The Earth, the Man and the Door

Two verses follow one another. Read them closely.

The word peri has vanished between the command and its execution. Rashi, in the name of the midrash: “that the taste of the wood should be like the taste of the fruit — and it did not do so… therefore when man was cursed for his sin, it too was remembered for its own and cursed” (Rashi on 1:11).

The midrash does not decide. It offers two paths, and both must be known.

Count the verses. The command is given in 2:16. The woman is not formed until 2:22 — six verses later. She therefore did not hear the command: she received it from him.

Now listen to what comes out when the serpent asks.

A fence has appeared. Bereshit Rabba 19:3 stops exactly there and quotes Mishlei 30:6: “do not add to His words, lest He reprove you and you be found false.” Then Rabbi Hiya teaches: do not make the fence greater than the essential, lest it fall and cut down the plantings.

It is worth noticing where this falls. According to Rabbi Pinhas the earth was judged for having exceeded the command. The man drawn from it falls through an excess added to the command. The symmetry is not an image: it is in the words.

The question deserves to be put directly: of what exactly is Adam found guilty? The verse of the verdict says so, and it names two things.

The first thing named is not the eating. It is having listened to a voice in place of the One who entrusted him with the deposit.

But there is a third thing, and it is the only one nothing made inevitable. To the question ayeka, where are you, he answers:

Whatever one holds about the inevitability of the sin itself, that sentence was commanded by nothing. It is the one place in the account where choice is visible to the naked eye — and it is exactly where judgement falls.

There remains the heaviest question: if the sin had to happen, why the sentence?

The Rambam refuses the premise, and refuses it with the verse of the garden itself. Hilkhot Teshuva 5:1: “permission is given to every man” — and his proof is “behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Bereshit 3:22). Then 5:2: “let this thing not cross your mind… that the Holy One decrees upon a man from his formation to be righteous or wicked. It is not so.”

The Gemara, for its part, knows of sins that were arranged — and says why. Of David and of the golden calf: “neither was David fit for that act, nor were Israel fit for that act… then why did they do it? To tell you that if an individual has sinned, they say to him: go to the individual; and if a community has sinned, they say to them: go to the community” (Avoda Zara 4b-5a). The reason given is not fate: it is the opening of a door.

The sending out is not framed as revenge. The verse gives the reason, and it gives the destination.

Two things, and neither is revenge. The reason: the tree of life. The destination: the ground from which he was drawn — the very ground that, in the first section of this study, was judged with him in one court. He is not cast anywhere: he is sent back to the side of his own matter.

But the midrash goes further than that reading, and in another direction.

Three things follow, and none of them is theoretical in the month of Elul.

Adam took a long time to learn what Kayin understood at once. The difference between them is not the gravity of the sin: it is one sentence — I did teshuva — and the moment at which it is said.

One word, and the sentence is lifted. And it was of David that the Gemara quoted above said: “neither was David fit for that act… to tell you that if an individual has sinned, they say to him: go to the individual”. The man whose sin was arranged in order to teach the teshuva of the individual is precisely the one who said the word Adam did not say.