Torah Study Blog

If you go to the Museum of Natural History you can see representations of what early man looked like and how we evolved in our position in the animal kingdom. Our earliest ancestors did not have the benefit of evolutionary scientific knowledge. But our texts show us that for thousands of years, just as today, people struggle to understand the human condition and to attempt to answer questions like: Who are we? What is our nature? How are we to live?

Last week we discussed the disobedience of Adam and Eve when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of All Things. This is also known as Original Sin. This week we looked at the Jewish view of human nature vs the Christian view of human nature.

Our Torah portion for last week ends with a set-up for the Noah story. Genesis 6:5-6 says that, “The Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time.” God sends a great flood to wipe out the current batch of humans on earth and creates a new batch out of the line of Noah. Our Torah portion for this week tells us that when God tells Noah that it is safe to come out of the ark God also says to himself, “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth.” (Genesis 8:21)

It is interesting to note that God, the creator, did not truly know his creation. He did not anticipate the evil inclinations of man, and in Genesis he discovers for the first time the basic evil in humans. In Hebrew, the inclination to do evil is the yetzer hara. The inclination to do good is the yetzer tov.

Paul the Apostle lived roughly from 5-64 CE, and in his letter to the Romans, it is written that we cannot overcome our inclination to sin. According to the scripture, “sin came into the world through one man (meaning Adam) and death through sin (meaning because we ate from the Tree of Knowledge of All Things, we could not eat from the Tree of Life and live forever). Paul says, “sin dwells within me” and he asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” The answer according to Paul is that Christians can find “eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 5:12 and 7:15-24)

If you are Christian and you want to know how to break the cycle of sin, you could find an answer in 1 Corinthians (15:22) where Christians are told, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”

St Augustine lived from 354-430 CE and expanded upon the idea of original sin by saying that all of humanity was present when Adam sinned – therefore even new-born babies are sinners when they are born. He said that God created good humans, but we are corrupted by our choices. And he wrote that, “man, corrupt by choice and condemned by justice has produced a progeny that is both corrupt and condemned.” This teaching from Augustine is the reason Christians baptize infants to cleanse them of original sin.

Jewish texts have never been fundamentalist, that is, expected to be taken at face value with no questioning. Over the centuries Jewish texts have been subject to interpretation and writing reflecting those interpretations teaches us about our past. Now we take a look at what Jewish leaders told their followers:

Jewish writing from the late 1^st century CE about the sin of Adam has been preserved in by Christianity and provides some insight. The writing has been attributed to Ezra the Scribe, but scholars doubt that attribution and the writing was not preserved in our Bible. However, the passage acknowledges that when Adam sinned, “the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants.”

Three different times in the Babylonian Talmud (200-500 CE) the Rabbis note that humans were contaminated when fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of All Things was eaten. Then, “when the Jewish people stood at Mount Sinai, their contamination ceased, whereas gentiles did not stand at Mount Sinai, and their contamination never ceased.” This is why they seek deliverance through Christ. Jews do not need that path.

The medieval scholar Nachmanides of Spain (1194-1270 CE) wrote that humans have an evil nature in their youthful days because they are following their animal instinct. However, as people grow older they use their intelligence to mature out of their evil nature.

The Zohar, a 13^th century mystical text which provides the foundation for Kabbalah, says that Eve actually copulated with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Though it may be true that, “when Israel stood at Mount Sinai, that pollution ceased,” according to the Zohar it only ceased for men. The writer contends that women maintain their sinful nature and, “That is why greater numbers of women are found to be addicted to magic and licentiousness than men.”

Yetzer hara is our inclination to do evil, so you would think it is something we should try to expel within ourselves. However, Jewish teaching has defended the yetzer hara because some claim that without it man would not have a career, a wife, or children. There is a midrash that tells the tale of when God, as an experiment, removed the yetzer hara from the world, but then chickens stop laying eggs.

We human beings are made up of good and bad traits, both of which serve a purpose.

misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter