[Avodah] Gan Eden

Micha Berger via Avodah avodah at lists.aishdas.org
Fri Oct 28 03:19:46 PDT 2016


On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 12:09:35PM +0300, Eli Turkel via Avodah wrote:
: How (when?) did the phrase Gan Eden which appears in Bersehit as a physical
: place get transformed to a place for the sould after death?

Couldn't you ask the same about a valley outside (nowadays well inside)
Y-m?

Seems to me that both are simply comparisons -- a place as nice as gan
eden, a place as bad as the local Canaanite center of child sacrifice.

However, the two uses of gen eden is more similar than the uses of
gehennom. Because Adam before the sin was less encumbered by the physical.
The reality he enountered was more like olam baba than the olam hazeh we
experience. See Michtav meiEliyahu vol I, "Olamos deAsiyah veYetzirah",
pp 304-312. For that matter, according to REED, even the arrow of time
is a post-sin phenomenon -- vol II, pp 150-154, vol IV, pg 113.

Whereas (according to the Ran) the physical fires of Gei Ben Hinnom are
being compared to the feeling of absolute and inescapable shame.


...
: Heard a shiur that this is one of the most difficult stories in chumash.

And Mishlei is one of the most difficult books in Tanakh.

Maaseh Bereishis is incomprehensible. The "only" things we're going to
pull out of this part of chumash are meshalim for our own lives. Meshalim
are intentionally enigmatic, as they hint at more and more to analyze,
more comparisons to learn from.

I bet that if we weren't distracted in other texts by more ability to
understand the narrative as narrative, we would have similar lists of
questions. What do you think the Abarbanel would say to that suggestion?

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             When a king dies, his power ends,
micha at aishdas.org        but when a prophet dies, his influence is just
http://www.aishdas.org   beginning.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                    - Soren Kierkegaard



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