Judaism Is Our History, Our Messianic Destiny, and Our Personal Morality
The Jewish religion is the outgrowth of the experience of the Jewish people through events to which they ascribe transcendent meaning. Every people has a history, but many people pay no attention to their own history. It is meaningless to them. The Jewish people know that their history is more than a series of fortuitous events; it is the enactment on this earth of a divine plan. The history of the Jews has a goal; the Jews have a destiny. That destiny is not to have fun, be happy, or even live in peace, it is to fulfill our historic Messianic role.
Jews invented history as we know it today. Most cultures have been ahistorical; they did not think in historical terms. They merely noted events, but saw no connection between them. They did not perceive that history had a direction. The ancient Egyptians, for example, would write chronicles: “In the fifth year of King So, there was a war; in the seventh year, there was a famine.” But the royal chroniclers made no attempt to link these events together, explaining their cause-and-effect relationships, noting the flow of events.
Egyptians, Hindus, and Greek philosophers considered truth universal, static, and unchanging. Events were the stuff of poetry, of epic story-telling, but they were not the source of truth. They had no religious value. They indicated no purpose. Events are unique, not universal; they are relative, not absolute; they are subjective experiences, not objective science. Only Jews found the truth of God in human history.
History was invented three times: by the Jews in the Tenth Century BCE (Before the Common Era), the oldest historical work, being the Book of Samuel; by the Greeks in the Fifth Century BCE starting. with the history of Herodotus; and in the Second Century BCE by the Chinese, with Ssuma T’en’s great history of the rise of the Han Dynasty, The Shih Chi. India never did develop independently a concept of history because its sages were concerned only with the eternal and the unchanging underneath all the superficial variety. Not until a very late date did the Hindus import the concept of history from the Muslems.
The Bible perceives time as the divine dimension. The future is the realm of the possible. It is free will which opens the future. The unpredictability of the future is the evidence that free will truly exits. In the beginning, before God created the universe, there was no disharmony or conflict in existence. There also was no change. Nor was there any choice. Even time did not exist, for time is the measure of change, and the future is the possibility of choice. God could have created a universe which was in perfect harmony, without conflict or evil.
But in order to do so, the Divine will would have had to fill the universe. There would have been no room for any-other will. There would have been no possibility of any other being with a free will. There would be no future, merely the determined existence of the perfect universe.
In order for there to be creatures capable of exercising free will and making moral choices it was necessary for the Infinite to be limited. This process is called in Kabbalah tsimtsum (interaction). This contraction, or voluntary self limitation of the Master of the universe, is what permits all intelligent creatures on the various planets in our universe to exercise their free will to choose good or evil. Since many intelligent creatures do choose evil there is in our world conflict, disharmony, and violence.
For hundreds of millions of years on our planet there was no war, no oppression, no injustice, no evil. Before the evolution of mankind there were no creatures capable of choosing either good or evil. The possibility of evil was brought into the world by mankind. The possibility of goodness was also brought into the world by mankind.
The ultimate goal of history, human history on this planet, and divine history in the universe, is Tikun, the restoration, the fixing of the disharmonious conflict-ridden societies on the planets in our universe. When the societies and civilizations of the intelligent beings throughout the universe have all reached the level where they freely choose the good, then the creatures’ acts will be in harmony with the Divine Will. We will be Godlike because we will act so that our will and God’s will are one. This indicates that the allegory is not about the fall of mankind but about the rise of mankind’s awareness.
We must analyze this allegory carefully to understand what it really means. The Torah says that man and woman were naked and they were not ashamed. This statement teaches us that they were living in a state of nature as animals still do. Living in a state of nature, animals mate in the open. They do not object if other animals watch while they mate. Many mate indiscriminately.When the female is in heat, she will accept all males of her species who approach her.
Humans are different. Although specific customs vary from culture to culture, in every human community, there are, and there always have been, customs indicating a feeling of shame and propriety regarding sexual behavior. Sexual relations between men and women are regarded as being private. Clothing covering the parts of the body related to sex is a symbol of this sense of privacy.
Among the other primates, there is no similar sense of a need for privacy, or for moral and sexual propriety. Thus clothing and propriety in terms of sexual conduct can be considered a unique characteristic of human communities. However, the state of man and woman in the Garden of Eden was that of animals or infants, who feel no need for sexual privacy and therefore are not ashamed of their nakedness. We will understand the meaning of this allegory better if we compare mankind in the Garden to an infant, and what happened to Adam and Eve to the process of growing up, acquiring moral knowledge, and independent judgment.
This allegory, of course, was not really concerned with a guy named Adam and his girlfriend, Eve. Remember that Adam and Eve gave birth to three sons, one of whom was killed. The other two married, but whom did they marry? Fundamentalists, maintaining that Adam and Eve were the only people God had created, were forced to say their sons married sisters, pointing out that ordinarily the birth of females was not recorded in the Torah. The marriage of brothers and sisters is incest. And incest was prohibited not only by Jews but by the general population of every society that has ever been on earth.
Creation was not simply a matter of one man and one woman who had the names of Adam and Eve. God created mankind.That is to say, as a result of God’s original creation, humanity evolved from the primates. And at one point, porto-humanity became human. The transition occurred when one species of primates became moral and the story of the Garden of Eden is the allegorical account of how this happened. Because it is an allegory, there is no need for the Torah to explain in the next chapter where Seth and Cain found their wives.
This is why Jews do not oppose the teaching of the theory of evolution. A 1981 survey in California asked people to choose between the theory of evolution and the biblical version of creation. In Hebrew adam is not a name, but the word used for mankind or humanity. Adam was adopted as a name by later generations, but in the Torah it always refers to mankind. Eve is the slightly erroneous transliteration of the Hebrew word Khavah) which means Life-Giver, referring to the special, unique power of females to give birth to new life. We shall see later that it is due to this special quality that Khavah came to eat from the fruit of the Tree before Adam.
The Torah uses the image of eating to make the concept of internalizing knowledge dramatic and vivid. When you eat, the food enters your body, some of the food’s molecules becoming your molecules and functioning as part of your body. The allegorical consumption of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil symbolized humanity’s internalization of the values of Good and Evil.
Animals can be taught to behave in ways their owners consider proper or convenient; but these are externalized behavioral patterns taught by conditioning with rewards and punishment. Animals do not understand why they do what they are taught. However, adam – humanity – is rational, capable of understanding, and spiritual, capable of intuitively experiencing the divine aspect of moral behavior.
