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The ongoing study of Genesis, we have reached all the way to Chapter 3.
So you've only missed two chapters.
I hope that my regular class, you brought some Bibles with you.
If not, I will read the sentences anyway.
And it's not a worry.
One second, please.
I'm going to announce that afterwards, don't forget in the midst of the drama of Genesis.
Just take Oh Okay.
Now, last week, no, last session, whenever that was, two weeks ago, that's right.
Two weeks ago, you recall the creation of woman took place.
By the way, I think a word about a subject that is often raised is Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have different creation accounts.
This is one of the bases by which people frequently speak of what's called a documentary hypothesis.
Who wrote the Torah is one of the great ongoing riddles of both religious and non-religious people.
I don't have an answer to that.
As I've often said, I am intellectually open to whatever scholars show me.
At the same time, I treat it as if it's divine.
So there, I allow my intellect free reign.
My intellect is always open to reading what scholars write.
On the other hand, I do not close my religious soul to the divinity of the text.
I found music is the best analogy that I can give, and I've given it frequently because I love music and it's helpful.
I do not find that I enjoy music more the more I study about modulations of keys and the use of triads and so on in various works.
There is a given point I found, others may not, where in my study of music, I enjoyed the music less the more I studied how it was written.
That I ended up seeing E-flat instead of hearing a gorgeous melody.
That happened to me.
It may not happen to you, but it can happen to people.
And I'm afraid that a lot of scholars of Bible see all the notes, but don't hear the music.
I want to know the notes, but I am more interested in the final analysis in the music.
Do Genesis 1 and 2 conflict?
I don't think so.
To the modern mind, we write stories as follows.
On January 8th, the following happened.
Then on January 10th, this happened.
In February, the following happened, and we go on.
That's how we moderns write.
Now, I have no problem with that, but that's not how the Torah was written.
But whether it is by God or by man, that is not how people wrote in the ancient world.
It was stories without chronological interest, generally speaking.
They would give the story.
And if they had another version of the story, whereas our mind says, look, two stories that contradict each other, that's not how they thought.
They said, wait a minute, reality has a great many angles to it.
In some ways, that's more sophisticated.
Wouldn't you think that it would be interesting to read, I don't know, about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, let's say.
And you read it, you read three stories about it.
They each accentuated different details.
Lincoln's perspective, John Wilkes Booth's perspective, the country's perspective, just to make up three.
Wouldn't that be an interesting way of reading about it?
I think it would illuminate more.
But then somebody will say, uh-huh, you see?
It couldn't have happened the way it was written because one story gives you this perspective and another gives you this.
For example, in one case it says, and God created Adam, male and female, he created them.
Then in the next one, you have God created Adam, and how was the woman?
She doesn't get a name yet.
How was the woman created?
It was created, by the way, as I pointed out, from his side, not from his rib, from his side.
So people say, you see, it's contradictory.
But why is that contradictory?
One statement is, I want you to know, God or the author, capital A, small A, is saying, I want you to know that the human being is a full human, that there are male humans and there are female humans, and they are absolutely equal.
Now, in chapter 2, I'll give you the details of how it happened.
There are scholars who say, you see, it's contradictory.
Which one do we listen to?
One or two?
Shows that there are two different versions here.
I don't read it that way.
It's not a defense of the text so much that I'm making as a defense of a sophisticated idea that you can get the story and you can have two different perspectives.
But they're not contradictory in any way.
If number one had said, if chapter one had said, God created Adam, male and female, he created them, and he created them at the exact same moment, and he never took her from his side.
And then chapter two said, you know what?
Adam was created and then the woman was created from his side.
So you know what?
We have a contradiction.
Otherwise, I don't see it as a contradiction.
Thanks, Ron.
I don't see it as a contradiction, just as more information.
Remember, Torah means teacher.
It does not mean history.
Torah means, it comes from the Hebrew verb lehorot, which is to teach.
If you look at it that way, I think it's a much better way of understanding what's going on.
Now, the last thing we learned in chapter 2 is that Adam and his wife were naked, but they weren't embarrassed by the fact.
Who is not embarrassed by nudity?
The answer is kids.
What I said last week and will very, very basically recapitulate is, I think you have in the story of the Garden of Eden, and I have always believed this, I think you have the story in the Garden of Eden of every one of us.
Every one of us starts out in the Garden of Eden, and we grow up.
However, a lot of people want to stay in the Garden of Eden.
A lot of people don't want to grow up.
In fact, the more I grow up, or the older I get, some will debate whether I grow up that much, but that's a separate issue.
You already heard I was controversial.
But the more I do get older, the more I realize that that's what life is about, growing up.
And of course, as every one of us who is an adult knows, but this is one of the great secrets that children don't know, is that getting older and growing up have little to do with each other.
It is one of the, you know what I knew I was an adult when I met immature 50-year-olds?
Because when you're a kid, you just think, oh, 50, 40, 30, they're adults, they're mature, because they got older.
And then as you get older, you realize that's not true at all.
There are people who never grow up, who don't want to grow up.
That's the Peter Pan legend, if you will.
Women accuse a lot of men of doing that, for which reason a lot don't want to commit, because commitment takes, for men in particular, an act of renunciation of part of their childishness, of gallivanting around the world as a kid forever, wandering from flower to flower.
I'm using a B analogy.
Please, it was.
Don't take it as an insult to women to be compared to flowers.
But that's really what is involved in life, I am convinced, is the act of growing up.
And growing up means shedding a lot of the innocence.
It does.
It's shedding innocence.
It doesn't mean becoming coarse.
You can do that when you shed innocence.
But it does mean shedding the innocence of our childhood.
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Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
They were naked and didn't even know it.
They weren't embarrassed by it at all.
Everything was natural.
They had no pain.
They had no suffering.
And as I pointed out last time, they were bored out of their mind.
That is what I believe the text is in the final analysis really wanting to tell us.
That if we could have a beautiful, beautiful life, freed of all pain in the Garden of Eden, or know it all, really have it all in the sense of understanding the nitty-gritty of life with the ultimate nitty-gritty, the sexual nitty-gritty, we would opt for the pain and growing up and non-innocence over no pain and innocence.
That's what we would do.
That's what I think the story is here to tell us.
Not so much that Adam sinned, though that is an element, obviously, but rather that this is what it is to be human.
Listen, the only thing that Adam was told not to do, it's amazing.
He could do anything he wanted except one thing, eat from the tree of knowledge of good and bad.
It's the only thing he couldn't do.
And lo and behold, it's exactly what he did.
By the way, which proves that eating from the tree is not what gave man the ability to choose between right and wrong.
We had that ability prior to eating from the tree.
What there was, however, was a contradistinction between two trees, the tree of knowledge of good and bad and the tree of life.
And basically what God is saying and what the text is saying is this, human beings, you have your choice.
You can eat from the tree of immortality or you can eat from the tree of knowledge of good and bad.
But you can't eat from both.
You want to be immortal?
Fine.
Go ahead.
But you cannot then be fully human.
You want to be fully human, then you die.
That's what God said.
You eat from that tree and you'll die.
Okay, so that brings us to chapter 3.
Chapter 3 begins with the serpent being declared, or the snake or the serpent being declared the most cunning of all the animals of all the wild animals that God made.
And he said to the woman, which is interesting in and of itself, this whole thing, by the way, is very difficult stuff.
That's why, as I pointed out when I first gave it, I waited a long time to teach this.
I have taught Deuteronomy, I have taught Exodus, and I would never touch the beginning chapters of Genesis.
It's still in some ways puzzling, but I'm trying to sort out the puzzle with you.
First of all, why is the serpent used?
Clearly, I don't know how clearly is appropriate a word, but what we have here again, and those of you who have been taking this with me know, much of the beginning of Genesis is to destroy polytheism.
It's to destroy the gods of the ancient human beings, of ancient man.
One of them was the serpent.
The serpent was a very revered symbol, as you can see in almost all ancient pictures.
God uses the serpent here to chastise him.
Just as, by the way, all the ten, well, nine of the ten plagues against the Egyptians were against Egyptian gods.
The first plague was against the Nile, which was an Egyptian god.
It was turned to blood.
The ninth plague was against Ra, the sun god, darkness.
What most Jews and non-Jews do not realize about Judaism is that its real intent was to destroy polytheism, is to destroy the worship of false gods.
We have plenty of false gods today, but that brings me to an entirely different subject, which you can get right outside the room afterwards.
But in the meantime, this issue here is the destruction of false gods, one of them here being the serpent.
Okay, so the serpent speaks to the woman.
First question is, why didn't the serpent speak to man?
Good question, isn't it?
Why didn't the serpent go to the man?
Why did the serpent go to the woman?
I don't have a complete answer, but it's the sort of question that makes reading this stuff come alive.
When I learned this stuff as a kid in yeshiva, that was the way we were taught to learn, and it's been the greatest, single greatest vehicle of learning in my life.
I read newspaper articles, books, and Torah in that way.
Why did the author say X and not Y?
Why didn't the serpent go to Adam?
Well, you could have any number of thoughts that could come to the mind.
First is, he thought he'd have a better chance with the woman.
I think that that's the most obvious answer that one might say.
Is that a put-down of women, that women are more easily talked into the wrong thing?
Well, I don't think so in light of how of what was done with Adam.
I mean, when you will see how Adam got to eat from that tree, you can truly leave that text saying men are silly putty.
I mean, nothing in comparison to what the woman, he put up no fight whatsoever, as you'll see.
So I'm not sure it's a statement that women are more easily changed or persuaded to do the wrong thing.
What might have been is she was not instructed.
Adam was.
She got it secondhand.
That's what I think is going on here, rather than so much that the woman is a more persuadable creature than the man.
That might be, it might have been an element.
I don't deny it.
But I think the more obvious thing is God's instruction of not eating from the tree of knowledge of good and bad was given to Adam.
It was not given to his wife.
I'm not saying Eve because we don't know her as Eve yet.
That's the reason I'm not giving her the name yet.
That's my suspicion.
So the serpent speaks to her.
And I'll read to you from the English translation I have, which is none of them are great.
They're just relatively good.
And he said to the woman, yep.
It doesn't say yup, remind me.
It says yay.
Now, I prefer yup to yay.
Yay, hath God said, didn't God say, you shall not eat of any tree of the garden?
Already, this is really, it's priceless.
It is just priceless.
The serpent is a major liar.
He goes to the woman, or it goes to the woman, and says, hey, didn't God say you can't eat of any tree?
It's totally made up.
Do you see what the serpent is trying to do here?
If he would have said, if the serpent would have said what God really said, she wouldn't have been persuaded because she would have realized how reasonable God's demand was.
But the serpent makes up something.
Why did God say?
Eat of all the trees.
He actually said that, God.
Eat of all the trees except for one.
Here comes the serpent and says, hey!
Didn't God say, don't eat from every tree in the garden?
Totally inverted what God had said.
People do that all the time.
In order to get people to do something wrong, to violate a law, they will exaggerate what the laws are to make them seem absurd.
So he's delegitimizing already.
That's another reason, by the way, that I believe that the serpent went to the woman and not Adam.
Because she didn't hear the actual directions.
But rather he did.
So the serpent can confuse her.
So didn't God say you can eat from all the trees of the garden?
So verse 2.
And the woman said to the serpent, of the fruit of the trees of the garden, we can eat.
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God said, do not eat of it, neither touch it, lest you die.
Okay?
She got it all wrong.
The only part she got right was that God said, you eat of all the trees.
Why did she get wrong?
Anybody realize what she got wrong?
What did she say here that has nothing to do with what God instructed?
Touching.
He never said, don't touch it.
She got it all wrong.
It's like telephone.
What we have here is that proverbial game of telephone, wherein I tell you something, you tell somebody else something, and by the end of it, it is unrecognizable.
All God said, God really is getting a bad rap here.
He sounds like he's a jerk.
The serpent makes him sound like a jerk, and so does the woman.
Don't touch it.
All he said was don't eat of it.
And the serpent says you can't do it of any of the trees.
So God gets a bad rap, as it were.
Now, also, I don't have an answer for this, but there's a very interesting thing here.
She said, the tree in the middle of the garden.
Why didn't she say the tree of knowledge of good and bad?
Interesting, isn't it?
Because, I'll tell you why it's interesting.
If you look at chapter 2, verse 9, the tree that is described as in the middle of the garden is the tree of life.
I don't have an answer to that, but you have to admit that that's pretty interesting.
The words cannot have been erroneously thrown in.
They're too precise.
The tree of knowledge, the tree of life, is described as the tree in the middle of the garden.
And now she's telling the serpent, we can't eat or touch of the tree in the middle of the garden.
So she got it all wrong.
She identified the tree wrong.
She said that we can't touch it.
And the serpent got wrong, as I said in his original question.
Okay?
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Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
Next, verse number three.
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God said, Do not eat of it, nor touch it, lest you die.
Verse 4.
And the serpent said to the woman, you won't surely die.
Now, now that's interesting.
I wonder how he knew.
Now, I'm very serious.
It is an interesting question.
How did he know that?
I don't have an answer.
But you've got to admit, it does make serpent sound fairly impressive.
Maybe that's why it's called the most cunning of the animals.
Who knows?
Maybe he figured it out what exactly will happen.
Anyway, that's what he says.
For God knows that the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil.
This is very heavy stuff.
Okay, what is the serpent doing here?
The serpent is doing something critically important for us.
Remember, you've got to read it always.
What do I learn from this?
Or you're not understanding what the thing was written for.
What?
Whom is the serpent now blaming for this law?
God.
The serpent is doing a very interesting thing.
He's saying to her, You got this law from God because God needs the law, not because you do.
Is that clear to you?
He's saying, the serpent is saying, he's afraid.
The day you eat it, you'll be like him.
You'll know good and evil just like God knows.
So he's afraid.
That's why he gave you the law, Ms. That's what the serpent is saying.
If you would understand that, then you would realize it's not for your sake.
I can't tell you how important this is, because a lot of people think that laws, religious laws, are given for God's sake.
And that immediately renders them, I believe, unworthy of being followed.
Any religious law to be worth its salt has to be given for our benefit, not for God's benefit.
If you are told in Judaism to keep the Sabbath, you are not told to keep the Sabbath for God's sake.
You are told to keep it for your sake.
God can't be made happy or sad, as it were, through a law.
They are given for us.
This law was given for us, not for God's sake.
But the serpent turns it around.
He is worried if you do this.
So the law is not for you, madam.
It's for God.
Now you know why it begins, verse 1.
And the serpent was very cunning.
Now you realize how inverted everything is.
First, he gives you a ridiculous law.
Don't eat from any of the tree trees.
Then he gives you, then, when we understand the real law he gave you, it's obvious that it's solely given for God's sake, not for your own.
By the way, what does knowing good and bad mean, or good and evil?
What does the tree of knowledge of good and evil mean?
The more that I have delved into this, the more and the more I look at where tov vara, good and bad, are listed together as a unit.
In the Bible, it generally means everything.
Knowledge of everything.
In other words, we have it in English where we would say, well, you know, he knows the pros and the cons.
If you know the pros and the cons of something, you really know it well, right?
You've got to know both sides.
That's what it really means.
Knowing both sides.
That would be the tree of knowledge of both sides.
Would probably be the most accurate translation, not literally accurate, but in explaining what it involves.
So it's the tree of knowledge of everything, of both sides.
You will know them if you eat there.
Now, verse 6.
By the way, just, I'm sorry, on five, we have here a classic presentation of the way all of us tend to do what's wrong.
First, we would overstate the prohibition, then knock the motives of whoever prohibited it, and then say, I won't really suffer from it.
It's almost like, for example, with drugs, with narcotics.
People will say, people who will use it will say, well, you know, they just banned, the government bans everything.
This is just another thing that they're banning.
Number two, why do they knock it?
Because they want to deprive me of real freedom.
It's not for my sake.
It's for the government's sake, to have more power or whatever the reason might be.
And third, if I take it, I'm not going to really suffer from it.
Whatever it is, we often use that type of argument to enable ourselves to do something wrong.
That's exactly what happens here.
Verse 6.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes, and that it was desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit and ate.
Before the next part, it's a very interesting thing.
I think that we have here a very interesting assessment of the woman.
The woman is tempted in every way.
She's tempted by her eyes, she's tempted by her appetite, and she's tempted by her mind.
That's very important.
And I think that in some ways it makes her look a lot better.
It wasn't merely, wow, and she was convinced by the serpent, and it looked good, and she ate.
No.
She thought about it.
She looked at it after hearing the arguments.
And one of the arguments for doing it, and you know the word secho?
That word is here.
L'ahaskil.
To become sensical, to become sensed, wise.
That's the word that is used.
That was one of the three things that appealed to her.
Let me tell you something.
If something appeals to your eyes, your appetite, and your mind, that's the triple threat, as they say.
It is very hard to say no to one of them, let alone to all three of them.
Who would you, with the promise that you actually might know everything as a result, you wouldn't eat of it?
It's an interesting question.
I think what the text is saying here, please understand why the woman was tempted.
Okay, now, she took of it and she ate.
I find this also impressive on her part.
After all, you figure she could have said to herself, maybe we will die when we eat it.
I'll give it to my husband first.
Right?
He'll be my official taster.
It doesn't say that.
She took it.
In other words, she stuck by her convictions.
If I am going to eat, if I am going to do it, I will eat first.
And it says, she took from its fruit and she ate.
She didn't die.
Now remember, remember, God said, when you eat from it, you'll die.
She obviously didn't die.
So she can only conclude, the serpent's right.
It's interesting, isn't it?
I totally understand why she would give it to her husband after that.
It makes perfect sense.
The serpent seems to have turned out right.
I didn't die.
My eyes are opening.
The thing's delicious.
I'm getting wiser and wiser and neuter and neuter by the moment.
And that's terrific, too, because sex before nudity was very boring.
And here we go.
So what happens?
It's the end of that.
And she also gave to the man with whom she was, and he ate.
Okay, now, you have to admit that she comes out somewhat more impressive than he does.
Here.
That was it.
The serpent goes through this whole routine.
You will be wise.
God is wrong.
Don't you want to know everything?
She looks at the tree.
It's beautiful.
She'll get wiser.
A whole thing.
And with him, eat.
Adam, here, here's an apple.
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Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
Now, this is a very interesting thing.
It really is.
It's actually a puzzle to me how easily he ate.
What is one to conclude from this?
There are two possibilities only.
Either he knew what it was, a fruit from the tree of knowledge of everything, or he didn't know what it was.
Now, we don't know that, do we?
It's a very interesting thing.
It doesn't say, she didn't say, here, look, this is from the tree of knowledge of good and bad.
You'll love it.
I ate from it, and look at me.
I'm happy and alive.
And the serpent's doing a beautiful dance, and we're all thrilled.
Nothing like that happened.
She just said here, did he know?
It's a very, I don't have the answer to that, but it occurred to me studying this that that's a real question.
Did he know what he was eating?
We don't know for sure it looked different from any of the other fruit.
So now there are two possibilities.
If he knew what it was, why did he eat?
Okay, on the assumption that he knew it was from the forbidden tree which God himself had forbidden Adam, why did he eat from it?
I don't have an answer except to say, possibly, that he had total trust in her or he was totally controlled by her.
It's very possible.
I mean, psychologically or however.
We don't know.
But if he did know what it was, it is fascinating that he took it so easily.
No questions, nothing.
What if he didn't know what it was?
If he didn't know what it was, then she is an SOB.
See, that's important.
If he didn't know what it was, she tricked him.
Is that right?
Here's a fruit.
Well, it's a fascinating issue, which maybe more years of study will lead me to one conclusion or the other.
I have to believe, please hold it, because I want to go through.
Do write it down though.
I want to take questions later.
Please don't forget it.
And any of you, if you have anything to say, please write it down because I want to take stuff later.
I just don't want to stop in the middle.
But that's a very tough issue.
My suspicion is he knew what it was.
The reason I do is because God wouldn't have punished him otherwise.
God only would have punished her, if punishment is a correct term.
And last week I noted that I don't care.
If he didn't know what it was, how could he be held culpable?
So my suspicion is he knew what it was.
And look, his wife's chewing, Adam here.
She's not dying.
She's loving it.
And I guess that's why he did it.
He was somewhat malleable.
When God was talking to him, he was very influenced by God.
When his wife was talking to him, he was very influenced by his wife.
Adam basically was whoever got to me last, I listened to.
Next verse.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.
Now that is fascinating.
That is about as fascinating a verse as exists in the Torah.
You know, imagine it's your first time reading the text.
I would think that the single most curious thing in your mind, the thing you're most curious over is, what'll they learn when they eat from the tree of knowledge of good and bad, right?
That to me, that's the suspense of the story.
Not what'll happen to them.
Well, yeah, what'll happen to them, but not in the sense will God kill them.
But what'll happen to them?
What will be different?
One thing and only one thing is mentioned.
They discover sexuality.
They knew sex.
They had to have known intercourse because they were told to be fruitful and multiply.
And that was the only way to do it.
By the way, it's a fascinating question to be able to have intercourse without really knowing sexuality.
Now, animals do it, though.
So in effect, what they had, I assume, was intercourse a la animals.
Wherein you did it.
It was one of the pleasurable acts of your life.
But animals don't go around embarrassed at their nudity.
It's just one of the acts that they perform in order to procreate the species.
Was that what sex was like prior to eating from the tree of knowledge?
I don't think there's an answer, obviously.
But it is interesting.
They learned they're naked.
In other words, they learned the sexy side and the naughty side of sex.
The bad side, the tough side, because there are a lot of sides to sex.
That great, he just was killed.
He was a UCLA professor of psychiatry, Stoller, Robert Stoller, wrote a book called Sexual Excitement.
I think he was one of the leading psychiatric thinkers, human thinkers of our time.
He was killed by a speeding kid driver a couple of months ago.
And it's really, it's an unbelievable loss.
At any rate, Stoller wrote in this book, he wrote real, which is why he was controversial.
He actually wrote about reality.
And he wrote at the end of one chapter, I never memorize books.
I can't.
I mean, I never memorize lines.
That's not my gift to memorize.
But I committed to memorization the last two lines of one of his chapters, one of the preeminent psychiatrists in the world.
He was writing on male-female lovemaking, and he said, let me see if I remember.
I don't remember it exactly.
See that?
I committed two lines to memory and forgot one of them.
But I remember the second.
The first line was something to the effect of when people have sex, it is not frequently lovemaking.
Too bad.
I mean, you know, in this scientific treatise about human beings, you don't expect the writer to write too bad at the end of the chapter.
But what he was pointing out, which I think a lot of us like to deny in our desire to romanticize life, is the non-loving element of sex, which is a very powerful part of it.
After all, you love your child, you love your parents, you love maybe a cousin or a friend, but you don't want to make love to them.
If it were only love, then we would be making love to all the people we love or want to make love to them.
But we don't.
And you know how powerful non-sexual love is.
You have it for your children.
That's very powerful, at least when they're young.
And just joking, just joking.
And so you know the power of non-sexual love.
Clearly, sex is a lot more and often not even about love.
There can be very unloving, powerful sex.
And that's a very powerful force.
And that was unleashed when they did this.
And that really, in effect, is what divides us from our innocent childhood from adulthood.
That divides everybody.
That you can't help, that you simply grow into, an understanding of those differences.
So that's the thing they learned.
They were no longer innocent.
And we all know what innocent means.
And it has to do with that big dragon in our lives, which concerns our sexuality.
So what did they do?
They immediately made for them fig leaves and made them into, in modern Hebrew, it's belts.
But the assumption is that they were wider than belts, what they made for themselves.
So it says, I have here girdles.
What translation does anybody?
Aprons, coverings.
They're all good.
There was, was that mini skirt?
Is that what I heard from that?
No, wouldn't that be funny?
And she made for herself a mini skirt.
All right, next verse.
Spirit of the day might even be better, actually, I think, than cool of the day.
Anybody have spirit of the day?
Or what?
Wind of the day?
Breezy time.
Yeah.
I have not figured out why that was thrown in.
It might have meant more to the ancients than to us those words.
And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of God amongst the trees of the garden, which is almost funny.
Hide yourself among trees from God.
But they did.
And God called out to Adam.
Now, why did God call out to Adam and not both of them?
Because it was to Adam that he gave the instructions.
God's fair.
And he says, and this is the number of rabbinic sermons given on this verse could fill the Encyclopedia Judaica.
And God said to Adam, where art thou?
Where are you?
Now, of course, why do rabbis love to make a sermon on that sentence?
Because obviously God knows where Adam is.
So the question is not for God's sake, it's for our sake.
Where are you?
You got to know where you are.
God knew where he was, obviously.
Anyway, so he answers, I heard your voice in the garden, and I got scared because I am naked and I hid.
To which God said, who told you you're naked?
That's really, it's priceless.
I love this.
You didn't happen to have eaten from that tree that I told you not to eat from by any chance.
So Adam said, well, in fact, I did.
So what does Adam say?
This is one of my favorite lines in the entire Bible.
This woman you gave me.
I didn't ask for the apple.
I didn't ask for the woman.
Get the hell out of here.
Isn't that a right?
It's absolutely funny.
Did I ask for this woman?
You gave it to me, and she got me to do it.
That is why it's so priceless.
It's not only shifting blame to her, she shouldn't have been born.
It's worse than blaming her.
He's blaming God.
If you didn't make her, I promise you, I never would have eaten from that tree.
And he's right.
He got to hand it to him.
A monkey could not have convinced him to eat from the tree.
So this woman that you made, that's what I love.
It's God's fault.
You know, there are people, you know, I get angry at people, you know, blaming government for their problems.
This is the ultimate.
It's God's fault.
She is the one who gave me an I8.
So God said, now, by the way, it's interesting here.
They all tell the truth.
When God asks the questions, they all tell the truth.
Did he not tell the truth?
The woman who you made gave me an I ate.
Is that absolute true?
That's why God doesn't respond anymore.
He got the truth from Adam.
So fine.
He knows it's true.
It's a very interesting thing.
So he goes to the woman whom he made.
So God says to the woman, what'd you do?
What did you do?
I don't think he said, what'd you do?
What did you do?
And the woman said, the serpent tricked me, and I ate.
Is that true?
Yes, it is true.
Huh?
Yeah, so God, again, it's very, they all tell God the truth.
the serpent trick nobody takes responsibility I mean their character I won't speak about But at least they told the truth.
You know, you can imagine Adam could have said, gee, I didn't know it was that apple.
That is another reason, by the way, that I believe that he knew what he was eating.
Since with God roaming, he could have easily said, I didn't know.
I thought it was from the tree of life.
Right?
Or any other tree.
But he didn't.
He told the truth.
He was too scared to lie, perhaps, or we'll give him credit.
He told the truth.
He told the truth and he said what it was.
So I think we can infer from that.
She didn't trick him.
It was simply her presence.
I think he told the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The woman gave it to me and I ate.
Okay?
She said the serpent tricked me.
Which is true.
It's not the whole truth.
Because part, she knew what she was doing.
At any rate, but he did trick her.
At least that's her perception.
Let's put it this way.
That the serpent misled her into believing, into getting confused, and she ate.
So God doesn't say another word to her, just like God didn't say another word to Adam.
So God goes to the serpent, and notice, this is verse 14, he doesn't ask the serpent a single question.
Because what's the serpent going to say?
Who's the serpent going to blame it on?
There's nobody left.
It's interesting, isn't it?
That's why God didn't say to the serpent, and why did you do it?
So God says to the serpent, because you did this, you will be cursed from of all, most cursed of all the animals that exist.
You will crawl, you will walk on your belly, and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
This, I think, clearly was to de-deify the serpent, which is what I spoke about in all of Genesis.
And then, 15, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed.
This is clearly an anti-pagan polemic, wherein the mixture of the human and the animal in paganism was very great.
This is a total separation.
Human is human.
Serpents are serpent.
There is no relationship in any way.
And you will be, they'll bruise your head, you serpent, and you'll bruise their heel.
Okay.
Then to the woman, 16.
I will greatly multiply your pain and your travail.
In pain, you will bring forth children.
That's part one.
Now, a very interesting thing here is, I will multiply your pain.
In other words, she had pain for childbirth from Eden.
It doesn't say, now you will give birth in pain.
I will multiply what already exists.
That's an interesting point that I don't think a lot of people realize, that there was pain in childbirth originally, according to the Genesis story.
What happens is it will be multiplied.
Okay, now you know sex, now you know life, so I'm not going to protect you.
What God is really saying is, if you want knowledge of everything, man and woman, okay, but don't ask for my protection.
You want life on its terms?
Here you are.
Are you with me, my friends?
This is critical.
That's what really happened.
God softened life for us till we said, in effect, no, I want it all.
I want to know it all.
And therefore, if that's the case, God removes protection.
That's why we get mortal.
We get pained.
We get hurt from each other.
We get hurt from nature.
We get hurt from childbirth.
We, in effect, opted for that.
Remember, it does not say, and God said, I'm going to punish you.
The word punished does not occur here, but it did occur with the serpent.
And it does occur with Adam.
The woman does not have the word curse.
The serpent is cursed to travel on his belly.
Man has cursed earth, you'll see in a moment, but the woman does not have anything cursed.
This is the consequence of what you did, much more than it is a punishment.
The problem comes next.
What else will be the result of this leaving of Eden, as it were?
And your desire will be to your man or your husband, and he will rule over you.
Now, this is an interesting and very difficult segment, which does not please feminists.
But the point is, shows that the original intent was that man and woman be totally equal.
Right?
Which is exactly what existed beforehand.
But now you have, I have removed that element of my protection, as I just spoke about, and I'm going to let nature go its merry way.
That means you will have pain in childbirth.
Men will be dominant.
But that doesn't mean that that's God's will.
You are not subverting God's will if you take a painkiller for childbirth.
And you are not subverting God's will if you have an equal relationship with your husband.
This is not saying, and this is my desire, that women suffer in childbirth and men rule over them.
That is not what is stated here.
It's simply saying that now that natural forces will go, this is what will happen.
And by the way, to a certain extent, there is what it is about.
In most cultures, men have dominated women, which is not something to be proud of.
It's simply a fact of life.
But just as we can have painkillers, we can have inequality killers.
Right?
The two of them are very allowable.
The other part is the tougher part: that your desire, your yearning will be for your husband.
This part is much less easily subverted than the male ruling and childbirth pain.
Yearnings are not nearly as easily destroyed as are inequalities and physical pains.
And that yearning does exist.
My argument here would be that this is in a slightly different category, much more of the unchangeable, though people will want to change it.
That's why you see all these books in bookstores: yes, you can live without a man.
Yes, you are something without a man.
Yes, you don't need a man, and so on.
There is in many women, nothing exists for all, but in many women, in most women, a deep yearning for a man.
Now you'll say, well, isn't there deep yearning in men for a woman?
As I said when I gave a course on this, it's a slightly different yearning.
Women yearn a man, and men yearn for women.
They're not the exact same yearning.
Don't yell at me for this, okay?
I am the bearer of bad tidings, not the creator of the problem.
That doesn't mean that men cannot grow into that yearning, but that is a good yearning.
If women didn't yearn for a man, men wouldn't marry.
You don't have any book.
Go to any bookstore and find me any book.
And they write books on anything.
Anything that'll sell, they write on.
You will never find the book, How to Get Her to Commit.
Why not?
There is book after book after book about getting him to commit.
Why men don't commit.
The Peter Pan complex.
Why isn't there, what was the girl, why is there the Tinkerbell complex?
There should be one.
There should be about women who won't commit.
Right?
Or women who leave.
They have men who leave women and women who love them.
There's no book, men who leave.
No, there isn't.
There is a book, men who leave women and women who love them.
Why isn't there women who leave men and men who love them?
It happens, but that's not the issue.
That yearning is actually a good thing.
One of us better yearn, or we won't ever cement.
We'll never stick together.
That yearning is critical, but it is the cause of great pain to a woman.
And by the way, that is also a statement.
Remember, man's problem here becomes man's consequence of eating is macro, all macro.
Woman's consequence is micro.
Notice that micro is the personal.
That's where women specialize.
Doesn't mean they're only interested any more than men are not only interested in the macro.
But as a talk show host for 10 years, I can tell you, when I discuss micro topics, on my list is Linda, Jenny, Barbara, and when I talk macro, it's Ira, Tom, and Joe.
Because that's where they specialize.
That's why you go, you know, the old, there is truth to it that when you go to a party, men will talk about sports, stocks, investments, and politics.
Women will talk about real life.
That's why I prefer women's discussions at parties.
The macro stuff, I mean, it comes out of my ears.
I do it for a living.
I rather talk about the nitty-gritty of life, the real things.
But that really is what you have here.
Her consequences are micro.
His consequences are macro.
The consequences of his eating from the tree are in verse 17.
And to Adam he said, Because you hearkened into the voice of your wife, in other words, as opposed to hearken to mine, his punishment isn't because he listened to his woman, it's because he listened to his woman and not God.
And have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you.
In other words, in other words, I commanded you not to, and you listen to her, saying you shall not eat of it.
Cursed is the ground.
You see, the serpent is cursed, and Adam is cursed.
But specific, to be very specific, the ground is cursed for Adam.
In toil, cursed is the ground for your sake, in toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life.
Thorns also and thistles it will bring forth to you, and you will eat the herb of the field and the sweat of thy face.
You will eat bread till you return unto the ground.
For out of it were you taken, for dust you are, and into dust you will return.
All for one apple.
Finally, after that, you do wonder what happened.
You know, it's these lacunae, these gaps in the narrative that are always so fascinating.
What did Adam and Eve do then?
You know, do they look at each other?
Did they embrace?
Did they make love?
Did they get angry at each other?
Did they start hunting snakes?
You know, you just wonder what did they do?
Who knows?
What is the next sentence?
It almost seems like a non-sequitur.
The next sentence is, and Adam named his wife Eve.
For Eve means jerk.
Can you imagine?
You know, he was so ticked off.
Ah.
No, because she was the mother of all living things.
In Hebrew, in Hebrew, all these original names prove to me, and I don't want to prove it to you if you don't feel this way, but for me personally, the whole story is allegorical because the names mean that.
Adam means earth.
Eve means life.
So it's earth and life.
I mean, we're talking, I think, very symbolically here.
Even the names Cain and Abel mean something in that way that tend to make it an allegory.
But if you wish to take them literally, I have no problem whatsoever.
And it's very touching, verse 21.
By the way, you notice there's no protest.
Isn't that interesting?
There's no protest from Adam and Eve.
It's not fair.
First of all, why do you think there was no protest?
One is, I'll bet you they were pretty relieved that they didn't die.
That may truly be one of the reasons that there was no protest.
Another one was a sense of, yeah, well, we now, our eyes are now open and we understand what you're describing.
It's as if I were to say to you, you don't want a license?
No problem.
You want a driver's license?
Okay, let me just tell you the following.
The chance of your being killed in a car crash are the following.
The number of people who are maimed in a crash is the following.
You've now opened your eyes to driving.
Let me tell you the realities of driving.
You get what I'm saying?
And you're not going to complain.
You will just, you'll swallow hard and say, I understand this.
That's what comes with getting a driver's license.
They got a driver's license to live.
And here are the risks that come with it.
And so you don't get complaints.
For all we know, incidentally, they weren't terribly depressed.
Who knows?
I'm serious.
We don't know.
After all, what he did afterwards was give his wife a name, which is very interesting.
It certainly doesn't bespeak of anger.
So anyway, God made, and this is touching.
And then the next thing is, God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
22.
God said, Behold, man is like one of us, knowing everything.
And now, lest he put forth his hand and take from the tree of life and eat and live forever, therefore God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out Adam, the Adam, the man, and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden the cherubim and the flaming sword, which are like angels, with a flaming sword, which turned every way to keep the way to the tree of life.
So it's not available to us in the state that we are, but the tree of immortality still exists.
It's an interesting hint, isn't it?
It wasn't destroyed.
It's just guarded from our reach.
Well, what does that imply?
You'll infer what you want, but it is interesting, isn't it?
That it's still there, wherever that may be.
It's a tough thing here that God said he'd be one of us, that man will be one of us.
This is really the lesson of the story.
We can know a lot.
We human beings can know an awful lot.
The problem is when we think we can know everything.
And that is called, the Greeks call it hubris.
It's a tremendous arrogance that the human can have.
We can know everything.
We can play God.
The belief of the Bible is, and it's one of my favorite quotes, I believe it's from Proverbs, Reishit Chochma Yir Atadonai.
Wisdom begins with awe of God.
If you don't acknowledge that there is something higher than you, with all of your knowledge, you'll be a fool.
That's the biblical notion.
I believe it deeply.
And I will give one example of this.
I think the biggest fools of the 20th century have been secular intellectuals.
Not all secular intellectuals are fools, but the biggest fools have been secular intellectuals.
They gave us theories like communism and Marxism.
They gave us Aryanism.
They gave us racism.
It is a very, very powerful lesson to be learned.
As scholars have noted, you were more likely to be anti-Semitic in Nazi Germany if you graduated high school or college than if you didn't go.
The Anti-Defamation League has pointed out that blacks do not have any more anti-Semitic tendencies than whites, except for one group of blacks, blacks who go to American colleges.
Anti-Semitism among them is far higher than among blacks who don't go to college.
There is a real worry that I have of the pursuit of knowledge with no notion of God attached.
And that's the lesson that is being taught here.
You think you can know Tovara.
You think you can know everything.
Well, if you don't know that I, God, am higher and no more, you will ruin your lives, which is exactly what we do time after time with the hubris of thinking that we can understand everything without God.
That's what is talked about in these last sentences of chapter 3, and it's the whole point of the story.
You can know a lot, man, but the moment you think you're one of us, you are doomed.
And it was Marx who said, man is God.
Apparently they weren't all that angry with each other because chapter 4 verse 1 begins, and Adam knew his wife Eve, and she got pregnant and gave birth to Cain.
See, I told you it wasn't all that bad.
They had sex, and the way this again proves that knowledge of good and evil has a lot to do with sex, that the biblical word for having sex is, you get the phrase, you know, well, do you know her biblically?
People use that often as a joke, but it is to know biblically is to have sex with.
And there is both a lot of truth to that and a lot of, I think, relationship to the tree of knowledge of good and bad.
Anyway, he knew his wife.
It's interesting.
It doesn't say he slept with her.
He lay with her.
It sometimes does.
But that's the first time it's used, and I'm sure it's related to the tree of knowledge.
She gave birth to Cain.
Why?
Because I have gotten a man with the help of God.
Cain, any of you who know Hebrew, no ly knot means to buy or to acquire.
Cain, therefore, means acquired, that which was acquired.
That's how he got his name.
Okay?
And she continued to give birth, and she gave birth to his brother Havel, in English, Abel.
And now, Havel means, it could, it really means nothingness or vanity.
The beginning of Ecclesiastes is Hevel Havalim HaKol Havel.
The vanity of vanities, everything is vanity, or nothing of nothings, or emptiness of emptiness.
So they have acquired and emptiness for kids.
And you think you've seen odd names.
I'll never forget a former U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
I saw a letter from him in the New York Times about 20 years ago.
Phelps Phelps.
I just wondered, of all the names in the world, why his parents gave their son Phelps the name Phelps.
So, I don't know.
She gives birth to the two of them.
Abel is a verse 2.
Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the ground.
And it came to pass after some time that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering to God.
By the way, one of the points here is the universality of sacrifice and the universality of prayer and belief in God.
Cain brings from the fruit of the earth an offering to God.
And Abel also brought an offering of the first of his flock and of the fat thereof.
This is truly fascinating.
And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering.
What other translations do you have?
And the Lord, what?
Turned to, paid heed to, I'm sorry, received.
In other words, God preferred Abel's sacrifice.
Okay?
Here's my $64,000 question after I read verse 5.
But to Cain and to his offering, he had no respect.
And Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.
Here's my question to you: How did Cain know that God preferred Abel's sacrifice?
Anybody have an answer?
Huh?
Well, God doesn't pick up sacrifices.
You just offer them.
Smoke didn't go up.
Well, that's interesting.
It's very physical, yes.
Fire came from heaven and ate it up.
You see that here?
Sorry?
Okay, but this is rabbinic exegesis later on.
And that's fine, but it doesn't say it.
What can you infer from the text just reading what I call the pshop, the text itself?
Yes?
Okay, that's my answer.
Does anybody have another answer?
That's what I believe.
I'll tell you, I'll tell you.
Yes, back there?
Yes.
What did Abel ask for?
only on the basis of what is written, yes, yes, I think that that's true, and that's what his answer was.
That's why Cain knew.
Let me, if I may.
I'm sorry, sir.
This, what I believe, and I can't prove it, but I try to read only what's there without the light of thousands of years of various readings into it, which I appreciate, but I'm trying to read it anew.
It seems to me that Cain knew.
Because Cain knew what his brother offered, which is what you're pointing out, and knew what he offered.
And as you pointed out, he knew what he felt.
He was doing it more or less pro forma, or compared to his brother's sincerity, he felt that he was lacking.
That's the issue.
God doesn't need firstborns or first fruits.
That's pagan.
God doesn't eat.
So it can't be God's preference.
It has to be here, the internal devotion of the individual, and clearly that Cain's was greater.
Cain knew it.
You know what you feel.
And sometimes, not always at all, you can sense what another feels.
My point here is this.
And then this is now adding to this point.
It's not written here.
When you do things for God, to God, sincerity is everything.
When you do things for people, sincerity is much less important.
It's one of the things that, in fact, I believe so deeply, it is one of the guiding principles of my own religious life, and I will explain.
It says in the Torah that you give 10% of your earnings to the poor.
Right?
Sadakah.
It also says in the Torah that when the Israelites, when the Jews built the temple, it said, let every Jew give whatever his heart prompts him to give.
And I use that distinction to teach or to learn the following.
What you do for God should come from your heart.
What you do for human beings doesn't necessarily have to come from your heart.
It is better to give 10% of your money to charity, even if it's solely because of the law, than to give 1% from your heart.
Because the poor need your money much more than they need your heart.
But God needs your heart, not your money.
And that's what the issue is here.
The issue is that it was clear that it was insincere on Cain's part, and Cain knew it.
Now, it's a very interesting thing that happens in life if somebody does something better than you do.
You have two possible reactions.
Isn't that beautiful?
I could learn from that.
It's something for me to emulate.
Or they should drop dead.
Is that correct?
Those are the two general possible reactions we have to other people's excellence or greatness in the same act that we have.
My God, that is really something to learn from.
Or you know what?
He should drop dead.
Cain opted for the latter.
We now go to verse 6.
Yeah, oh, oh, and by the way, what's critical here, and it's right up my alley in what I've been speaking about in the last year, what is Cain's reaction?
He got angry.
My current theory of life is that anger is the most important emotion to get a hold of.
I don't mean to suppress, to get a hold of.
Everybody in this room has anger.
There is no human being in the world who is not angry.
The questions are, how angry and at whom?
We all have anger.
My mother didn't love me enough.
My father didn't love me enough.
My brother didn't love me enough.
My sister didn't love me enough.
My husband didn't love me enough.
My wife didn't love me enough.
My kids don't love me enough.
The government doesn't love me enough.
My friends aren't faithful to me enough.
People don't do enough for me.
People cheat me.
I get cut off when I go in the left lane.
People take my parking spot.
And not only that, six million Jews were killed a generation ago.
Okay?
From the sublime, or from the ridiculous to the sublime, back to the ridiculous, back to the sublime.
There are a lot of reasons to be angry.
The question is, is the anger, is the anger appropriate?
There are people, there are religious people who say never be angry.
I get this a lot when I speak on inter-religious forums, which for those of you not in L.A., on the unhumble assumption that every one of you in L.A. knows this, which is of course preposterous, but a lot of you do.
Sunday nights I speak to priest, minister, rabbi on the radio every week for 10 years.
And it is not uncommon for a priest or a minister, much more so than a rabbi as it happens, to say that it is not good to have anger.
I don't agree with that, but there is a lot of truth that anger is the breeder of evil.
That I believe deeply.
It's a very new part of me, a new part of my thinking, that evil comes from anger more than any other one thing.
The trouble is that people need to know what their anger is toward.
Germans had a deep anger.
A lot of psychologists hold that they are angry from the way they were raised, that Germans had a particularly severe upbringing, fairly loveless, severe authoritarian upbringing.
Others also note the anger over losing World War I, and that the right wing in Germany blamed their government for selling them short at the Treaty of Versailles.
Whatever it was, it is clear that there was a lot of anger.
Anger is okay if you channel it towards the appropriate source.
So that, for example, I would say to a Jew, I said this when the Prime Minister of Israel announced that Poles drink anti-Semitism in their mother's milk.
He is angry at Poland for the Holocaust.
What he should be is angry at every Pole who participated in it.
As opposed to Poland.
It is good, in my mind, to be angry at those who do bad, but it is terrible to be angry at a group.
That's where a lot of evil takes place.
Anger that is not deserved, and it just, I don't control it.
It is not coincidental that it says he was angry.
Did anybody hurt him?
No.
He hurt himself.
But he lashed out in his anger against Abel, who did nothing whatsoever to Cain.
Which, by the way, is really, in a sense, much of history of persecution, certainly of the Jews.
The Jews would live in most societies quite quietly.
In the 20th century, Jews have gotten a lot noisier.
But in general, Jews were very quiet, living their own lives and were hurt.
They were the Ables.
There was a lot of anger around them.
They did their thing.
And it's not only Jews.
Jews are not the only persecuted group in history.
It's just the most ubiquitous.
People get angry and they lash out at the Ables around them.
That happens all the time.
The kid who cheats in class is very likely to be angry at the kid who doesn't cheat in class and does well.
Be your real anger at him.
Why didn't you stoop to my level?
There's an anger.
In fact, there's a book out for ordinary men or ordinary people, I don't recall, and it's about a group of Germans who murdered 80,000 Jews.
And before the war, they were postmen, civil servants.
They were just brought in together and say, here, go kill Jews.
Most of them weren't even anti-Semitic.
But they did it.
And a big part of the reason was they didn't want the anger that they felt would be shown to them by their colleagues if they didn't participate.
If you do good, the bad will be angry at you.
It is a common thing in life.
Anger is a very tough issue.
It causes a lot of bad stuff.
And that's what God says to Cain in 6.
Why are you angry?
And why do you look sad?
Number 7.
If you do well, if you do good, won't it be lifted up?
And if you don't do well, if you don't do good, sin sits or couches, crouches at the door, and you will desire it, but you can rule over it.
Is that in effect the translation you all have?
In effect?
Because it's a very tough sentence in Hebrew.
If you get angry, it is very common.
That's God's point here.
When you get angry, the likelihood of your doing bad is increased tremendously.
That's why you've got to rule over it.
Evil, sin, is crouching at the door.
If you get angry, your doing bad is imminent unless you control yourself.
That was God's advice.
God knew exactly what Cain would do.
This is his advice.
Rule your anger.
Rule the desire for sin.
And then 8, which is one of the most interesting verses.
And Cain spoke to Abel, his brother.
And it came to pass, when they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and killed him.
It's a very bizarre sentence.
Look at it again.
And Cain spoke to Abel, his brother, and it came to pass.
What did he say?
Isn't that interesting?
We don't know what he said.
I guess he said, come with me out to the field.
I don't know what he said, but whatever it was, he got up and he killed him.
Did Abel do a thing to Cain?
Nothing.
And he just killed him.
And God said to Cain, just like he had said to Adam, right?
Cain, where's Abel, your brother?
And in one of the most famous answers in the entire Bible, Cain says, I don't, the traditional translation is, I don't know, am I my brother's keeper?
Okay, these will be my final, but they are big, big points.
This, there is an incredible amount of material in this thing.
Number one: Why didn't Cain say, I killed him, so wouldn't that have been the most logical answer?
I picked up a rock, bashed his head in, and he's dead, God.
Any problem?
I mean it sincerely.
Why didn't he answer that?
Did God ever say, thou shalt not murder?
No Ten Commandments?
No seven laws of the children of Noah?
Cain could have said, I killed him.
What's the problem?
I believe that this teaches one of the most fundamental rules of life and of Judaism and of the Torah.
And that is the belief that revealed legislation is not necessary to know good from evil.
We are expected to know that certain things are wrong just by the fact that we are human beings.
That's why I never accept the argument, well, they weren't educated.
How are they supposed to know that you don't beat children or you don't shoot children in the area?
They grow up in an area where a lot of kids are shot.
People speaking of gang members will say, how are they supposed to know?
The answer is the belief written here that we have a conscience.
That just as you know you don't want to be killed, you know that this person doesn't want to be killed.
That's why his answer is so important.
He does not feign ignorance of the morality, immorality of what he did.
Okay?
This is how I learn that conscience is implanted in the human being according to the Bible.
Cain knew what he did was wrong.
But he gives a smart alecky answer.
Gee, I don't know.
Am I my brother's keeper?
There are three ways to read his response.
The Hebrew says, Loyadati, Hashomerachi Anochi.
Literally, it can mean what you heard.
I didn't know, am I my brother's keeper?
Or it could also be, I didn't know that I am my brother's keeper.
There are three ways to read it depending upon where you put the accent.
One is, I didn't know.
I don't, well, there are four ways.
I don't know, am I my brother's keeper?
Just a snotty answer, okay?
That's one.
Another one is, I didn't know that I'm my brother's keeper.
Having to do in effect with the act that he had just performed.
I didn't know that, that I'm responsible for my brother.
Another one is, I didn't know, Hashomer, or I don't know, am I my brother's keeper?
You, God, are my brother's keeper.
If you put the emphasis on I, it's all different.
I don't know.
Am I my brother's keeper?
Usually we say, I don't know.
Am I my brother's keeper?
But what if the accent is on I?
Am I my brother's keeper?
Do you see all the existential things that come from this?
You could all ask the same thing.
Am I responsible for people or is God responsible for people?
For those of you who wonder how God can allow evil, here is the answer.
God allows evil because we are our brother's keepers.
God isn't.
Anyone who says, why did God allow the Holocaust, is asking Cain's question.
You're my brother's keeper.
No, that's not true.
The implication is unacceptable.
We are our brother's keeper, not God.
That's how he allows it.
So, I don't know how you want to read it, but it is a very interesting possibility in any of these directions.
And the final point to be raised is verse 11, verse 10.
What did you do?
God said.
The voice of your brother's bloods.
And it's too bad that it doesn't translate it as bloods.
It translates, I'm sure your translation is blood.
Does anyone have bloods?
Okay, that's where a literal translation would be very helpful.
You have bloods?
What translation is that?
The Hebrew is the voice, I'll do it literally, the voice of the bloods of your brother are screaming at me from the earth.
And here, I think the rabbinic translation is right on.
When you kill someone, you have not only killed them, you have killed all those that would have come from them.
So the bloods of your brother are screaming at me from the earth means it's not just your brother's blood, but his kids that he never had, and the grandkids he never had, and so on and so forth.
It's to give you an idea of how evil murder is.
What you have done when you murder.
That this would be listed as the first sin of the human species.
I don't want to include the eating of the, I guess the eating is the first, but this is the first that we can relate to.
None of us can violate the trees in the garden.
That's how bad it is.
That is what you've done when you commit murder.
You have killed far more than that individual.
And it's so powerful that they are screaming at me.
You know who should be angry?
God is in effect saying, Abel, he's the one who's screaming.
He's the one who should be angry.
It's the victim who's angry, not the criminal who should be angry.
You should control your anger, but he has justified anger because you murdered him.
It's a darn good lesson for our time, where we often invert whose anger we have sympathy with and whom we ignore when that anger is unleashed.
Let me take a couple of questions.
I know that some of you had, and if you don't, we could take it next time, yes?
Yep.
Yep, we're not up to that yet.
So let me take it when it comes up on the years.
We're not up, right?
It's beyond where we got.
Yes?
Just take five minutes, folks, if you could stay where you are.
That's correct.
I know.
I don't know why people say apple.
It's like why do people say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale?
It never says whale.
It says great fish.
Maybe he had an apple in the great whale, and that was, you know, and they got mixed up.
Back there, yes?
Oh, that's interesting.
It's an interesting question that he was present for the discussion.
Yes, what verse is that?
It's 6.6.
3.6.
The question was, I'll read you the verse.
It's great.
Some interest.
I have to think it through.
And so she took, this is Eve, she took from the fruit and she ate.
And she gave it also to her husband who was with her and he ate.
So is the implication that he was with her during the dialogue with the serpent?
Oh, well, we've established he knew where it came from.
But yeah, but that would be at the very least.
It's an interesting point, because with her would seem totally redundant.
Not redundant.
Yeah, redundant.
Or superfluous.
Obviously.
Where else is he going to be?
It's an interesting point.
Yes.
Contribute to the equation of sex and sin.
Is that what you're basically asking?
Well, the truth is, it probably did for a lot of people.
I don't think that that's the point here.
Comes into the picture, life changes.
We're no longer innocent, and it really, I mean, it's primal stuff.
Sex is the TNT of life.
It is, and it can blow things up and it can make the world, which it does.
That's that drive.
If you think of an asexual person, you think of a person with no drive, right?
And if you think of a person with a great deal of drive, you automatically assume they have a strong sex component.
And that is true.
It's the dynamite of our lives.
It's the dynamism.
And it's not something we're happy to see, generally speaking, profoundly subside in our life.
We feel life ebbing away if that ebbs away.
It's something people wish to preserve, that part of them.
Whether they have the means to live it or not is a physical issue.
But having the drive is something everybody wants.
It keeps you alive.
So yes, I don't see it at all as sinful.
I see it as a root of a lot of sin, obviously.
The most obvious being rape.
Another one being adultery, though that's more complex because they're more emotional.