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. 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