GEN282 Man the yetzirah-creator, according to the teaching of Halakhic Judaism, is responsible to God the beriah-Creator not only for the raw material of the natural world into which he was placed, but is responsible as well for protecting and enhancing the civilizations which he himself created.  “Subdue it” is not only not an invitation to ecological irresponsibility; it is a charge to assume additional moral responsibility not only for the nature world as such but even for the man-made culture and civilization which we found when we were born into this world.  Perhaps the most succinct summary of the role of man and nature is given early in the Biblical narrative of God’s placing Adam in the Garden of Eden—which, from its description in Scripture, was a model of ecological well-being.  [this verse].  The undefiled world was given over to man “to work it,” to apply to it his creative resources in order that it yield up to him its riches.  But alongside the mandate to work and subdue it, he was appointed its watchman; to guard over it, to keep it safe, to protect it even from his own rapaciousness and greed.  Man is not only an oved, a worker and fabricator; his is also a shomer, a trustee who, according to Halakhah, is obligated to keep the world whole for its true Owner.  GOODSOC 221-2

SHOW FULL EXCERPT

GEN283 For the intellect that God made overflow unto man and that is the latter’s ultimate perfection, was that which Adam had been provided with before he disobeyed. It was because of this that it was said of him that he was created in the image of God and in His likeness. It was likeness on account of it that he was addressed by God and given commandments, as it says [this verse].  For commandments are not given to beings and being devoid of intellect.  Through the intellect one distinguishes between truth and falsehood, and that was found in [Adam] in its perfection and integrity. EWM 131

SHOW FULL EXCERPT

GEN284 See [[DEUT591]] Deuteronomy 12:31 abhorrent DORFFDRAG 176-8

SHOW FULL EXCERPT

GEN285 The Jewish laws of kashrut were established to wean man away from violence and to learn to abhor the sign of blood. The Jew must be taught to detest death, abhor blood, and recoil from unnecessarily hurting any of God’s creatures Love for sadistic pleasures must be utterly uprooted from the human heart. God is the Creator of life, and man is its guardian and protector. Adam and Eve were commanded never to take the life of any animal, but to subsist on vegetation alone: From all the trees of the Garden you may eat” [this verse].  A quandary arose after the flood, which decimated all living creatures, including plants and animals.  Prior to that, the Almighty had never given man permission to consume animal flesh. Had God not permitted Noah and his family to partake of the animals, they would have perished. Moreover, since Noah had exerted strenuous efforts to save the animals as well as himself and his family, he was entitled to partake of their flesh in order to survive. God allowed Noah’s descendants to eat meat as well, and since then there has been an acceptance of the human need to consume meat as a source of nutrition and sustenance.  The problem that arose was how to allow man to take animal life for food, while simultaneously suppressing his love for violence? Furthermore, how could man partake of the flesh on the animal without becoming one himself? The Almighty therefore gave the laws of kashrut, whose purpose was to regulate how man could take animal life, which animals he could slaughter, how he could put them to death, and which parts of the animal could then be consumed. Simultaneously with granting man the right to devour animals flesh, God insisted that he take life only in the most humane possible way, and even then never consume the animal’s blood. Furthermore, man was permitted to partake only of nonaggressive, non-predatory and servile animals like goats, cattle, and sheep. As the ancient Rabbis point out, all the permitted animals are herbivorous and therefore nearer he vegetable world. They spend a great deal of time in the process of digesting their food and show an almost plantlike passivity.  The same applies to fowl. The only fowl allowed to the Jew are birds that survive on berries, worms, or bark, never scavengers or flesh eaters. The rules of kashrut are based on the belief that meat eating is different from eating vegetables and requires a great deal of sensitivity to animals. Man must be weaned off the callous indifference to taking life – any life.  Rabbi Joseph Albo, the great Spanish mystic, wrote that Adam and Eve and their progeny were originally forbidden to eat meat because of the cruelty involved in killing animals. In fifteenth-century Spain, Don Isaac Abravenel, one of the greatest biblical exegetes, endorsed the call for vegetarianism and taught that when the Messiah comes, everyone would return to this ideal state. Contrary to the view that the main rationale for kashrut is hygiene, the fact that the law of kashrut rule out all beasts of prey shows a different impetus.  Animals that have split hooves cannot be predators, for the split hoof makes them slow moving and awkward. … What the Torah was doing in limiting the Jews to these passive vegetarian animals was first, weaning them away from love of violence by causing them to slaughter animals humanely, and second, ensuring that they do not consume anything that would encourage their innate predatory treat by forbidding them to eat any omnivorous animals.  The founder of Christiany was insistent that “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out the mouth that defiles” (Matthew 15:11). Judaism rejects this belief, stressing that man can indeed by defiled by absorbing the wrong foods. Parents try to govern their children’s television intake, convinced that violence and sex can have an adverse effect on the minds of their young.  If this is true of mental material, why should physical sustenance be any different? The undeniable fact is that if you eat poison it can kill you. Judaism simply expands on this by applying it also to spiritual poison. BOTEACH 301-03

SHOW FULL EXCERPT

GEN286 The sin of justifying human suffering … betrays a fundamental ignorance of Jewish theology.  Judaism sees death, illness, and suffering as aberrations in creation that were brought about through the sin of Adam in Eden. When God created the first man and woman, he placed them in His garden and told them that they were permitted to eat from all the trees of the Garden, with the exception of one: the tree of knowledge of good and evil. [Genesis 2:16 and this verse … “for on the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.”] The verse is puzzling. Adam and Eve did indeed eat from the tree of knowledge, yet they did not die on that day. In fact, Adam lived on for more than nine hundred years! How to account for this discrepancy? Judaism and Christianity deal with this difficulty in startlingly different ways.  According to traditional Christianity, the meaning of God’s warning that sin would bring immediate death was the Adam and Eve would die a spiritual death.  Thus, as soon as man committed the “original” sin, his soul died and he was damned. Christianity traditionally recognizes a body-soul dualism whereby people are viewed, not as integrated beings, but as possessors of an eternal soul and an ephemeral body, which is the vessel designed to accommodate the needs of the immortal soul. Only the soul can be restored in heaven through an affirmation of belief in Christ. According to the Jewish interpretation, the meaning of the verse was that on the day Adam defied God’s command and ate of the tree of knowledge, he would be condemned to death; he would lose his immortality.  As God’s direct handiwork, whom He had created in His direct image, man was never meant to experience death. Like his Father in heaven, mean was meant to live eternally. As long as Adam remained attached to the infinite source of life, he was eternal like his Creator. By sinning against God, Adam and Eve severed themselves from the infinite source of life and immediately they began to decay and die. Through his transgression, Adam brought death and destruction into the world. He might live many more years, but one day he would succumb to death, just as every apple when detached from a tree succumbs to decay. The implications of this rabbinical exegesis on this crucial passage of Genesis are profound. There was never meant to be a place for life to include suffering or pain. The Garden of Eden, previously this earth, was perfect. By detaching himself from God and worshipping his own sensual lusts, man became vulnerable and has been suffering for it ever since. This rabbinic teaching also declares that suffering has no meaning. It was never part of the original plan, it has no purpose. … To hasten the arrival of the promised world of the future, man must today drown the world’s imperfections in endless deeds of lovingkindness … man’s mission was never to make peace with suffering and death, but to abolish them from the face of the earth for all eternity by joining God as a junior partner in creation. … The atheist doctor who struggles to cure AIDS is infinitely more in tune with the Jewish response to suffering than the minister of religion who tells his flock that suffering is part of the divine plan.  The sinning businessman who may have never stepped into synagogue but makes a loan to a colleague to save him from bankruptcy is more in tune with the Jewish response to suffering than the Rabbi who seeks to give a rationalization for why children die of leukemia.  … Our energy must be dedicated, not to explaining hurt and pain, but to combating them and to healing wounds. BOTEACH 200-203

SHOW FULL EXCERPT

GEN287 According to traditional Christianity, the meaning of God’s warning that sin would bring immediate death was that Adam and Eve would die a spiritual death.  Thus, as soon as man committed the “original” sin, his soul died and he was damned.  Christianity traditionally recognizes a body-soul dualism whereby people are viewed, not as integrated beings, but as possessors of an eternal soul and an ephemeral body, which is the vessel designed to accommodate the needs of the immoral soul.  Only the soul can be restored in heaven through an affirmation of belief in Christ.  According to the Jewish interpretation, the meaning of the verse was that on the day Adam defied God’s command and ate of the tree of knowledge, he would be condemned to death; he would lose his immortality.  As God direct handiwork, whom He had created in His direct image, man was never meant to experience death.  Like his Father in heaven, man was meant to live eternally.  As long as Adam remained attached to the infinite source of life, he was eternal like his Creator.  By sinning against God, Adam and Eve severed themselves from the infinite source of life and immediately they began to decay and die.  Though his transgression, Adam brought death and destruction into the world.  He might live many more years, but one day he would succumb to death, just as every apple when detached from a tree succumbs to decay.  BOTEACH 202

SHOW FULL EXCERPT

GEN289 See [[GEN368]] Genesis 3:6 ate FREUND 107 footnote 50

SHOW FULL EXCERPT

GEN288 Don’t lie even on behalf of a good cause, not only because lying is wrong, but also because people will come to doubt the truthful things you say.  Thus, God instructed Adam not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life in the Garden Eden.  But Adam, fearing that Eve would violate the edict, apparently told her that not only had God forbidden them to eat from the tree, but that He had also forbidden them to touch it.  Genesis 3:3 A Midrash, picking up on the discrepancy between God’s original words and Adam’s, and Eve’s claim to the snake that God had forbidden them to even touch the tree, teaches that the serpent pushed Eve into the tree.  When she saw that no injury ensued, she assumed that Adam had likewise lied when he told her that God had forbidden them to eat of the tree.  So, Eve proceeded to eat the fruit, with disastrous results.  From this we learn that even when our cause is just, we must be completely truthful.  Thus, Jewish laws forbids a person who is soliciting for a charitable cause to say that he gave a larger gift to the charity than he did, in order to influence the person whom he is asking to give a larger gift.  TELVOL 1:407

SHOW FULL EXCERPT

GEN290 That which separates the human being from all other creatures in the universe is his ability to choose his own path in life.  … Just as only God has freedom in the universe, so does God grant freedom only to man, that is, in His image.  The first story in the Torah demonstrates man’s ability to choose.  God commands man not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but man defies Him and eats anyway.  AMEMEI 34

SHOW FULL EXCERPT

GEN291 Rabbi Yosef Yozel Hurwit, who founded and led the Novarodok school of Mussar in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writes about this episode [Madregat ha’Adam The Levels of Humanity Jerusalem: Yeshivat Ner Shmuel, 2002] saying that this directive was not a commandment to Adam and Eve.  Rather, it was God’s good advice to them.  The same can be said about the Torah’s bidding “You shall be holy.”  Exodus 22:30  Not just an injunction, this too is advice that helps us understand and act on an impulse we all already feel within ourselves, which is the inner drive to improve and to make something better of our lives.  … The Torah’s advice is to recognize that, at heart and in reality, the inner impulse to improve that you feel is a spiritual urge, an innate drive toward spiritual refinement, that is squandered when it is spent on your clothes or your car.  It is a sad mistake to put it to any use other than becoming the holy being you have the potential to be, the Torah advises.  MORINIS 11-12

SHOW FULL EXCERPT