From: JoshHoff@aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004
9:41 AM
To: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: Netvort: parshas
Bereishis, 5765
The Root of All Evil
By Rabbi Joshua (rootlessly known as The Hoffer) Hoffman
In parshas
Bereishis, we learn of the sin of Adam and Chava (Eve), eating of the fruit of
the tree of knowledge of good and evil against God's express command not to eat
from it. . The snake first enticed Chava to eat of the fruit, and, after she did
so, she gave some of the fruit to her husband to eat, as well. When God
confronted Adam and asked if he had eaten of the fruit, he answered, "The woman
whom you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate" (Bereishis,
3, 12). This answer seems, at first blush, very strange. The rabbis criticize
Adam for not simply confessing his sin, as, for example, King David did, when he
said, simply, "I sinned." However, the defense he offered does not seem to be
very convincing. What kind of excuse was it for him to say that his wife gave
him some of the fruit? Why should that in any way mitigate his own sin of eating
it? Adam, in fact, was according to the rabbis, a very wise person. How, then,
is his wisdom reflected in the answer he gave to God?
Rabbi Binyamin
Sorotzkin, son of the late Rosh Yeshivah of Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland, Rabbi
Baruch Sorotzkin, zt'l, writes, in his Nachalas Binyamin to parshas Bereishis,
that Adam understood that eating from the tree constituted theft from God,
because the tree, along with the rest of the universe, belonged to God, and God
had not given anyone permission to eat from it. However, Adam reasoned that once
his wife took some of the fruit, she acquired it, and it was no longer an act of
theft to eat it. His mistake, however, was that any act of transgression against
God's will is an act of theft, regardless of the technical details involved in
reaching performing that act. Rabbi Sorotzkin cites, in this regard, the
Talmudic statement ( Berachos, 35a) that anyone who benefits from this world
without reciting a blessing is considered as if he has stolen consecrated
property, as it is written, " To the Lord belongs the earth and its
fullness thereof." Since Adam did not follow God's guidelines when he ate
from the fruit of the tree, then, he was actually stealing from God.
The notion of sin constituting theft from God can be found in
the concluding prayer of Yom Kippur, the Neilah. In that prayer, we say to God,
"You separated man from the beginning." The commentary Eitz Yosef, which can be
found in the Siddur Otzar HaTefillos, explains that this statement refers to
Adam, whom God separated from the Garden of Eden because of his transgression.
The prayer goes on to say that God has given us the day of Yom Kippur as a day
of forgiveness, "so that we will keep our hands away from stealing." The sin of
stealing is singled out here, among all the other possible sins that man may be
guilty of, because all sin is really theft from God. We may add, in accordance
with the comment of the Eitz Yosef, that this entire prayer connects our sin
back to the first sin committed by man, perhaps as a way of emphasizing that
man's sinful actions trace themselves back to Adam's sin of eating from the
fruit of the tree. Adam's response to God's question to him about his deed
betrayed, as we have seen, a failure to recognize that what he had done
constituted an act of theft from God. As Yom Kippur draws to a close, we declare
our recognition of God's ownership of the world he created, and our commitment
to use it only in accordance with the instructions He has given us in his Torah.
Based on the notion that sin constitutes theft from God, we can
understand a difficult passage in the Rambam in the beginning of his Laws of
Repentance. The Rambam writes there that there is an obligation to confess one's
sins as part of the process of repentance. The source for this mitzvah, writes
the Rambam, is the verse in parhaas Naso, stated in regard to someone who stole
and has now decided to return what he stole and repent, "They shall confess
their sin that they have committed" (Bamidbar, 5, 7).Why was the requirement to
confess one's sins, which applies to all transgressions, placed in this section
of the Torah, which deals with the sin of theft. Rabbi Yisroel Meir of Gur, in
his commentary Chidushei Ha Rim, explains that this is because all sin is theft
from God. Therefore, whenever man wants to remove the barriers that he has built
between God and himself through his sin by repenting, he must, as part of that
repentance, acknowledge that the entire universe is God's, and that we can only
benefit from it if we follow His guidelines for doing so. In this way, repentant
man not only corrects his own shortcomings by undergoing the teshuvah process,
but corrects the mistake the mistake which Adam made and which lies at
the root of all sin-the failure to acknowledge God's ownership of the
universe