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