[Avodah] Original Sin

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 09:24:22AM -0500, Zev Sero wrote:
: AIUI, and as I've explained it to Xians, we believe that the Fall
: affected only the body and not the soul.  As a result of the Fall, the
: body is subject to suffering, decay, and ultimately death; that is
: undeniable.  But the "neshama shenatata bi tehora hi"; the neshama is
: not Fallen, and comes into the world needing no salvation, other than
: whatever private cheshbon it accumulated in previous incarnations.
: Therefore we are not born into a sort of spiritual peonage, and have no
: need for a Saviour...

REED writes that what the cheit did was cause an internalization of the
yeitzer hara. Whereas before Adam naturally did what was right, and his
bechirah was in assessing what was truly right, now he had taavos for
other goals.

This is an issue beyond the guf.

My take from the REED's essay on the 4 olamos that the cheit lowered
man's perception, internalizing the yeitzer hara.

The Gra writes (Havayah veHasagah cheileq 2) that before the cheit,
Adam's olam ha'asiyah is the world we now call olam ha'yetzirah. Rav
Dessler notes that this makes them sound like levels that a person can
be on. Why are they called olamos, words?

He answers this using the Alter of Kelm's maxim about how the tailor sees
a crowd as a see of suits, and a shoemaker, by their shoes. He speaks
of a phenomology; the "real world" is the world as it appears to us. And
therefore Adam qodem lacheit had a different "real world" than we do.

Li nir'eh, the two tie together with REED's idea of nequdas habechirah. We
are only aware of a small subset of the decisions we make. Our spotlight
of consciousness is defined by where the battlefront lies between YhR
and YhT. But conscious awareness is also what defines which olam one
lives in.

What I would say is that whle the Notzri "original sin" meant that
the soul is incapable of redemption, we believe "neshamah shenasati bi
tehorah hi", even belashon hoveh. Rather, our awareness (ruach?) is no
longer exclusively coupled to it. We therefore have a nequdas habechirah
that sees a pettier world, and can make pettier decisions.


Along similar lines, the Alter of Slabodka noted that Hashem rewards
every mitzvah and punishes every cheit. Meaning, that despite the eigel,
we still are the people of maamad Har Sinai. By adding evil, one now has
a more complicated mixture. But the good is still in there.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             It's nice to be smart,
micha at aishdas.org        but it's smarter to be nice.
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