o r a
spirituality
sr'
A First Step 0 at
In The igliteirection
Parshat Bereshit: Genesis 1:1 - 6:8;
Isaiah 42:5 - 43:10.
W
as the creation of the world
as described in this week's
Torah portion an end in
itself or a means to an end?
The late midrashic work
Pesikta de-rabbati (ninth cen-
tury C.E.) suggested the latter:
"Everything that was created
during the six days of creation
requires tikkun [improvement
or perfectivizing]." In other
words, creation was not an end
in and of itself but rather a first
step and an opportunity for
humanity to bring this divine
enterprise to full perfection.
Such a perspective goes a long
way toward explaining the puz-
zlingly flawed behavior of the
major characters in the story of creation:
Adam and Eve disobey their lone com-
mandment, pass the buck when they get
caught and are banished from paradise;
Cain kills his brother and then refuses to
accept responsibility and is forced to wan-
der the Earth — hardly the trappings of
perfection. Rather, like creation itself, they
are works in progress.
Having laid the immense task of
improving the world on the shoulders of
Adam and his descendants, God also gave
them the means to accomplish it. Adam,
our commentators tell us, was created as
a combination of distinct heavenly and
worldly essences, elyonim and tachtonim,
which combined — at times harmoni-
ously, at times tempestuously — to form
a distinctly human personality.
Alone among earthly creatures, Adam
and his progeny are able to live in this
world eating by the sweat of his brow,
while comprehending the existence of
heaven and aspiring to live in the image
of God.
To be sure, such heavenly and earthly
qualities manifest themselves differ-
ently among the descendants of Adam.
Thus when we first hear of Abel, he is
offering a sacrifice — communing, as it
were, with the Divine; while Cain is over-
wrought with resentment of his brother,
a distinctly human disposition. Later,
the descendants of Seth (the third son of
Adam and Eve whose birth supplemented
the loss of Abel) inherit Abel's closeness
to heaven, exemplified by Enoch, the
grandson of Seth who, like Abraham,
sojourned with God.
It is tempting to see the worldly charac-
ter of Cain and his descendants as some-
how lesser than the heavenly character of
the descendants of Seth. Cain's act of frat-
ricide, after all, epitomized the
antithesis of creation. At the
same time, to define Cain and
his descendants solely by this
admittedly unforgivable act
(though it is not clear from the
text whether it was deliberate
or a tragic crime of passion)
overlooks later accomplish-
ments.
It was Cain, the Bible says,
who built the first city; and his
progeny introduced music and
artisanship into the world. Like
the beginning of creation, such
acts added beauty and order to a chaotic
world. So, the descendants of Seth mended
and preserved the bond between heaven
and Earth. The descendants of Cain took
on the less sublime task of advancing cre-
ation beyond the first six days.
How, then, do we reconcile such
constructive creativity with the violent
destructiveness of Cain? Here, too, the
text provides an answer. The term the
Torah uses to describe the creation of
Adam, Va-Yitzer, is written with an extra
letter Yud. Biblical commentators, always
eager to elicit added meaning from such
apparent textual anomalies, adduced that
the two Yuds represent the Yetzer ha-Toy
[inclination to do good] and Yetzer ha-Ra
[inclination to do evil]. That is, Adam
and his progeny were given the ability to
choose and the responsibility of choosing
to improve the world rather than destroy it.
In the end, creation is an open-ended,
ongoing process. The descendants of
Cain and Seth ultimately abandoned their
creative impulses and, within 10 genera-
tions after Adam, the world had returned
to chaos, and human creativity would
have to start over with Noah. Yet the para-
digm would survive. Noah, the man who
sojourned with the Divine, was also Noah,
whose creativity enabled him to build the
ark that allowed humanity to survive and
creation to continue along the path to per-
fection.
❑
Dr. Howard Lupovitch is an associate
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October 16 • 2014
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