revelation at Sinai cured the effects of Adam’s sin. That cure, however, would only be momentary. The golden calf recreated the repercussions from Adam’s sin.
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