[Avodah] Question Sin of Adam vs. Kayin

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 09:06:48PM +0200, Ben Waxman wrote:
: Our need to work is not because we don't live in Gan Eden, it is because 
: the entire world was cursed. Was the world before the sin one in which 
: people would have had to work?

REED writes that hainu hakh. The world we're in is a matter of perception,
and the cheit changed human perception. Being kicked out of the ideal
world and moved to a cursed one is a change in us which in turn imposes
a new order on the universe.

See MmE vol I, "Olamos deAsiyah veYetzirah" pp 304-312. That This michtav
also discusses the Maharal's shitah on nissim. REED is is being very
Kantian, and holds that what we think of as reality is really the order
that human perception imposes on reality.

Elsewhere, REED says that this applies even to time (MmE IV pp 113,
Zeman veHishtalshelus) and that our current concept of a linear flowing
time is a product of the eitz hadaas (MmE 2 pp 150-154).

I wrote about this at
http://www.aishdas.org/asp/2006/02/rav-dessler-on-reality-and-perception.shtml

Esnst Mach (after whom they named the speed of sound) and Einstein took
this one step further and used it to explain why science is possible.
The latter often said, "the most incomprehensible thing about the world
is that it is comprehensible". How is it that our mind's logic matches
the world's rules? Their solution: We are analyzing the phenomenological
universe -- the kinds of things we can measure and find patterns in is
itself shaped by the structure of that mind as the theory created to
explain it.

And so, it would appear (MmE I) that eviction from gan eden was descent
from olam hayetzirah to olam haasiyah, which was "really" a change in
adam and the order his new perception made of reality. Nissim are the
results of occasional flashes in which the person is on a plane where
the laws of olam haasiyah are more real and absolute than those of
physics.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Man can aspire to spiritual-moral greatness
micha at aishdas.org        which is seldom fully achieved and easily lost
http://www.aishdas.org   again. Fullfillment lies not in a final goal,
Fax: (270) 514-1507      but in an eternal striving for perfection. -RSRH