Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Adam Coretz Bar Mitzvah
October 5, 2002
What Was the Original Sin?
Adam read a very well known and theologically significant chapter this morning. In this Torah portion, God told Adam - not Adam Coretz, the original Adam - that he could eat from every tree of the Garden of Eden except the one in the middle of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Soon thereafter, God put Adam to sleep and created Eve out of Adam's rib. A serpent later seduced Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, which she did. Eve then gave some fruit to Adam and he ate it. Adam failed the test. He had been given just one prohibition and he violated it - one boundary and he trespassed it.
Classical Christianity teaches that because of Adam, all of us are born into sin. Adam bequeathed his guilt to all subsequent generations, his progeny. An old New England primer put it simply: "In Adam's fall, we sinned all." Adam condemned all of his descendants to the malady of sinfulness. How then can we rid ourselves of sinfulness?
Christianity asserts that, by ourselves, we cannot do it. Only God, through Jesus, can erase our sins. Jesus, who was without sin, came to earth to become the sacrifice for our sins. When he died on the cross, all our sins were transferred to him. Only by placing faith in Jesus can one eradicate one's sinfulness. Without faith in Jesus as the redemptive savior, humans would live and die in their original sinful state.
We Jews look at what is called the "fall of Adam" much differently. The Midrash tells this story. When Adam sinned, God caused all men and women of future generations - both the good and the bad - to pass before Adam. God said to him, "See, Adam, what you have done? You have brought punishment even upon good people." Adam became very upset when he heard this accusation. He was sorry that his single act of disobedience or rebellion would stain all people throughout the generations. Adam begged God not to let good people suffer because of him. God then assured Adam that no one in the future would share in his act; rather, they would be held accountable only for acts they themselves had committed. In other words, we Jews believe that every person is responsible for the quality of his or her own life. So Chapter 3 of Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, serpent and tree has nothing to do with original sin as far as Jews are concerned.
I would like to suggest, however, that there is in Judaism an "original sin." But it is not in Chapter 3 of Genesis; it is in Chapter 4. You see, the word "sin" in Hebrew never appears in Chapter 3. It appears for the very first time in Hebrew Scripture in Chapter 4, the story of Cain and Abel. Let me remind you of how that tale begins.
"Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain . . . she then bore his brother Abel." So Cain is the older brother, and the world now has four human inhabitants. "Abel became a keeper of sheep, and Cain became a tiller of the soil." The older brother is a farmer, the younger a shepherd. "In the course of time, Cain brought an offering to God from the fruit of the soil. Abel, for his part, brought the choicest of the firstlings of his flock. God paid heed to Abel and his offering" - the younger brother, the shepherd who had brought the firstlings of his flock. "But to Cain and his offering, God paid no heed. Cain was much distressed and his face fell. And God said to Cain: 'Why are you distressed? Why is your face fallen? Surely if you do right, there is uplift; but if you do not do right, sin couches at the door. Its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master'."
So the first time that the word "sin" appears in Hebrew Scripture is right before Cain murders his brother. The first sin committed by a human being in the Bible, the original sin from which all others flow, is not disobedience or lust, nor is it murder. The words are spoken after God has favored Abel's offering over Cain's. The original sin - and I owe credit to Rabbi Harold Kushner for this lesson - is the belief that there is not enough love to go around for everyone. If someone else is loved, he must be stealing that love from us. Cain has seen God favor his younger brother, Abel, and believes that if God loves Abel, God will not be able to love him as well.
In John Steinbeck's novel, East of Eden, which is a Midrash on the story of Cain and Abel, one of the characters says: "The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears." Cain is driven to murderous rage by the feeling that he will not be loved, because God has loved someone else first.
As an aside, Rabbi Kushner asks whether the roots of Christian anti-Semitism don't lie in the notion that God cannot love Christians if God still loves His first People, the Jews. The source of so much hatred can be traced to this belief that there is not enough love for everyone, that life is a buffet line and, if the person ahead of you takes too much, there will be nothing left for you.
Is there a cure for this original sin - the fear of siblings that they will go unloved if their parents have someone else on whom to lavish their love? Coming to terms with their feelings of sibling jealousy may in fact be an important part of growing up. Sigmund Freud had an hypothesis that "once children recognize that they cannot win through rivalry, and that they must share their parents' love, they begin to identify with other children like themselves. Through that identification comes the seeds of a sense of justice, a decision that if we cannot be loved more than another, all must be treated equally and fairly."
In other words, the story does not have to end with Cain killing Abel in an effort to be the sole recipient of God's or Eve's love. (There is an ancient legend written thousands of years before Freud, that Cain and Abel were quarreling over which would become Eve's mate after Adam died.) The story could have described Cain and Abel realizing how much they have in common by being dependent on God and working together to try to understand and please God. After all, brothers and sisters do not only fight; they share more, over more years and often more intimately, than they do with parents or even spouses. Once the rivalry is put into perspective, once the original sin of feeling that another person's love was stolen from you is perceived for the error that it is, there is a lot on which to build.
I think Kushner has something here, because the rest of the Book of Genesis is replete with instances of sibling rivalry. I remind you of Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. Yet if Genesis is a chronicle of sibling rivalry, it is also a book of sibling reconciliation. Isaac and Ishmael come together at the grave of their father Abraham. Jacob and Esau overcome their memories of past hurts and fears and fall into each other's arms after 20 years of estrangement.
In the greatest story ever written about brothers overcoming hatred and jealousy, Joseph is reunited with the brothers who sold him into slavery. For years Joseph dreamt of getting even with them; but, when he finally had the power to do so, when he was a high government official and they were famine-ridden shepherds begging for food, Joseph discovered that he did not really want revenge. He wanted family and he could not have family unless both sides transcended the hatreds and hurt feelings of their growing-up years.
Siblings need to realize that just as they and their brothers and sisters no longer resemble the childhood photographs in the family album, they no longer resemble the mental stereotypes each is carrying around in his own mind. When Jacob and Esau met after 20 years of separation, each found that his memory of his brother was 20 years out of date. Each had been hating or fearing a person who no longer existed, a person who had been replaced years ago by a more mature figure, tempered by experience and by life's hard lessons.
Too often I have sat with families in order to prepare for a funeral service. Children of the elderly parent who died assemble from various directions. Sometimes when there had been family feuding, brothers and sisters make a point of sitting at opposite ends of the room, taking their turn speaking to me. But more often, thank God, they reach out to each other - hesitantly at first, afraid of being rejected, but in that moment of confronting their shared memories and their shared sense of mortality, falling into each other's arms and saying "why did we have to wait this long? Why did it take this to get us into the same room together?"
I recently read the true story of two brothers who had an argument and spent 20 years not speaking to each other. When one died, the other broke down and sobbed - "Now I don't have Sam not to talk to any more."
Cain and Abel were the first human beings who had never lived in paradise. They were the first human beings who had to compete for parental approval and contend with parental rejection. They never knew that a paradise of their own making was within their reach. All they had to do was love each other enough to take pleasure in each other's successes, instead of believing that the other's success came at their expense. All they had to do was understand that love is not like a bank account which is depleted as it is given away, where every dollar of love can only be spent once.
My dear friends, love is not like a buffet line where the person in front of you threatens to take too much and leave too little for you. Love is like a muscle - the more it is exercised today, the more it can be used tomorrow. Parents who love one child do not run out of love; they are practicing loving and will be better at it when it comes to loving their other children. Whenever we "give away" our love, God replenishes it so that we become the channel of God's love flowing to all of God's children - a channel which never runs dry. Had Cain been wise enough to understand that, he might not have spent his days as a friendless wanderer. He might have reclaimed for himself and his descendants the paradise that Adam and Eve had lost.
We Jews believe that we come into this world with a clean and stainless slate. We are born without sin. We have the potential to be noble or ignoble, compassionate or heartless. The choice is ours. May we choose to love and never fear that those we care most about - including God - will ever run out of love for us. Amen
In preparing this message I have benefitted from the writings of
Rabbis Harold S. Kushner and Samuel M. Stahl.
