Sin-A-Gogue
Page 4
When describing the concern of the Jewish people for Moshe’s delay, the term bushah reappears, albeit in a different form. The verse recalls:
And when the people saw that Moshe delayed coming down from the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him: “Up, make us a god who shall go before us; for as for this Moshe, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what has become of him.” (Ex. 32:1)
In this context, the term bushah means delay. Though the usage is different, the appearance and meaning of the term in the stories of Moshe and Adam are significant. How does the term for lateness relate to the sin of Adam?
Lateness connotes dissonance. You were supposed to arrive by now, but you are late. There is a disconnect between where you are and where you are supposed to be. Bushah, both lateness and shame, describes a conflict between expectations and reality. Adam prior to the sin was not capable of such dissonance. When God is suffused in all of reality, then whatever is present must have been God’s intention. For man to experience such dissonance, he must first have his own expectations and sense of self. It is man’s capacity to fashion personal expectations, ambitions, and aspirations that allow for experiential “lateness” when such hopes do not materialize. The product of Adam’s sin was the capacity to experience the shame of personal delay. Following the sin, now with his own will, wants, and desires, Adam could encounter the pain of missing the mark of his personal objectives. Indeed, as discussed earlier, the Hebrew word —sin, means to miss the mark. Adam’s sin created the possibility for man to form his own expectations, and along with that ability, came the possibility of failure.51
Hermann Cohen, the great Jewish neo-Kantian philosopher, argued that much of what separates religion from systematic philosophy is the former’s emphasis on sin through which there is a unique capacity for self-discovery.52 Philosophical ethics, Cohen explains, is concerned with the laws and norms that regulate collective societies and communities whereas religion is concerned with the individual. Religion, according to Cohen, is especially suited to facilitate individual discovery because of its emphasis on self-discovery as a product of moral failures. While philosophical ethics emphasizes ideals for the collective community, the individual can only be found through his moral failures. Some have compared Cohen’s approach to religion to Tolstoy’s remark, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”:
The crux of his account of religion’s distinctiveness seems to be the vaguely Tolstoyan assumption that insofar as individuals are moral, they are alike, but every individual is immoral in his or her own way.53
In Cohen’s words, “In myself, I have to study sin, and through sin I must learn to know myself.”54 In other words, religion for Cohen is the vehicle through which each person confronts bushah, each individual’s own unique “lateness.” Religion focuses on man’s moral lapses and there it finds the individual. Human individuality emerges through the friction of moral failure and aspiration. The process of failure and atonement as a medium for individual discovery is the province of religion alone. Systemic philosophy gave us societal norms; only through the sin and strivings provided by religion are individuals created. As Cohen emphatically writes, “the discovery of humanity through sin is the source from which every religious development flows.”55
Failure as self-discovery has been considered by other modern thinkers. In Brian Christian’s 2011 book The Most Human Human, the author uses a fascinating strategy to discover the essence of what makes us human. In 1950 computer scientist Alan Turing proposed using a test to differentiate between human thought and machine calculation.56 A judge should have a conversation via text with two individuals—one actual human and one computer. If, proposed Turing, a computer could convince a judge that he was in fact conversing with a human being, such a computer could be considered to be capable of thought. Though some thinkers argue with Turing’s suggestion, each year a modern-day Turing competition is arranged with the grand prize, known as the Loebner Prize, awarded to the most human computer. Brian Christian, he describes in his book, entered the competition for a different prize. Aside from the award given to the most human computer, the judges also reward the human whose conversation is most human. Mr. Christian’s work offers a fascinating lens into the signals and tools with which humans express their humanity. Of course, as the modern era progresses and computers become more sophisticated, the distinguishing characteristics of human beings become more and more elusive as well. As he writes:
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that every psychologist must, at some point in his or her career, write a version of “The Sentence.” Specifically, The Sentence reads like this: “The human being is the only animal that _____________.” Indeed, it seems that philosophers, psychologists, and scientists have been writing and rewriting this sentence since the beginning of recorded history.57
Likely, Hermann Cohen would have completed ”The Sentence” with the word “sins.” Similarly, those in the Izbica-Radzyn School would likely have completed ”The Sentence” with a tribute to man’s capacity to experience shame. Both, however, reflect the centrality of Adam’s sin to their conception of Adam’s essence. Of course, whether it is Turing’s Test or Gilbert’s Sentence, humans will continue to angst over their individuality. In fact, when asked in an interview how he would complete “The Sentence,” Mr. Christian offered the following clever suggestion: “One can always turn the sentence on itself: humans appear to be the only things anxious about what makes them unique.”58 Indeed as we have seen, it is not man’s arrival and fulfillment that sets him apart. Rather, lateness, sin, failure, and shame are the crucial components that make humans human.
The Other After Sin
Adam just realizes he has sinned. His eyes are open. What does he see? First, the Bible mentions that he recognizes he and Eve are not dressed, a biblical allusion to the prominent role of sexuality in sin. Immediately afterwards Adam and Eve hear a noise:
And they heard the voice of God walking in the Garden toward the cool of day; and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden. (Gen. 3:8)
The Bible’s description of God following Adam’s sin is quite telling. God is now an Other—someone who can be avoided and evaded. The creation of self is now complete. No longer does Adam look at himself as an extension of God—God is now an Other strolling through the Garden. In the space created for self, there is now room for failure, growth, shame, and anxiety. As Wiskind-Elper explains in her brilliant presentation of Izbica-Radzyn thought:
The Face (of God) is hidden. In the vacant space of absence that gapes before them, humans first taste the freedom to choose. Anxiety and an unfamiliar dimension of self-consciousness quickly crowd into these moments.59
Godly immanence has become more transcendent in order to leave space for the self. There was always uncertainty with how that space would be filled—but that was precisely the choice Adam advocated for.
The dual implications of the biblical versus Talmudic chronology of Adam’s sin reflect the dual nature of sin and free-will. On the one hand, like the biblical implication, sin is avoidable. As reflected in the biblical introduction of sin, only following the creation story, Adam’s sin corrupts an otherwise pristine world. In this reading sin is not a part of creation but a rebellion against it. Here a fully developed Adam commits the sin. The Talmudic reading, as elaborated upon by the aforementioned later approaches, presents sin as part of creation. Here sin, self, and free will are just as much a part of the creation story as light, water, and the stars. Whether sin, and by extension man’s capacity for choice, is pre-ordained or a product of human agency may depend upon which reading you prefer. This duality—sin as a part of creation or a corruption of creation—remains a central theme throughout Jewish philosophy. Is all of creation, sin included, suffused with God or are there limits to His immanence? The tension between Divine immanence and Div
ine transcendence and its relation to the question of God’s presence in acts of sin, which has been debated throughout Jewish history, has its root in the very origin story of sin. Ultimately the guiding question behind the nature of sin is not just what or why, but it may be a matter of when.
Original Sin’s Legacy
Sin’s origins were embedded in creation, but what of original sin? The Christian doctrine of original sin has a long and fascinating history on which several volumes have already been written.60 Basing himself on the teaching of Paul (Rom. 5:12–19), Augustine brought the doctrine to the mainstream attention of the Christian public. According to Augustine, the sin of Adam created an indelible and permanent stain on mankind that could only be removed through the sacrament of baptism. Thus the doctrine of original sin, as developed by Augustine, had two innovative components. Firstly, the sin of Adam affected all of mankind for future generations. Secondly, the only way to remove the stain of original sin was through the rite of baptism.
The latter point, it turned out, created much more controversy—even within the Christian world. If baptism were needed to redeem the effects of original sin, what about infants who die without such rites? According to Augustine, such infants, with the stain of original sin still apparent, would be doomed to eternal damnation. This helpless account of human salvation was rejected by Pelagious, a British monk who refused to accept that man could only be redeemed through God’s grace. According to Pelagianism, original sin did not remove man’s capacity to live a decent and ethical life. It is through man’s decisions and free will that human redemption is achieved.61
During the wave of Jewish–Christian polemics of the Middle Ages, original sin became a frequent target of Jewish criticism. Much like the Pelagian objection, Jewish polemicists objected to the implications that those who did not receive baptism—included in which are the Forefathers—would suffer damnation. This objection was coupled with the legal difficulty based upon Deuteronomy 24:16 that “Fathers will not be put to death for their children, nor children for their fathers; a man shall be put to death only for his own sins.” Surely, the doctrine of original sin contradicted the Torah’s assurance of no ancestral punishment.
Joel Rembaum, in his comprehensive survey of Medieval Jewish arguments against the Christian doctrine of original sin, summarizes the mainstream Jewish reaction as follows:
They contended that this concept led to a number of absurd and blasphemous conclusions regarding God and divine justice. Given the Jewish concept of the evil inclination, Jews were generally willing to admit that the effects of Adam’s sin were physically transmitted to all of Adam’s descendants. They categorically denied, however, that Adam’s sin generated a permanent spiritual corruption that was transmitted to the souls of all humans.62
The backlash of medieval Jewish polemicists to the doctrine of original sin should not be accepted at face value. Generally, polemical works are poor sources for actual Jewish doctrine. Daniel Lasker, in the introduction to his work on Jewish–Christian polemics, notes the healthy skepticism deserved by extrapolation of theological truth from polemical tracts:
Polemical compositions were intended as polemics, a genre for which objective truth is one of the first casualties…. If one wants to know a particular author’s true view on a subject, a polemical treatise is the last place one would look to determine it. When this literature is analyzed without due recognition of “polemical license,” the research runs the risk of reading too much into the texts. Drawing historical, theological, social, or intellectual conclusions from polemical literature should be attempted only in a restrained manner.63
Given this warning, it is not surprising that the vehemence with which the doctrine of original sin was opposed within polemic literature may not actually reflect its patent rejection within Jewish sources. In fact, as pointed out by Lasker, the doctrine of original sin “was not entirely foreign to Judaism” as some polemics would otherwise suggest.64
The Talmud (Shabbat 146a) seems to acknowledge the effects of original sin but asserts that the collective revelation of Sinai countered its effects for the Jewish people. It writes:
Why are the idolaters polluted? Because they did not stand at Sinai. When the serpent copulated with Eve, he imposed pollution in her. The Jews who stood at Sinai—their pollution has ceased; the idolaters who did not stand at Sinai—their pollution has not ceased.
Presumably, the pollution referred to here is the lingering poison of the original sin. Of course, the antidote in the Jewish view is not baptism but rather the revelation at Sinai. In fact, Rabbi Avraham Ibn David of Posquières, known by the acronym Raavad, uses this Talmudic passage as a prooftext to explain a difficult passage in the Passover Haggadah. In the hymn Dayenu, we praise God’s beneficence by saying, “If He had brought us to Mount Sinai and not given us the Torah it still would have been sufficient.” The statement is puzzling—what would be gained by standing at Sinai had we not received the Torah? Raavad explains, based on the aforementioned passage, that the aftereffects of Adam’s “original sin” were in fact cleansed by our collective presence at Sinai.65
While certainly rejecting the role of Jesus and Christian salvation, nonetheless the contradiction between Judaism and the doctrine of original sin is smaller than Jewish polemics would suggest. Aside from the Raavad and among many others, both Rabbi Ephraim Luntschitz in his famed biblical commentary Kli Yakar and Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, known as the Shelah, make use of this Talmudic passage to suggest a broader notion of original sin than is presented in polemics.66
Aside from the Talmudic reference, many more mystically influenced commentators, particularly within the school of Lurianic Kabbalah, were more receptive to a broader conception of the effects of original sin that more closely align with Christian presentations.67 Lasker explains their approach as follows:
Certain kabbalists taught a doctrine of original sin in that Adam’s transgression gave evil an active existence in the world. The entire creation became flawed by this first sin. Unlike the Christian, however, the kabbalists taught that every man had the power to overcome the state of corruption by his own efforts with divine aid. There was no implication here, as there was in Christianity, that salvation could be achieved only by the sacrifice of a God-man.68
Indeed, the prominence of Adam’s sin in Lurianic mysticism, particularly the subsequent notion of tikun-rectification, attracted many Christians to Lurianic mysticism. In her groundbreaking study on the impact of kabbalah on the scientific revolution, Allison Coudert details an entire community of Christian scholars and thinkers that became enchanted with kabbalistic thought.69 Led by Francis Mercury van Helmot and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth,70 kabbalistic texts were translated into Latin, collected into the work known as Kabbala denudata, and disseminated to many emerging thinkers in Christian circles, most notably Wilhelm Leibniz.71 Normally the emphasis on the repercussions of Adam’s sin are seen as a Christian idea, but within the esoteric world of Lurianic thought, Adam’s sin and the subsequent struggle for restitution became markedly Jewish.72 In fact this is what attracted Christian mystics to kabbalah. Whereas Augustine’s presentation of original sin, against the Pelagian objections, minimized man’s ability for redemption without Christian rites of sacrament, the Lurianic reading highlighted man’s singular power and responsibility to attain redemption. As Coudert writes:
The Lurianic Kabbalist could not retreat into his own private world. He had to participate in a cosmic millennial drama in which his every action counted. The Lurianic Kabbalah was the first Jewish theology which envisioned perfection in terms of a future state, not in terms of a forfeited ideal past, and as such it contributed to the idea of progress emerging in the West.73
Lurianic mysticism recast the narrative of original sin into a recurring contemporary notion of redemption. Yes, original sin had grave repercussions. But the magnitude of the sin was overshadowed by the capacity for redemption.
Returning to Eden after Eden
To “renew our days as of old” is a somewhat contradictory request. Days presumably can either be old or renewed—how can we ask for both? Based on this seeming contradiction, the Midrash reinterprets the term kedem—; it is not referring to an antiquated time but rather a place. The term kedem, explains the Midrash, refers to the Garden of Eden, which in the Torah is referred to on two occasions as kedem. Curiously, when demonstrating the association between the word kedem and the Garden of Eden, the Midrash ignores the first reference in the Torah, which reads, “God planted a garden in Eden, to the east” and instead chooses the second reference to the Garden of Eden as kedem. The latter reference, “and having driven out the man, he stationed east of the Garden of Eden,” does not refer to Adam’s idyllic residence in the Garden but rather his exile. Why does the Midrash when interpreting our plea to “renew our days of old” skip the first reference to the Garden and instead read our prayer as a reference to Adam’s exile?
A dear friend, Rabbi Dr. Simcha Willig, showed me a remarkable interpretation of our prayer to “renew our days of old” from Rabbi Rob Scheinberg. His words:
The word kedem in Genesis 3:24 is not a word associated with the Garden of Eden itself, but a word associated with the EXILE from the Garden. The decision to quote the word kedem from this verse, rather than from 2:8, indicates that, from the perspective of this quotation from Eikhah Rabbah, “hadesh yameinu ke-kedem” does NOT mean “renew our lives as they were in the Garden of Eden.”