Shaarei Shamayim

Thank you all for coming this Shabbos to celebrate my engagement to Cheryl Tobin. But now I have a problem. What am I going to do next week to bring you back to Shule? How can I top this?

This Shabbos I’d like to share some insights from this week’s and last week’s Torah portions on what it take to remarry. Last week we began the reading of the Torah with the book of Bereshit—Genesis, with all its familiar stories. Last week we read the stories of creation, of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Able. This week we read the stories of new beginnings with Noah and the flood and the Tower of Babel. Each year we read these stories and it’s amazing that each time there’s always something new to be learned.

For example, in a book published in honor of a colleague, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, Rabbi David Flatto (with thanks to Rabbi Jack Reimer for showing this to me) asks an amazing question about the story of Cain and Abel—a question that never occurred to me in the more than 50 years I have been reading the story. He asks, when Cain was fighting with Abel, who is missing in the story? Their parents!

Where was their father Adam? Your children are fighting and you don’t get involved? Adam, where are you? It’s your job to break up their fight, to referee their quarrel, to make peace between them. That is what a father does. And so, as Gd said to Adam after he ate from the forbidden fruit, Ayeka, “Where are you?” Let us ask Adam the same thing. Ayeka, where are you Adam when your children need you? It’s a great question and I wonder why I never thought of it.

Rabbi Flatto looks at the story from a modern psychological perspective and suggests that Adam was depressed after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. And so, as people who are depressed do, Adam withdrew into himself, losing interest in the world around him. Adam’s life has come to a standstill. He is frozen, numb, paralyzed. He’s not there for his family because he has withdrawn into himself. He’s become crippled—emotionally incapacitated.
 
Can you blame him? He lost paradise. He lost the world in which you never need to work—the place where Gd is accessible, the place where all the animals obey you, the world where any food you want—with the exception of one fruit—is right there for the taking. With such a loss he loses interest in life—remaining fixated on how wonderful life used to be in the Garden, and so he had no energy left—even for his family. If you understand Adam this way, then his absence, his lack of involvement in the lives of his children becomes understandable.
 
Now let me show you what happens in the 2nd part of that story. Cain has committed murder, and so technically he deserves to die. But he can rightly claim that he didn’t know what murder was, and that he didn’t know it was forbidden. After all, no one had ever died before. How was he to know that if you hit someone with a rock, he would die? And, if there was no law book to declare that murder is a crime—let alone a capital offense—then he can rightly ask Gd to please show him mercy and forgive him.
 
Gd recognized the validity of Cain’s argument, and so he did not execute him. Instead, he sentenced him to exile to wander the earth. And in order to protect him, in order to make sure that no one would kill him for what he had done, Gd put a mark upon his forehead, as a sign of Divine Protection. Then the Torah (Gen. 4:16) says: “And Cain left the Presence of Gd and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” 

Now that same phrase, “East of Eden” is also said of Adam after he was expelled from the Garden (Gen. 3:24). And so the Rabbis of the Midrash make a connection. Adam lived East of Eden after leaving the garden and Cain went East of Eden after murdering his brother…therefore, the Midrash concludes, they must have met!
 
The Midrash (Raba) pictures the 2 of them meeting—the father who has been absent from his son’s life and the son who has gotten into the worst trouble on his own…the father who committed a sin for which he was expelled from the Garden and the son who committed the ultimate sin of murder. Adam starts the conversation: “What sin did you commit, and what punishment did you receive?” To which Cain answers, “I committed murder, but I repented, and Gd reduced my penalty.”
 
Adam is stunned. Adam had sinned, but his sin was not really that terrible. He was guilty of giving in to temptation and eating forbidden fruit. Nu, it’s wrong, but is that such a terrible thing? And yet, for this, he was thrown out of the Garden! Whereas Cain committed murder, and yet he was forgiven, just because he did teshuva? The Midrash continues: Hitchil Adam mitapeyach al panav, “Adam hit his forehead,” and he said, Kach hi kocha shel teshuva, v’ani lo yadati, “So great is the power of repentance, and I did not know it! Immediately, Adam arose and proclaimed: Tov l’hodot LaHashem, usually translated as, “It is good to give thanks to the Gd,” but he meant it’s deeper meaning, “It is good to confess to Gd!”
 
What’s going on here? It’s the way of the world that parents teach their children, but here a son is teaching his father. And perhaps, that’s part of the lesson—that as parents we should be open enough to learn even from our children. Adam was paralyzed—unable to move, to teach, to get involved in the life of his children because he was suffering from depression and wallowing in self-pity. He missed the Garden Paradise and the life he had there so much that he could think of nothing else. He lived only in the past. And it became the task of his son Cain, to lift him up and help him recover from his depression, and teach him to live in the present and to care about the future.
 
How does Cain teach Adam? In the only way that anyone ever teaches anything…which is by example. Cain does 2 things that his father had never done:
1st, he builds a city. To build is to care about the future. Cain was condemned by Gd to be a wanderer and yet, he builds a city?
            And the 2nd thing he does is even more remarkable. He names the city, not for himself, but for his son. As the Torah says: “He called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.”
 
This is the same Cain that once denied that he was his brother’s keeper. Now he insists on being his son’s guardian. Cain models for his father the act of fathering. He shows his father how to be a father. Something Adam had never really done until then.
 
And how do we know that it worked? How do we know that Adam recovered from his depression, and left the past and began to live in the present and for the future? At the end of the chapter—after the father and son have gone their separate ways—the Torah tells us: Vayeyda Adam od et ishto, vateyled ben, “Adam made love to his wife another time, and she gave birth to a child.” Abel is gone. Cain is gone off wandering somewhere who knows? And Adam and Eve, who have failed with their 1st 2 children risk and love and dare to bring a 3rd child into the world! They have not gotten over the loss of their 1st 2 children. No parent who loses a child ever does. They mention Cain and Abel in the very same breath when they name their new child (Gen. 4:25). They call this new child Sheyt or “Seth,” which means “a gift,” because, as Eve said, “Gd has given him to us as a gift in place of Abel whom Cain killed.”
 
I love this verse. Adam is called in the Jewish tradition Adam Harishon, “Adam the 1st.” It’s not such a big deal. Anyone can be 1st. It’s just a chronological fact—not a spiritual achievement. He happened to be born 1st. But to love and lose and begin over again? That’s a spiritual achievement!
 
Adam and Eve are the models for all the losers in the world…and who isn’t at some time in his life a loser? They are the models for all those who love and lose and have the courage to love again. They are the models for all those who are able to get up off their knees after a crippling blow, and start over.
 
We see the same theme repeated in today’s parsha. Noah has lost his world, just as Adam and Eve lost their paradise. Everyone he knew—with the exception of his wife and children—all his friends and family, everyone in his world is gone! In fact his whole world is gone—his home, his fields, his neighborhood, all gone! He becomes depressed and can’t bear to face the world. How do we know he’s depressed? Gd had to command him to leave the ark (Gen. 8:16). He couldn’t face leaving the Ark where Gd took care of him and see the destroyed world outside. And when he left the ark one of the 1st things he did was to plant a vineyard and get drunk! 

But Noah got over his losses as we eventually do and somehow—like Adam and Eve and Cain—found the courage to start life over and to begin to live again.

Let all of us who have had painful, crippling, soul-wrenching losses—losses of the kind that make us want to crawl into ourselves, and close our eyes and close our hearts and focus only on our own pain, and only on what we once had…let all of us who have known the pain of rejection and expulsion as Adam and Eve did when they were pushed out of the Garden and forced into the real world, and as Cain did, when Gd sentenced him to wander eternally…let all of us who have lost their world as Noah did…let all of us who have known a measure of the pain that they knew…learn from them today how to recover and how to rebuild our lives and how to begin over again. Amen!

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