[Avodah] Chessed and the Eitz haDaas

[Micha Berger]

While reading Shavuos to Go, this year's edition, I found the following
essay by our chaver R' Mordechai Torchyner.
http://www.yutorah.org/togo/shavuot/articles/Shavuot_To-Go_-_5770_Rabbi_Torczyner.pdf
or <http://bit.ly/atu86K>. He writes about the connection between
Shavuos and chessed. Often cited is the idea that Rus, a book about
chessed, is read on Shavuos to highlight this connection. R’ Torczyner
opens with a different point of connection:

    [A] midrash describing the scene atop Har Sinai places the credit
    not with Moshe, but with Avraham:

        At that moment the ministering angels sought to harm Moshe. God
	shaped Moshe's face to appear like that of Avraham, and God
	said to the angels, "Are you not embarrassed before him? Is
	this not the one to whom you descended and in whose home you
	ate?" God then turned to Moshe and said, "The Torah was given
	to you only in the merit of Avraham."

But what I found particularly intriguing is that RMT builds the
connection from the following observation:

	Adam and Chavah were charged with working in their garden and
	protecting it, and they would have been the sole beneficiaries
	of their work; every plant they grew, nearly every fruit they
	cultivated, was theirs to eat. (Bereishis 2) Only in one case were
	they told to labor benevolently without expectation of reward:
	The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would receive
	their care, but provide no benefit. All work for that tree would
	be purely chesed shel emet, kindness without any anticipation of
	reciprocity. This was their own opportunity to engage in olam
	chessed yibaneh, bringing into reality a world founded on
	kindness. Instead, though, the first human beings took that
	fruit for themselves.

The sin of the tree of knowledge was a flaw in chessed, in acting for
the other with no intent to get benefit from it. I would suggest that
this notion of chessed was in fact the very da'as the tree was supposed
to impart.

And it's not until we get to Avraham, who not only performs chessed
but commits to transmitting it down the generations that Hashem finds a
nation worth of the Torah. This is the reason why humanity required 26
generations between the giving of derekh eretz and the Torah.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             One doesn't learn mussar to be a tzaddik,
micha at aishdas.org        but to become a tzaddik.
http://www.aishdas.org                         - Rav Yisrael Salanter
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