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There were ten generations from Adam to Noah to show how long-suffering God is, since all these generations antagonized Him until He brought the waters of the Flood upon them.

There were ten generations from Noah to Abraham to show how long-suffering He is, since all these generations antagonized Him until our Father Abraham came and took the merit of them all.  (Avon 5:2-3).

1.  Tzaddik – Righteous

Three Words – There are three words formed from the same root, expressing the same concept.  Tzaddik is a righteous person; tzedek is justice in a court of law; tzedakah is ‘charity’.  Three words.  In common expression and understanding they are taken as three widely varying ideals: People think of a tzaddik as a ‘righteous person’ who engages in religious ritual.  Tzedakah, charity and benevolence based on the circumstances of one in need, is far removed from tzedek the strict and scrupulous application of principals of law without regard to the need or circumstances of the accused.

But the Hebrew language teaches us otherwise.  All three words are derived from the word in Hebrew for ‘justice’.  All three concepts are different expressions of the same theme: that God has created the world with a plan and that every human being must see himself as an executor of that plan.  Whether in his personal life, his legal dealings, or his disbursements to the needy, a Jew must see himself as an administrator of justice, apportioning his emotions, time, wisdom, and resources according to the wishes of their ultimate Owner.

Leviticus 19:15 – “Do no wrong in judgment.  Do not favor the poor, and show no honor to the great; with justice shall you judge your neighbor.”

     The verse concludes with the positive command that complements and summarizes the three negative commands with which it begins.  In order to do ‘justice’ properly, the judge must see every person standing before him, rich or poor, as his neighbor, entitled to the same rights and privileges, subject to the same obligations and duties as he is himself.  His judgments are not handed down from on high; they are simply expressions of fairness and right as defined by the Torah (Hirsch).

Deuteronomy 24:13 – “You must return the security to him … that he may bless you, and it shall be for you as a righteous duty (tzedakah) before Hashem, your God.”

Form of Justice – As soon as you perceive that what you are doing is only your duty, your vocation, your task as a human being and as a Jew … (you will) act with no other purpose than to fulfill the will of your Father in Heaven, and to give light and warmth and nourishment just as a ray of sunlight gives light in the service of God.  Why should God give you more than you need unless He intended to make you the administrator of the blessing for the benefit of others, the treasurer of his treasures?  Every penny you can spare is not yours, but should become a tool for bringing blessing to others … That is why our Sages prefer to give the beautiful name of Tzedakah to this act of charity by means of material goods.  For tzedakah is the justice which gives to every creature that which God allots to it. (Horeb).

Tzaddik as Judge – A tzaddik, too, is one who exercises justice.  He knows that he is but the treasurer, not the owner, of the entire store of human and material resources.  The marching orders of his life are contained in the Torah.  For him to do otherwise than to carry them out meticulously would be a lack of justice that is comparable to robbery?  For, indeed, if he were to make use of the breath of life, the spark of intelligence, the potential of wealth in ways opposed to the will of God, is he not misappropriating them from the Owner who has entrusted him with their management?

Man is created with his treasury of potential and, as life goes on, it is filled or depleted.  What he is to have has been decided before his birth; what he does with it is left to him.  Each individual human being is born with a mission all his own.  The child born with the mission of being the teacher of the generation is endowed with the brilliance of intellect, memory, and analytical powers to do so.  The one who is expected to become a supporter of Torah and the poor will be given great wealth.  The mental and material treasures of a human being are the tools he is given to accomplish the goal God set for him, and the tools, can be used well, or they can be wasted.  Money can find its way to worthy causes or it can be invested in a  quest for more wealth; or it can be squandered at roulette wheels.  Man will be called to account for how wisely and righteously he has utilized the gifts placed in his trust.  But one thing must be clear: whatever he needs for his mission will be provided him (Michtav MeEliyahu).

1.  Noah

Genesis 6:9 – “Noah was a righteous man; he was perfect in his generation.”

Perfect Tzaddik – The Torah testifies that Noah was totally righteous, a tzaddik.  By definition he was a man whose life was an unending pattern of justice.  Like the righteous judge who apportions fairly between the claims of those who appear before him, Noah dealt with the conflicting claims that make up every human life, and apportioned his time and patience, his wisdom and knowledge, his wealth and property between himself, his family, and his neighbors.   God’s testimony to Noah’s righteousness is the most eloquent of statements; an unimpeachable guarantee that his every act was measured and considered – and just.

Yet we find declarations about Noah that seem to contradict the lofty characterization of him as a tzaddik.  The Midrash says that Noah was saved from the Flood only because he found grace in the eyes of God – but not because he was deserving!  Noah himself is quoted in the Midrash as saying to God, ‘And as for me, what they have done, I have done equally; what is the difference between me and them?’

What was the sin of the generation that caused the verdict against them to be sealed?  Robbery.  Yet Noah declared himself guilty of their sin, and the Midrash states that his salvation was nothing but an act of mercy because he found grace in God’s eyes.  How are we to understand that ‘righteous’ Noah, the tzaddik who apportioned every aspect of his existence to the proper service of God could be considered on a par with the corrupt?  How can we associate the sin of robbery with Noah?

Zohar says that Noah sinned in not having chastised his fellow men.  Therefore, the destructive, murderous waters of the Flood are called ‘the waters of Noah’ (Isaiah 54:9) – the waters were his responsibility because, had he fulfilled his responsibility fully, the waters might never have come.  Had he chastised and taught, done more than set a towering personal example of righteousness, then mankind might have listened and heeded and survived.  And the mission of Adam might not have ended in torrential failure.

Withholding Speech – Yes, righteous Noah indeed fulfilled his minimum obligations without flaw.  His ‘justice’ could not be faulted.  But he could have done more, and great people can be dealt with as severely for not doing right as for doing wrong.  He was guilty of withholding speech at a time when it could be beneficial to others.  To live amid sin and to have the opportunity to help eradicate it by speaking up, be reasoning, by chastising, by teaching, by pleading – and not to do so, is equally guilty.

What is more, to withhold speech where it is needed is itself considered robbery.  When Sarah accused Abraham of not supporting her against arrogant, rebellious Hagar, she said, ‘my wrong is upon you’ (Genesis 16:5).  Rashi explains that Abraham was to blame for Sarah’s humiliation because he refrained from reprimanding Hagar.  Noah was guilty of ‘robbery’ because he refrained from doing more than the strict dictates of righteousness required him to.

III.  Noah and Abraham

The Difficulty – The verse says that Noah was a righteous man in his generation.  Some of our Sages explain this in praise of Noah: if he was righteous in an evil generation, imagine how much greater he would have been in a time of righteous people.  Other Sages interpret it as an indirect criticism: he was considered righteous in his generation compared to the corruption surrounding him.  Had he lived in Abraham’s time, he would have been insignificant (Rashi; Genesis 6:9).  How are we to understand and resolve these differing views of Noah?

Heavenly scales weigh differently than do ours.  Righteousness in God’s eyes is measured by how well one judges in the universe of his own being.  In the heavenly scale, the great scholar who uses half of his mind’s potential is honored but slightly for the great knowledge gained by using half his capacity; he is dealt with harshly for not having done twice as much.  On the other hand, the laborer whose free moments are spent struggling over a chapter of Mishnah to the limits of his mental capacity, may rightly earn immense reward.  The Holy One, blessed be He, does not count the pages, but the hours.

Noah survived the destruction caused by the failure of the first ten generations, but Abraham did much more: he was so great that he earned for himself all the reward that should have been the lot of the ten generations that preceded him.  Abraham succeeded where all others failed, but how did he become more righteous than Noah?  If we properly understood the term tzaddik as referring to a person who attains the standard set for him by God, then the same pedestal should have borne both Noah and Abraham.

Abram Outgrows His Mission –  Abraham was born Abram (11:26).  His destiny was to be the moral leader of the nation of Aram.  Had he fulfilled that mission and nothing more, he would have been ‘righteous’.  But he did more.  A human has the capacity to rise above his mission.  Through dedication, prayer, love of God – all the attributes of the greatest figures – it is possible for a person to fulfill the mission set forth for him and be granted a new, higher one – just as it is possible for someone to fail so utterly that it becomes impossible for him ever to attain the good for which he was created.

Abram’s name was changed to Abraham because as the Torah says, “I have made you the (moral) father of a multitude of nations (Genesis 17:5).  As Rashi explains, he had outgrown his mission.  No longer was he the ‘Father’ merely of Aram, henceforth he was to become the ‘father’ of all mankind setting a moral standard that would become the goal of the next four millenia of human history and that would bring the Glory of God to earth on Mount Sinai, in the parchment and letters of the Torah, and finally, in the very being of his descendants.  This aspect of Abraham’s greatness overshadowed Noah’s.  Noah fulfilled his mission – he even attempted to rebuke his generations. But Abraham rose above his mission and thereby gained a new one.  Because he sanctified God’s Name far above the extent for which he was created, he earned the merit which would have belonged to all the others had they done what they were created to.

Noah faulted himself for not having done more.  He could have.  Abraham did. That a ‘perfect tzaddik’ is taken to account for not having done much more than he should have been expected to, is in itself an eloquent tribute to his greatness.

Ten Generations – The number ‘ten’ in Scriptures or the Oral Torah, is a reference to the Ten Heavenly Emanations by means of which God’s Presence descends from heaven and makes itself manifest.  Thus we have the ten statements with which God created heaven and earth; Ten Commandments; the ten tests of Abraham; and the ten plagues upon Egypt.  All of these phenomena were aspects of revelation.  Through each, man and the universe were elevated to new perceptions of God’s holiness and presence.

Of the same order were the ten generations from Adam to Noah and the ten from Noah to Abraham.  The number ten was not coincidental; God had a plan of development which was to proceed and develop until it reached its spiritual culmination in ten generations.  The master plan of creation was Torah and it was to enable man to perfect himself through the study of Torah and the performance of its commands that heaven and earth were created.  The divine intention was that God’s Presence be revealed behind the obscurity of earth’s hiddenness through Adam, and that man’s perception of it grow and intensify stage by stage, emanation by emanation, until the tenth generation when it was to reach its climax.  Then, the Torah would be given and all mankind would achieve God’s final purpose and become ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exodus 19:6).

     The process was to begin again from righteous Noah who signaled a new and better beginning by bringing offerings of thanksgiving and dedication to God after the deluge.  Once again, God set in motion the chain of development that was to culminate in man’s perfection and the giving of the Torah.  Again, man did not rise to the challenge.  The ten generations sinned increasingly, angering God more and more, even attempting to challenge His mastery of the earth and do battle with Him by erecting their Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9).  But this chain of ten had a different ending than the earlier one.  Had it ended in total failure, then no one can know what sort of misfortune might have been visited upon man.  Instead it ended with Abraham.  By his own greatness, a greatness he proved by elevating himself through a succession of ten tests, he achieved in his person what all ten generations had failed to do.

Until Abraham – ‘Abraham performed the commandments of the Torah before they were given’ (Yoma 28b).  He reached so high a level that his own words and thoughts became Torah; he united himself with the mind of God until his own thoughts and wisdom became identical with God’s.  Thus, in a more symbolic sense, the Divine Plan was fulfilled and Torah was ‘given’ – not to the flawed generation of Babel – it was dispersed; not by giving the Tablets and the Torah in its present form – that was left for Moses and the children of Israel.  But the Torah was given and nurtured in Abraham who, in a real sense, began a new history of the world.

1.  Crucial Moments

     The Sixth Century – The Divine Plan has decreed that there be times when particular manifestations of holiness are visited upon earth.  Genesis 7:11 “In the six hundredth year of the life of Noah…all the fountains of the great deep and the windows of the heavens were opened.” Zohar comments that the ‘wellsprings of the deep’ refers to the wisdom from below, man’s capability through the Oral Torah to broaden and develop the wisdom of Torah.  The ‘windows of heaven’ refers to the Written Torah, God’s gift from heaven.  From the moment of creation, that year was foreordained to be a time of awesome Godly manifestations.  Had man been worthy, he would have received the Written and Oral Torahs and been worthy of broadening and deepening it through the Oral Torah.

The six hundredth year of Noah’s life was chosen as a year when a flood of wisdom would descend upon earth.  But like all heavenly gifts, man is free to decide how he will use it or whether he will be worthy to receive it.

The generation of Noah should have been beneficiary of this ‘water’ – water as an allegorical reference to Torah.  But they were unworthy.  So unworthy were they that ‘water’ – which in God’s spiritual world refers to wisdom – became the water of the Flood that blotted out man.

The generation of the Dispersion, too, was destined for a blossoming of knowledge.  The gift of Torah was ready for them, but instead they became the subordinates of Nimrod.  They had all the prerequisites of greatness, but they abused them and so, lost the opportunity to become the fulfillment of God’s plan.

A New Potential – But there was one man among them who was not swept along by the tide.  He was forty-eight years old and he knew that his master was Hashem, not Nimrod.  Because he persevered, the blessing of Torah that was destined for his countrymen concentrated upon him.  He recognized at the age of three that there had to be a single God Who created and ruled the universe.  Now, at forty-eight, he experienced a new revelation of Godly wisdom – of Torah – in the year and the place destined for revelation – and recognized his Creator as he never had before.  His name was Abram and the Sages say, at the age of forty-eight, Abram recognized his Creator (Midrash).

Unlearned Lessons – In Babel, Abram recognized his Maker and Nimrod recognized his own sword and bow.  Noah was still alive as were his three sons – four people noble, righteous patriarch of the human race.  Surely Noah cried out against the lunacy of building the pointless tower in an insane effort to ascend to heaven and compete with God.  Surely he told his great grandchildren that a merciful God could turn wrathful in the face of such iniquity.  And Abram who would spend a lifetime of kindness in drawing people close to God’s service was unafraid of Nimrod and his threats of death; Abram, too, surely protested.  But the people didn’t listen.

Noah was perfect and righteous.  He could save his family, but not the world.  Abram, too, was perfect and righteous and he salvaged the sparks of holiness from the madness of Babel.  But then he added a new dimension to his mission by becoming Abraham, leader of all the world.  He was so great that he acquired all the merit that had been trodden underfoot by his own generation and all those before.  In so doing, he realized and fulfilled the purpose of creation and earned for his children the most treasured gift that God could bestow on any of his creatures – The Torah.

1.  The Ark

The Robber:  The Flood was precipitated by robbery.  God can endure patiently all varieties of sin, waiting for repentance, exacting punishment, building for better times in the future.  But robbery represents an unpardonable low in human behavior because it shows man as a selfish being concerned with himself alone even at the expense of others.

God tolerated Israel’s most grievous sins as long as they were loyal to and considerate of one another.  The present exile, the Exile of Edom, was brought about by Rome which, the Sages teach, was descended from Esau.  His dominant characteristic was violence and murder.  That, too, is akin to robbery. The murderer will allow nothing to stand in his way.  And if the life of another human being bars the achievement of his goal – he will shed blood to gain it.  Because Israel in the declining years of the Second Commonwealth sinned in its social life through jealousy, hatred, and failure to extend themselves for the benefit of one another, they were placed under the domination of the nation that exemplified cruel selfishness.

The destruction of the First Temple was caused because Israel sunk into lust.  It was exiled in the hands of Babylonia, a nation that was the leading oriental example of pleasure-seeking self-indulgence.  This exile fit the sin.

The Ark’s Lesson – To save earthly life by means of an ark and miraculous salvation from the ravages of the Flood would hardly have sufficed if the sin that finally caused the Flood had remained totally unredeemed.  Therefore, the ark had to be more than a protection against the raging elements outside it; it had to enclose creatures led and cared for by Noah and his family, forcing them together, imposing upon them an awesome regimen of selflessness that allowed not a free moment for self-indulgence.  Thereby, a human tradition was re-imposed.  Cain asked, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’  Noah answered, ‘Yes, I am the keeper of everyone, from human being to gnat, from docile lamb to voracious lion.’

For Noah personally, this was a vital lesson.  He was taken to task for not having shown sufficient concern for his generation, for not rebuking them, praying for them – saving them.  He had been content to protect his own righteousness.  His labors in the ark demonstrated to him that he must feel a responsibility for all others.

Of course, his task could have been eased, but that would have destroyed a vital function of the ark.  For the ark was an incubator of goodness.  A necessary ingredient of the salvation was God’s command that the conditions for future survival be developed in the ark.  So Noah and his family became caretakers for all surviving animal life, laboring, trudging, serving, so that when the ancestors of humanity emerged from the ark to rebuild the deluged remains of the earth, they would do it with a reborn awareness of the role of man as a caring, unselfish being (Harav Gifter).

1.  Shem and Japheth

Greece and Israel – The characteristics of Shem and Japheth were different, but they were intended to be complementary.  Japheth was blessed with beauty and sensitivity; Shem with holiness and the Divine Presence.  Of the many nations descending from both, the blessing of Japheth took root in Greece, while the blessing of Shem rested on Israel.

Noah’s blessing (9:27) –  “May God extend the boundaries of Japheth, but he will dwell in the tents of Shem”.  The Talmud teaches: “the beauty of Japheth (the Greek language, the most beautiful of tongues should be in the tents of Shem.” (Megillah 9b)  This interpretation of Noah’s blessing was used by the Sages to permit the translation of the Five Books of Moses into Greek.

Japheth’s Role – Noah used the name ‘Elokim’ in giving his blessing to Japheth.  It is the name of God that represents His dominance over nature for, as the commentators note, has the same numerical value, 86, as the law of nature.  Noah bestowed upon Japheth the blessings of nature, the ability to perceive and create beauty in this world, but he told his open, expressive, perceptive, gifted son that his achievements must ‘dwell in the tents of Shem.’  Otherwise, his gifts would be worse than wasted; they would become a destructive, corrupting force,  Beauty can elevate man and it can corrode him.  It can inspire man and it can degrade him.  For man is more susceptible to his heart and his senses than to his mind and his soul.

The Conflict – The beauty of Japheth and the tents of Shem reached their time of coming together during the period of the Second Temple.  It was begun upon the command of Cyrus, a descendant of Japheth.  His motives were pure at first, but later his respect for God and love for the Jews changed to wickedness (Rosh Hashanah 4a-b).  Had his motives remained pure, the Second Temple might have achieved the holiness and Divine Presence of the First, but because he fell from his grandeur, the Temple that originated with his benevolence could not become worthy of so lofty a stature (Yoma 9b-10a).

Then came the reign of Antiochus and the Syrian-Greeks.  The Syrians, bearers of the blessing of Japheth, imposed their culture upon Israel and attempted to destroy its allegiance to the God Who dwelt in the tents of Shem.  They defiled the Temple and chose three commandments as their prime targets:

The Sabbath: If God was the eternal Creator and continuous resuscitator of the universe and if His Torah formed the blueprint and formula for the existence and purpose of Creation, then Greek culture would have to stand aside and bow humbly before the tents of Shem.  This, Antiochus could not tolerate.

The New Moon:  the symbol of man’s obligation to instill holiness in time.  Time is meaningless until the Sanhedrin hallows it by proclaiming ‘the new moon is sanctified, it is sanctified!’, and when this is done, the festivals – the appointed meeting places in time between God and man – enter the calendar and raise it from a record of material pursuit and struggle to a vehicle of holiness.  Antiochus and his culture were not absolute; they were either servants of holiness or crude intrusions upon the human purpose.

Circumcision: the declaration that the physical and the spiritual must be intertwined.  The physical world is not separate from and independent of the spiritual.  The body must bear the mark of allegiance to God’s covenant, the restraining mark which tell it, ‘You are a servant not a master; you are host to a soul and you must elevate yourself to its exalted level.’  Beauty and pleasure were not the independent virtues Antiochus said they were.  They were confined by Torah or they were nothing.

A world without a Creator, a calendar without holiness, a body without restraint – these were the goals of a culture that had accepted the gifts but not the goals of Noah’s blessing to Japheth.  External grace and splendor covering a corrosive emptiness.  To this had the beauty of Japheth been brought.

Greece should have placed its culture at the service of Shem, used it to help provide a glorious dwelling place for the Divine Presence.  Instead it’s splendor became darkness.

I.  The Greatness of Adam

In order to understand a sin, one must understand the sinner.  Moses – master of all prophets, most trusted in God’s universe, most humble of men – was denied the cherished goal of entering Eretz Israel because he hit the stone and chastised the people (Numbers 20:7-13).   There are many differing explanations of the sin; the commentators themselves find it hard to explain how Moses’ deed and words were serious enough to merit so severe a punishment.  Any understanding of the sin of Moses, as of any of the ancients, requires a realization that they were so great that their actions were measured by standards far above our own.
Who was Adam whose sin played such a pivotal role in the history and destiny of man?
 “When he was created the angels erred (thinking he was a divine being) and wished to sing “Holy’ before him. (Midrash)
The very angels thought that Adam was a deity.  They had no concept of what he really was.  We cannot even imagine how exalted was his greatness – for, if the angels didn’t know, can we mortals hope to know?
Adam extended from the earth to the firmament…..from one end of the earth to the other (Chagigah 12a)
This statement of the Sages has a profound spiritual dimension.  There was no facet of creation, from the most mundane to the most sublime, that Adam did not encompass.  Nothing was hidden from him.  No one ever comprehended better than Adam how each of his actions could determine the course of creation.  The angels knew that, ultimately, it was not they who controlled him, but he who controlled them, for the Divine Will made the functioning of earth dependent upon the deeds of man.
Even after his sin and after death, the holiness of Adam was so awesome that the least significant part of his body, his heel, was as brilliant as the sun.
Having these barest insights into the greatness of Adam, we still know nothing of his awesome nature; it is sufficient to know that the distance between his loftiness and ourselves is like the distance between heaven and earth.  Only in these terms can we hope to have a faint understanding of his sin.  Surely, however, we cannot either understand it or learn from it to perfect our own puny selves unless we banish from our minds the foolish myth of ‘apples in Eden’.
The Talmud says, it is not the poisonous snake that kills, but the sin that kills (Berachos 33a).  The snake, the bullet, the runaway auto, the disease – these are but the messengers that carry out a decree sealed by human misdeed.  They are no more the cause of death than the white sheet pulled over the face of the expired patient.
“Blessed is the man who trusts in God and who makes God the source of his trust (Jeremiah 17:7).
Chidushei HaRim, a Polish Rabbi born in 1799, explains that the two halves of the verse are dependent upon one another: the more one trusts in God, the more God justifies his trust with the result that his trust in God continues to increase.  Our greatest people found no difficulty in casting their lots for service of God without knowing where the next morning’s breakfast would come from.  Indeed, Torah was given only to the generation that ate the manna.  They learned in their everyday lives that they could live in a barren wilderness without fear, in secure confidence that God’s promise was their assurance of the next days sustenance.  Only after developing such faith was Israel worthy of receiving the Torah.
Rabbi Kotzker, born in Poland in 1787, said, Torah greatness can be attained only when there is indifference to need for financial security.  Torah is the wisdom of God; the Torah sage unites his own mind with the intelligence of the Creator.  To the extent that he is concerned with his needs in this world, he cannot escape its snares to ascend to a higher one.
For us, caught up in our work ethic and forty hour week, faith is a fringe benefit we can afford only after having attained bogus ‘security’.  Adam not only knew but saw that his service to God was the determining factor in his success.  And he saw it to a greater extent than any man who ever lived – until he sinned!

II.  Adam’s Sin

What was the difference between Adam before the sin and Adam after the sin?
Each of us is subject to our own temptations – some to money, some to lust, some to glory, some to power.  Whatever our spiritual level, there are some sins that tempt us  greatly, others that have conquered us, and still others that we never even consider.  Which of us, imperfect though we are, would attempt to commit a barbaric atrocity?  We know that human beings have, do, and will commit such acts – even people who love their families, assist helpless old people across the street, and consider themselves civilized.  Nevertheless, we don’t consider ourselves prey to this way of thinking.  There may be gossip on our tongues and larceny (in varying degrees) in our hearts; but some transgressions are so unjustifiably evil that in no way could we conceive of ourselves ever committing them.  They are beyond our thought processes.
This can help us understand, in small measure, the greatness of Adam before his sin.  Ramban explains, that when Adam was created, his nature was to do good.  He was not the mixture of good and evil inclinations that human beings are today.  We have lusts and desires that are part of our very humanity.  The desire for wealth, comfort, and pleasure is not whispered in our ears by some outside outside source seeking to lead us astray.  We want them, our psyche demands them.  We are born as selfish beings who would grow up to be totally selfish and self-indulgent were it not for the strictures of society and the strength of developing conscience.  Adam was different; his innate nature was good and it sought to perform nothing but the will of his Maker.
Of course, he had free will, for, as we have seen above, without man’s free-willed struggle to choose good over evil, the purpose of creation could not be fulfilled  But the temptation to evil was not a part of him; it went against his nature.  When the call to sin came to Adam, it came not from within himself, but from the serpent who served as the embodiment of the Satanic evil inclination.  But after sin, man changed.  The urge to sin was no longer dangled in front of him by a seductive serpent; it had become part of him.  Now the desire for forbidden fruits comes from within man; when we sin, we respond not to the urging of an outside force, but to our own desires.  It is we – not it or they – who urge transgression upon us.
If Adam was so great how could he sin?  If he has so clear a perception of God’s holiness, and was himself a person of such exalted spirituality, how could any outside temptation have swayed him?
Even at his elevated level, there was still a challenge.  Temptation came from outside, but Adam was capable of hearing and understanding it: it was his mission to elevate himself to a level where the urge to sin, was so senseless that it made no more impact on him than the buzzing of a fly.  Holy though he was by virtue of being the handiwork of God and the subject of angelic awe and praise, he was still created in partnership with the earth.  His animal flesh was the agent of Olam-earth to conceal even greater levels of holiness: it was his mission to elevate even the fleshly, the earthly, until the very veils shone with the splendor of their Creator.
To us – intertwined and interlocked as we are in contradiction, doubt, and temptation – Adam’s challenge seems like simplicity itself.  But it was a real challenge, nevertheless.  Had he persevered during the few hours between his creation and the onset of the first Sabbath, the purpose of creation would have been achieved and the rest of history would have been a tale of perfection, and exalted enjoyment of God’s rewards.  His immediate challenge was to resist the inclination to disobey represented by the serpent, and to cleave ever closer to God despite the barrier of flesh that removed him from the ultimate heavenly glory.  That the challenge was indeed worthy of even so great a creature as Adam is plain from the reward in store.  The purpose of creation was God’s wish to bestow well-deserved, hard-earned reward – and that purpose would have been achieved in just a few hours had not Adam succumbed.  In the heavenly school, might rewards are not earned by puny achievements.  No matter how convinced we are that we would have done better had we had the opportunity, we must realize that our lack of comprehension does not minimize Adam’s challenge.  Just as we have no conception of his greatness, we have no conception of the seeds of his failure.
Adam’s mission was to create a Kiddush Hashem, Sanctification of the Name, by overcoming the temptation to sin.  But because the temptation came from without, the Kiddush Hashem could never be as great as it would have been had he been able to overcome an internal urge to do wrong.  Had the falsehood of evil been less plain to him; had he been forced to choose between pleasant and ugly instead of between truth and falsehood, then the potential sanctification would have been much greater.  The businessman sanctifies the Name far more by not cheating his competitors than by not murdering them.  The Torah scholar sanctifies the Name far more by not wasting a precious moment than by not burning his books.  Because it is man’s mission to glorify God’s name, ‘everyone that is called by My Name, and I have created him for My Glory (Isaiah 43:7)’ – Adam hoped to accomplish greater glory for God by subjecting himself to and persevering against a greater challenge.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil contained more than luscious, attractive fruit.  It represented the mixture of good and evil, a conflict between desire and conscience. The commentators explain that when he ate of the tree, Adam changed.  No longer was temptation a serpent that sought to attract his interest from a distance.  No longer was sin like a fire beckoning him to jump into its consuming flame.  Temptation entered inside him and became part of him.  Lust was no longer the message of a glib serpent, it was the desire of pleasure-seeking man.  Until then, Adam and Eve wore no clothing – for why should they?  All of their organs were tools in the service of God.  There was no difference between mind and heart, between hands and other parts of the body.  There was no need for shame, for animal lust was not a human attribute.
After eating the fruit of the tree, however, ‘knowledge’ entered man.  It was not a new dimension in the knowledge of good – Adam’s knowledge of the good was intimate and awesome before then.  It was an awareness that good and evil are intertwined and that his limbs and organs, divinely bestowed instruments of good, could also be the tools of lust.  Mating had been exclusively the means of fulfilling God’s injunction to be fruitful and multiply, to produce new bearers of God’s mission, new creatures to whom the angels would sing and pay homage.  After his sin and his attainment of a new ‘knowledge’ of desire, it became a means toward gratifying man’s most powerful urge and transforming human beings into two-legged animals.  Therefore, the immediate product of the forbidden meal was shame and the need for clothing.  Man knew the anguish of his new knowledge, for it was a knowledge that brought lust and impurity inside him and defiled the organs that had once existed only for good.
For a human being to face such a challenge and surmount it is indeed a task of enormous difficulty.  Success constitutes a high degree of Kiddush Hashem.  That was what Adam wanted.  By making his task harder, he was hoping to serve his Maker better.  To find one’s way in darkness is a greater feat than finding it in sunlight.  Adam thought he could please God by plunging into darkness.  The hiddenness of creation itself was not enough for him; he thought he could serve God more if he served Him in new ways.  He was wrong.  He changed his mission, changed his essence, drew more veils of obscurity between himself and God, exchanged Eden for thistles and thorns, diminished his labor from positive and negative commandments to plow and scythe, changed from a target of the serpent to its host.
Had Adam not sinned, his life would have been an upward spiral of spiritual elevation.  But he did.  By doing so he caused a basic change in his make-up, and, therefore, in his mission.  Up to then evil had been an outside temptation, a clear-cut falsehood with no claim on the credence of man; by eating the fruit that held the knowledge of combined good and evil, Adam took evil himself.  It became part of his nature and from then on, his evil inclination became ‘I want, I desire, I need….’
The perfection of newly fallen man required a new, laborious, seemingly endless process.  It would require extensive time and the combined efforts of countless millions of human beings down the generations.  We cannot understand why this particular course was necessary, but so the divine wisdom decreed.  Man’s emergence from evil to good became infinitely more difficult because his perception of good and evil became clouded.  Lust and temptations became part of him and he began to see evil as unpleasant, ugly, ‘not nice’ – or tempting.  Since that day, man’s history has been an unending effort to raise himself out of that swamp and to return to that original realization when good and evil were distinct and clear cut.
In his present form, man cannot return to his original state.  Only through death and resuscitation could he be born once again as man before the sin.  For this reason, the sin brought death upon the human race.  Death became the only road to renewed perfection; by means of it, man left the life and earth that had become imperfect and, when the proper moment in God’s design arrived, his soul would return to a new life in a world of renewed perfection.  During this interval and again in its new life, the soul would reap the reward it had earned by its degree of success in the struggle to seize good from its concealment on earth.
The state of creation following the sin was confusion.  From the state of clear-cut division between good and evil, there emerged desire for evil and revulsion for good, impaired recognition of which was which, and a blurring of values.  Man’s mission on earth became separation.  He had to find the good both within himself and in the world around him, and he had to identify the evil masquerading as good.  The most dangerous result of his sin was confusion.  In a sense, earth returned to its primeval state when light and darkness reigned in an ill-defined mixture until God separated then.  Now man had created a new mixture within himself and it became his mission to define the ingredients once again.
No matter how high man rises in this world, he is still limited by his material nature and by the evil that is internalized with him.  At his best, he recognizes God as the true Judge, but he is inadequate to recognize the ultimate goodness in apparent tragedy.  That will have to wait.
The purpose of creation is man.  It  was made to test him, elevate him and to be the vehicle for bringing God’s mercy upon him.  And only he could fulfill it.  For that reason, the Torah does not say ‘and God saw that it was good’ after the creations of the second day even though the angels were created on that day.  The creation of angels, holy though they were, was not designated with a divine seal of approval because they are not essential to the fulfillment of God’s purpose as is man.  And of man, it does not say it was good, because man is never complete.  After more than fifty-seven centuries, his task still goes on.

III.  The Earth is Man’s

The heavens are the heavens of Hashem, but He has given the earth to the children of man (Psalms 115:16).
     Chidushei HaRim gives us a dazzling insight into this familiar verse.  God needs no assistance from man to make the heavens ‘heavenly’.  They are holy by virtue of His Presence and the hosts that serve and glorify His Name.   But the earth – to make the earth heavenly He gave it to man so that he, by the performance of good and the avoidance of evil can transform the cloak concealing His holiness and even His very existence into a slice of heaven.
At the beginning of creation the earth itself did not carry out God’s will:  God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation: herbage yelling seed, fruit trees yielding fruit each after its kind (Genesis 1:11).
Hashem commanded the earth to produce trees whose bark would taste the same as their fruit.  The earth did not comply.  Therefore, when Adam was cursed for his sin, the earth, too, was cursed.  God commanded that it be ‘a fruit tree’: that the taste of the tree be the same as its fruit.  The earth, however, disobeyed and brought forth ‘tree yielding fruit’, but the tree itself was not a fruit.  Therefore, when Adam was cursed for his sin, the earth, too, was remembered and punished  (Rashi; Midrash)
How did the earth have the audacity to disobey?  The earth, through its controlling angel, knew that God would store away the brilliant ancient light because the wicked people of the future were unworthy of it (Midrash).  It reasoned that if the original plan of creation was altered to prevent the wicked from enjoying a spiritual light that they did not deserve, then the richness of earth’s produce, too, was more than the wicked should be given.  Therefore, earth diminished the pleasures available to them and defied God’s order that it produce trees that would be edible and tasty throughout.  This failure of the earth contributed to Adam’s later sin, because the serpent strengthened his argument by pointing to the earth which had ignored God’s command with impunity.  For contributing to man’s downfall, the earth was cursed along with him.
But the earth’s intention was honorable, its logic faultless.  It intended only to follow the example of God Himself – why was it punished?
Its behavior and future punishment were meant to be lessons to man.  Otherwise earth would not have been given the power to sin and the Torah would not have found it necessary to record the sin for eternity.  The earth had been given a command yet it was presumptuous enough to claim for itself the authority to overrule the word of God.  Its reason? – logical.  Its precedent? – God Himself.  Where had it erred?
A very great man in the future – a man who was deemed worthy of becoming Mashiach – also took it upon himself to break a commandment.  King Hezekiah was shown that wicked people would descend from him, so he decided not to have children.  He thought it would be better to have no children than to have idolatrous children.  But the prophet Isaiah came to him and proclaimed angrily: “Why do you meddle in God’s mysteries?  You must do what you are commanded to do, and the Holy One blessed be He will do what pleases Him (Breaches 10a).”
The earth presumed to meddle in God’s mysteries.  It was forbidden to do so and punished for having dared.  This, too, is Torah and we must learn from it.  No lesson of Torah should ever be lost upon us.  Its every commandment, every incident, every conversation was included to educate and elevate man.
To ignore or forget is to lose a portion of life.  The Sages teach that when Israel accepted the Ten Commandments, it approached the exaltation of Adam before the sin.  Had the Golden Calf not been built, they would have entered Eretz Israel, built an eternal Temple, and the entire world would have received all the prophetic blessings of the world to come.  Like Adam, they sinned and fell from their greatness.  They received the Ten Commandments anew and the Second Tablets of the Law, but it was not the same.  Had they retained the first Tablets they would have learned and never forgotten; with the second Tablets, we learn and do forget (Midrash).  Adam sinned and became subject to death; Israel sinned and became subject to forgetfulness.  When a man studies and learns, he makes Torah a part of himself.  When he forgets his learning, a part of himself has left him – he has suffered a degree of death.
Adam sinned and humanity changed forever.  But the antidote to the serpent’s poison is forever available, even though forgetfulness is our lot.  We can succeed in isolating light from darkness, and holiness from profanity even though confusion is the legacy of that tempting but lethal fruit.
We can control the levers of creation by our study of Torah and performance of its precepts, even though a montage of men and machines blocks our view of the power of our deeds.
With eternal love you have loved the House of Israel, your people, Torah and commandments, statutes and ordinances you have taught us…..for they are our life and the length of our days and upon them we will meditate day and night.
God made the universe and presented us with its blueprint….so we begin our study…..

Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning..”

I.   Before the Beginning

Prior to creation there was nothing but the Glory of God.  Nothing – it is a concept that we, creatures in a physical world, cannot even begin to comprehend, just as the blind cannot comprehend the sunset and the deaf a symphony.  Can we conceive a world without time or space?  We can speak of it, think of it, but the truth is that we cannot really imagine something so foreign to our experience.
Existence prior to creation is unfathomable.  There was no sun nor moon – they were created on the fourth day. There was not even light or darkness – they were created on the first day.  That seems like a contradiction in terms; if there was no light than there was automatically darkness, for is not darkness the absence of light?  No, for even that seemingly basic concept is a product of our earthbound experience.
There is only God, incorporeal – not composed of matter, having no material existence – omnipresent – always in existence – without beginning and without end.  But God wanted to do good to beings apart from Himself, and in order to make it possible for Him to do so, He created a universe of human life.  Because God is absolutely perfect, He wanted the good that He would bestow upon others to be equally perfect.  This could be possible only if the beneficiaries of His goodness would be enabled to share in the perfection of His Glory.
His wisdom decreed that simply to create a being and lavish upon him the blessings of his Maker would not be enough, because the person who has not earned reward feels no satisfaction in underserved gifts – rather than make the recipient feel proud that he has been found deserving, he feels humiliated that he is showered with blessings that are not truly his.  Thus, in order for the intended goodness to be worthy of the Source of all good, it would have to be of a nature that could be earned by the beneficiary and thus be the greatest possible source of satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness to him.
In order to achieve this goal, God desired these conditions: man had to have free choice; he had to be placed in a setting where he would be required to choose between good and evil; and the choice could not be obvious – if it would be so then it would be absurd to reward man for choosing well.
If the superiority of good over evil were too manifest, the choice would become an automatic, instinctive decision; one unworthy of the sort of reward God wanted to give.  The goal could be achieved only if the holiness of God were so concealed that it would be possible to err.  If man could live in an atmosphere where evil was not only plausible but tempting, not only tempting but rewarding, then the successful struggle against seduction would steadily elevate him.  At every stage of his existence he would face new challenges, always struggling against the desires of the flesh.  If he could then surmount the ‘obvious’ and cling to the way of God, recognizing that the alluring impediments were nothing more than a mirage, his spiritual growth would be constant, and eventually he would be worthy of the reward which God created the universe in order to bestow.

II.  Good and Evil

But if God is everywhere, and nothing can exist unless He makes it so – how then can we associate Him with the existence of evil?
The Torah defines ‘good’ differently.  ‘Good’ is the presence of God; evil is not His absence – for his is everywhere – but His hiddenness, the lack of awareness that He is present.
The cardinal principles of Jewish belief are that God exists and that He is One.  His Oneness implies that there is no place free from Him.  The more one is aware of His Presence, the more that place or situation is good..  A church filled with people singing songs of praise and worship, a synagogue filled with children speaking to their Father, a poor hungry family receiving a box of food – all of these are good, because they are manifestations of His existence in the minds and hearts of people.  But scenes of suffering and tragedy can also be good if we could but realize that all is part of His master plan.  It is when we do not perceive His Presence, when we fail to see purpose and direction in earthly affairs that we live with evil.  In short, evil is a condition where God is not seen.
There are situations in life that seem inherently evil: surely the ugliness of man at his worst cannot be described as good.  But even they can serve as a vehicle for elevating man.  If he surmounts the challenge that they present, then he has become a better, stronger person.  The person who lives in a cruel society as Abraham did and remains kind and compassionate, has grown.  The one who travels through a deceitful land and remains honest and upright as Jacob did, has grown.  Thus, the evil around him served the beneficial purpose of elevating him to further greatness.

III.  Man’s Role

The world was now ready for man.  To see the light through the mists would not be easy, but it could be done if man were honest in seeking the truth rather than satisfying his animal desires.  Because it could be done, man was reqired to do it.  Because it was not an easy task, he would be amply deserving of reward if he achieved it.  Thus, God satisfied the native of creation: He would be able to present good upon man; but it would not be a cheap, undeserved good.  Man could attain it only by elevating the spiritual in himself and by uniting it with the spiritual in creation.  He would see the universe for what it was, a camouflage disguising what was truly meaningful and eternal.  He would realize that in total immersion in Torah even amid poverty, hunger, and thirst, lay a degree of happiness and contentment in this world that was infinitely greater than any to be found in wealth, luxury, and self indulgence. (see Avos 6:1)
To whatever extent he is able to accomplish that, man attains a degree of perfection that is somewhat akin to that of His Maker.  By uniting his intellect with that of God through the study of Torah and by perfecting his deeds through the performance of the commandments, man earns the degree of perfection that it is possible for him  to attain, and the degree of reward that God seeks to give.
In all creation, only man has unlimited freedom of choice.  The forces of nature have no such freedom.  The natural forces are under the control of angels who serve as the intermediaries in carrying out God’s will.  We find references in the words of the Sages to the angels of the sea, the angels of individual nations, even the angels of blades of grass.  These angelic ministers carry out God’s dictates throughout the universe.  The only exceptions are the people of Israel and Eretz Israel, both of which have greater holiness and are, therefore, guided only by God Himself.
The Jewish people began to attain this degree of holiness through the deeds of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Until the time of the Patriarchs, all men were equal both in their calling and in their opportunity to achieve the heavenly goal set for them.  But the ten generations up to Noah, failed to achieve their mission, and the ten generations from Noah to Abraham failed again, until Abraham founded the nation that would become God’s chosen one.  Eretz Israel is the ‘center of creation’ in the material sense, and it is the center of holiness on earth, as well. (Ramban)
Despite the laws of nature and the angels who carry them out, there is a power higher than them – man.  For it was given to him through his free choice, to make nature yield to him.  Throughout the Torah are sprinkled blessings that will come to man if he makes the Torah his love and the commandments his pursuit.
It is not at all surprising that man can sanctify himself and earn the blessings of holiness through immersion in spiritual pursuit.  That souls can cleave to God after they leave their bodies, or that righteous beings can be rewarded with the superhuman height of prophecy is not at all surprising: spiritual attainment is deserving of spiritual reward.  But rain, prosperity, security, triumph over enemies?  Why should the study of Torah or the performance of commandments affect crops, bank accounts, and battles?  This is one of the great miracles of creation: For that reason the Torah declines to promise spiritual rewards instead of material ones; the first are understood, the second could never be fathomed had not the Torah made them plain.
It is clear, therefore, that man’s deeds are not statistics in a personal ledger.  They can split the sea and stop the sun, water the desert and silence a cannon, because the world’s existence is founded in the spirit of God.  It is covered and camouflaged, but without it there is no universe, for without God’s Presence – open or concealed – nothing can exist.  Man can unite himself in thought and deed with that Presence.  When he does so he has fulfilled the purpose of creation, and creation bends to his needs.

IV.  More Worlds Than One

Even in this world of obscurity and hiddenness, there are still many levels of existence – many worlds.  Can one say that the great and holy sage and the most extreme criminal inhabit the same world?  Do the intellectual and the aborigine live in the same world?  A person’s world consists of far more than sand and sea – in essence the physical peculiarities of his existence are no more important than the brown paper bag in which a treasure may be wrapped.
Just as there are parallel lines of existence between righteous and wicked, so, too, there are higher worlds than any we can conceive of.  The Sages tell us that there is a Holy Temple in heaven that awaits the final redemption of Israel when it will descend to earth.  It is not a building of brick and mortar.  There is a spiritual Temple which will one day become clothed in physical form and take shape on earth just as the Torah of black fire on white fire took the form of parchment and ink and earthly commandments.  There is a physical Garden of Eden and there is a heavenly paradise – the first is the physical manifestation of the second.  When Jacob returned to the land of Canaan, he saw a company of angels and named the place Machanaim, twin camps.  Ramban explains that there were two camps – one, a company of angels on high; the other, Jacob’s company below.  The one below was the human complement of the one above – except that it was greater, because creation came into being to serve it and to be influenced by it.
All of this is part of the creation in which we live: limitation upon limitation, level after level.  Each person lives in his own world with the responsibility to climb to a higher one and the danger that he will stumble and fall to a lower one.  Each person can be knocked off course by the angelic enforcers of the laws of nature, or he can rise above them and bend them to his greatness.  He can be one more earthly creature, hardly rising above animal life, or he can become the fulfillment of God’s wish when He created heaven and earth and said “Let Us make man”.

An Overview

I.  Master Plan Of Creation
God created the world from a plan and for a purpose.  His plan was the Torah which preceded the world (Shabbos 88b), and His purpose was that man find the meaning and the goal of creation in the Torah:  “He looked into the Torah and created the world’ (Midrash).
Torah was the blueprint of creation.  It is commonly thought that, following the failure of the human race and the emergence of Abraham and his descendants as people worthy of bearing the privilege of becoming God’s chosen people, God decided upon the commandments which He transmitted to the Jews through Moses.  Nothing could be more wrong.  The Torah and its commandments were not designed in response to the demands and needs of early life.  The Torah pre-existed earth; and the universe as we know it was designed to conform to the requirements of the Torah.

II.  Gates of Understanding (Gates of Wisdom)
Indeed, it is true that Torah is the blueprint of creation, but that is only a small part of the total truth:  Torah remains the key to all the secrets and resources of creation.  When Adam was created, God placed him in the Garden of Eden ‘to work it and guard it’ (Genesis 2:15), upon which the Midrash comments ‘to work it’ through the performance of positive commandments, and to ‘guard it’ through the observance of negative commandments.  Man in his most exalted form can grasp that the true essence of all this earthly life is the extent of his service to God.  Let us attempt to understand – at least imperfectly – how Torah permeates every molecule of the universe.  If we succeed, we will have found the first marker on the road to fulfillment as the Creator intended it.

‘Fifty gates of understanding were created and all were transmitted to Moses except for one (Rosh Hashanah 21b)’

What were these ‘gates of understanding’?  Ramban explains that each order of the universe was created according to a plan, and its contents, growth, function, and all other of its aspects are determined according to it.  To enter into the mysteries of this plan and to comprehend it is to be admitted into its ‘gate of understanding’. The knowledge of man is the forty-ninth gate of understanding, the ability to know the complexities of the human mind and personality.
Above that gate, is the fiftieth – the knowledge of God.  Forty-nine gates were presented to Moses; the fiftieth was denied even him, for no mortal being can attain the understanding of God.  Thus, in the truest sense, Ramban continues, the fiftieth gate was never ‘created’, for the term creation implies that it was part of heaven and earth – part of the handiwork of the Six Days of Creation that is within the realm of human understanding.  But that gate, the ability to comprehend and understand the essence of God, was never created in the normal sense, because it is beyond the scope of man.

• Note: Chidushei HaRim suggests that not only was the fiftieth gate createdbut it was transmitted to Moses!  The very fact that a human being can conceive God’s greatness to the extent that he can say ‘ if all the seas were ink and all the heavens parchment and all the trees quills, I could not begin to write Your greatness’ – this in itself is a glimmer of the glories within the fiftieth gate of understanding.  This barest breath of the last gate was transmitted to man; otherwise how could he ever imagine that the unimaginable exists, how could his soul soar in futile yet fruitful quest of the infinite riches of God’s wisdom and spirituality?

With mastery of the forty-nine gates, Moses could understand the complexities of every aspect of creation and the workings of every human mind.  He could look at a person and perceive his sins and merits, his flaws and virtues.
Thus the wisdom of the forty-nine gates was more than a theory.  It enabled its possessor to know all the secrets of any aspect of creation to whose ‘gate of understanding’ he was privy.  He could unlock the high recesses of the human mind as Moses could, he could even know the workings of animal life and the earth.  The master of terrestrial understanding could know without Geiger counters and divining rods where mineral deposits were located and what veins of land were suited to the production of exotic plants.  He could know the ‘speech’ and behavior of animals and the secrets of human healing.
According to the Sages, King Solomon was the possessor of all wisdom, but the wise king did not request encyclopedic knowledge – he asked only for the wisdom of Torah so that he could judge his people wisely and justly.
For the forty-nine gates of understanding are all in the Torah.  The man who can decipher the depths of the Torah’s wisdom knows the secrets of agriculture, mining, music, mathematics, healing, law – everything! – because nothing was built into heaven and earth unless it was found in the Torah,  The question is not whether Torah is the source of all wisdom, the question is only how one interprets the Torah to unseal its riches.
Every aspect of the wisdom transmitted to Moses and presented to Solomon – and shared by the great figures of ancient Israel – is contained in the Torah.  One need only know how to find it.
We, in our spiritual property, lack the keys to the gates of understanding.  The Torah commands us in laws of agriculture – but does this tell us how to make farms more productive?  We are permitted to seek medical help – but does this teach us to conquer disease?  We are commanded to seek the benefit of our fellow men – but how does this show us the way to peace in a jealous, unruly, selfish world?

III. – Treasures Within Torah

“Uncover my eyes that I may behold wonders from Your Torah” (Psalms 119:18)

The wonders are there, it is we who fail to see them.  The eyes of the ancients were free of the material veils that so cloud our vision today.
The Talmud tells us that when Moses ascended to heaven to be taught the Torah and receive the Tablets of the Law; he saw God writing small crowns on top of the letters in the heavenly Torah.  Moses wondered why they were necessary and God answered, “There is a man named Akiba ben Joseph who will live many generations in the future who will derive mounds and mounds of laws from each crown” (Menachos 29b).
An extra letter here, a missing letter there, an enlarged letter, a miniature letter – all of these seeming aberrations in a Torah scroll are meticulously preserved guideposts to law, nature, and untold mysteries of the universe.  This explains why Jews down the ages have taken scrupulous care that all Torah scrolls remain faithful to the ancient texts.  Ezra the Scribe, who led the Jews back from the Babylonian exile, wrote a Torah scroll which remained the authoritative one for centuries and which was the standard against which all others were checked for accuracy.  Therefore, too, a Torah scroll with an extra letter – even a silent vowel like vav or yud – is halachically unfit for use.
The sum total of human knowledge, therefore, derives from the Torah, for the very universe itself is a product of Torah.  It existed, as the Midrash tell us – “written in black fire upon white fire”.
The black and white fire of Torah became clothed in ink and parchment, and the Godly wisdom which is the essence of Torah, remained hidden in its words and letters.  The very wisdom which dictated the creation remains imbedded in Torah and reveals itself to those chosen few who are capable of peering beneath its material camouflage.
When the ancient Romans apprehended the Mishnaic sage Rabbi Chanina ben Teradion for committing the ‘crime’ of teaching the Torah to his students, they condemned him to death.  They wrapped him in a Torah scroll and set him on fire.  As his agony reached its climax, his students asked him, ‘Rabbi, what do you see?”  He answered, “The parchments are consumed, and the letters fly up (to heaven)” (Avodah Zarah 18a).  The great Rabbi could see what his students could not.  Flames could burn parchment and ink, but the letters of the Torah are eternal, for the scroll is not their essence but their abode.  They find a temporary home in the artistry of the scribe, but hidden in his handiwork is the wisdom of the scribe Who preceded him – Who composed and wrote the first Torah in black fire upon white fire.  Let the earthly scroll be burned and its letters – those eternal letters that preceded earth and define its destiny – rise up to their Author.  The letters are eternal for they are the will of the Eternal!

IV.  The Oral Law

Even a cursory study of the Torah proves that there must be an unwritten law, that there is much more to Torah than the Five Books of Moses, the Chumash; much more even than the entire twenty-four books of Tanach.
 Exodus 17:14 – “Write this as a remembrance in a book and place it in the ears of Joshua…”  It is plain that, in addition to the written verses of the Torah, something else had to be told to Joshua.
Exodus 21:24 – “..eye for an eye..” yet never in Jewish history was physical punishment handed out for an assault.  Instead the verse was always interpreted to require monetary compensation.
Deuteronomy 12:21 – “You may slaughter from your herd and your flock which Hashem has given you as I have commanded you.”  Moses clearly states that he had “commanded” his people concerning Shechitah (the slaughtering of certain animals and birds for food according to Jewish dietary laws), yet we find no where in the written text of the Torah even one of the intricate and demanding rules of kosher slaughter.
Countless similar questions could be raised. The implication of them all is clear beyond a doubt: there is a second Torah, an Oral Law, without which the first Torah is not only a closed book, but without which the written Torah can be twisted and misinterpreted beyond recognition, as indeed it has been down the centuries.
As Rambam says in his introduction, Moses had three primary disciples: Joshua, Eleazer, and Pinchas, but it was to Joshua ‘who was Moses’ disciple’ that he transmitted the Oral Law and whom he commanded in it.
Moses was commanded to designate Joshua as his successor.  He was commanded: instruct him concerning the ‘Talmud’.  This Rambam interprets as a clear reference to the Oral Law.  This would explain why Israel was so incensed when Joshua forgot three hundred laws following the death of Moses, that there were some who threatened to kill him (Temurah 16a)!  Why the wrath against Joshua alone when there were myriad other scholars and elders in the nation who were equally guilty?  Because, as leader of the people, Joshua had been made responsible for the preservation of the Oral Law.
The Oral Law was taught in its entirety to Moses during his forty days and forty nights in heaven.  When one considers the origin of the hundreds of thousands of volumes that constitute only a fraction of the total body of knowledge that we refer to with the all inclusive name Torah, the phenomenon of Moses knowing it all is not surprising.  In essence, Torah is the wisdom of God, His own thought, the ultimate in spiritual greatness.

V.  Survival of Torah

Proverbs 6:23 – “For a commandment is a lamp and the Torah is light”.  Illumination is the last of three important steps taken by God in communicating His Word to us.  The first step was revelation which occurred when God spoke to the bible authors.  The second step was inspiration, that process whereby God guided them in correctly writing or uttering His message.  Now a third step is needed to provide understanding for men and women as they hear God’s revealed and inspired message.  This vital step is illumination, that divine process whereby God causes the written revelation to be understood by the human heart.
The  Person behind the illumination is the Holy Spirit.
God’s wisdom dictated that in our human existence, the way to ascend the spiritual ladder is through – and only through – the commandments of the Torah, just as the lamp is the means to attain light.  Man’s highest privilege and loftiest attainment is in the study of Torah, itself.
After the Torah was given, the Oral Law enabled Jews to properly understand the written Torah, to derive from the laws the principles that should be applied to new situations.  That human intellect is capable of divining a degree of God’s wisdom is one of His greatest gifts to man.  That man can sometimes give a logical explanation of one or another law is no proof whatever of the validity of Torah; the Torah does not need to be legitimized by man’s approval.  Rather it is a tribute to the brilliance of human intellect that it is capable of understanding an aspect of God’s wisdom.
The blossoming of the Oral Law in all its intellectual brilliance and glory – as we find it recorded in the Talmud and other books – did not begin until the period of the Second Temple.  The Shechinah, the Divine Presence, was not to rest upon the Second Temple as it had upon the first, a loss that caused the people enormous distress.  The Men of the Great Assembly, one hundred and twenty great men that included many prophets and leaders such as Ezra, Mordecai, Daniel and others, beseeched God for a divine gift to compensate for the losses.  During the entire period from the Giving of the Law at Sinai until the opening generations of the Second Commonwealth (530 BC – 70 AD), The Oral Law was handed down intact and free of dispute.  During the Second Commonwealth, however, the historic intensity of study began to decline ever so slightly, with the result that disputes began to arise among the Sages.  (Sanhedrin 88b)
In addition, during the long and cruel period of harsh Roman persecution, Torah study became virtually impossible except with the most extreme self-sacrifice.  The result was a further tragic decline in knowledge and an impairment in the transmission of the oral tradition.  Without the totally reliable teacher-to-student chain of Oral Law, ways had to be employed to regain what was being lost.
The principles of Biblical interpretation were taught to Moses at Sinai together with the rest of the Oral Law.  The Talmud teaches us the Thirteen Hermeneutic Principles through which the Torah is interpreted.  The Talmud makes extensive use of these principles, in fact they form it’s heart.  Through their use, it was possible to find within the Torah, laws from the oral tradition which had become forgotten or confused.
Following the death of Moses, a substantial body of orally transmitted law was forgotten as a result of the people’s grief over the loss of their teacher.  The leader and sage, Asniel, applied the principles of Biblical exegesis, a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, and restored the lost knowledge to Israel.  How did he do it?  The laws were not concoctions of Moses.  They were taught him by God as part of the Oral Law which, in turn, is the authentic interpretation of the Torah.  During Moses’ lifetime, the people found no need to derive the laws from Scripture itself, because the oral tradition was intact.
Asniel made use of established principles to regain knowledge that had been forgotten.  In this sense, God promised the men of the Great Assembly that He would reveal to them the secrets of the Torah.  They took the eternal tools of exegesis and used them to reveal the secrets that had always been locked within the words of the Torah, secrets that Moses had taught Israel and that, in turn, had been transmitted orally for over a thousand years until the oral tradition began to crumble due to a lack of diligence and outside persecution.  They did nothing new and certainly made no changes in the Torah; they merely made use of hermeneutic principles that had not been needed while the tradition of study was still at its high point.
The highest levels of spirituality attained by human beings were those of the Patriarchs:  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  They obeyed the laws of the Torah before it was given.  Who told them the laws?  No one.  Their own spiritual greatness combined with the holy emanations of Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) to create within them the instincts that dictated which deeds had to be performed and which were forbidden.  God and Torah form one unity; when the Patriarchs attained the lofty heights that brought them as close to God as human beings can become, they simultaneously became human manifestations of Torah and understood how it was to be clothed in human deed (Rambam).
Following the giving of the Torah, the Oral Law enabled the greatest people among Jews to see the total concept of a commandment.
When Moses was told that Rabbi Akiba would derive laws from the crowns of the letters, he was astounded that a human could reach such a level of greatness.

• Moses said before Him, ‘Master of the Universe, show Rabbi Akiba to me.’  He said, ‘Move backwards.’  He went and sat at the end of the eighteenth row of students and he (Moses) did not understand what they were saying.  He grew weak from the realization of his inferior knowledge.  As soon as they came to a particular law, (Rabbi Akiba’s) students said to him, ‘My master, how do you know this?’ He said to them ‘It is a law transmitted to Moses at Sinai.  (Moses’) feelings were set at ease. (Menachos 29b)

Moses understood the root of every commandment.  His depth of understanding was such that he intuitively knew every individual law associated with the commandment.  He did not perceive them as separate parts, but as aspects of one whole.

This incident illustrates the fundamental difference between the vision of a prophet and the wisdom of a sage.  The prophet sees with a dazzling clarity, but he is limited to what God reveals to him.  The sage may lack the clarity of the prophet, but by means of his Torah wisdom he is able to delve more deeply and develop a breadth of knowledge beyond what the prophet has been shown.  The prophet’s knowledge is far clearer and he attains a degree of closeness to God that was lost to the great men of the Second Temple, but the sage’s knowledge can be broader and more embracing.

This ability of man to use his human intellect to add to the store of Torah knowledge is surely one of God’s greatest gifts to man.

VI.  Divisions of the Oral Law Rambam divides the Mishnah into five categories:

1. The traditional explanation of the Torah’s text.  This includes such verses as ‘an eye for an eye’ which, as we have seen refers to monetary compensation only, and not physical multilation.  Countless verses in Tanach cannot be understood properly in the light of the simple translation, but only as our Sages received the interpretation in the chain of tradition extending from Moses.
2. Halacha, laws given to Moses at Sinai which are not specifically rooted in the Written Law.
3. Laws derived through logic.  A compelling logical conclusion has the status of a written law.  (For example, it is forbidden for someone to kill another human being in order to save his own life.  As the Talmud puts it: Why do you think your blood is redder than his? (Sanhedrin 74a) It must be made absolutely clear, however, that ‘logic’ in order to have any validity in Torah terms, must be firmly and unquestionably rooted in the tradition stretching from Sinai.)
4. Rabbinic decrees.  By saying, ‘you shall guard My ordinance’ (Leviticus 18:30), the Torah placed upon the Sages the responsibility to act whenever there appeared to be a danger of lack of strictness in the observance of the Torah’s laws (Yevamos 21a).  In observance of this Scriptural order, the Sages enacted such decrees as prohibitions against the marriage of close relatives who were permitted by the Torah to marry one another.
5. General Laws, ordinances, and customs that are enacted based on a rabbinic judgment of the need for them.

The Rabbinic authority to enact and enforce observance of their laws is conferred by the Torah itself.

Deuteronomy 17:8-11: “If a matter arises for judgment that is too difficult for you….Then you shall come to the priest, the Levites, and the judge that shall be in those days, and you shall inquire; and they shall tell you in the word of judgment.  And you shall do according to the word that they shall tell you…..and you shall observe to do according to all that they shall inform you…..you shall not swerve from the word which they shall tell you to the right or to the left.”

There is a particular type of Rabbinic ordinance, one that is much misunderstood, that provides an enlightening glimpse of the all-embracing nature of the Torah.  It is called asmachta, a Rabbinic law which is supported by a Biblical text.  For example, the Sages decreed that it is forbidden, under normal circumstances to have a non-Jew perform prohibited forms of labor on festivals.  Although the prohibition is Rabbinic is nature, they found support for it in a Scriptural verse: no work may be done.’  The phrase may be done indicates that the act is forbidden even if not done by a Jew.

The written Torah and the Oral Torah are indivisible halves of a sacred whole.

Torah is the beginning of creation – He looked into the Torah and created the world (Midrash) – and its purpose.  Jeremiah 33:25 – “..were it not for My covenant day and night, I would not have appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth”.  The privilege of accepting the Torah from God, for carrying out its precepts, and for finding its sacred sparks in the darkest corners of earthly existence, belongs to Israel.  Torah and Israel – the twin purposes of creation.  The very first verse in the Torah alludes to them: ‘For the sake of Torah and Israel, both of which are called ‘the primary cause and purpose, did God create heaven and earth’. (Midrash)