Did Adam Fall Up?

Here is the idea. Before Adam ate, he did not know right from wrong. Eating the fruit gave him that knowledge, and the ability to choose. So, the argument goes, the sin actually made him better.

The Rambam writes about this question at the start of his book of Jewish philosophy, the Moreh Nevuchim (Guide for the Perplexed), Part 1, chapter 2. A scholar asked him: if the fruit gave Adam the ability to know good from evil, then God rewarded him for disobeying. That makes no sense. It would be like a criminal being turned into a star in the sky as his "punishment."

The Rambam answers that the question is built on a mistake. Adam already had a full mind before he ate. That is what it means that he was created b'tzelem Elokim, in God's image. It is also why God could give him a command at all. You don't give commands to an animal.

The Rambam explains that the mind deals with true and false (אֱמֶת and שֶׁקֶר). "Good and bad" in this story means something lower: what looks nice and what looks embarrassing. That is a matter of opinion, not facts. You would never call a math fact "nice" or "ugly." It is just true or false.

So for the Rambam, the fruit did not make Adam smarter. It made him worse. He followed what looked good to him, "the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eyes" (Bereishit 3:6). After he ate, he started judging things by how they look instead of by what is true. That is why the Torah says "their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked." They did not see anything new. They saw the same things, but now they felt embarrassed.

Keep the Rambam in mind as you read the rest of this page. Anyone who says the sin was a step up has to deal with his answer.

In other words: acting from your own will is something God does, so in that way it is a Godly trait. But for a human being with a body, it also comes with cravings.

After the sin, God says: הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע, "man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil" (Bereishit 3:22). Onkelos translates it: man is now one of a kind in the world, able to decide on his own. The Rambam uses this verse as his source for free will.

Does the Rambam contradict himself? In the Moreh Nevuchim he says the fruit made Adam worse, and here he uses the same verse to prove we have free will. No. Here he is describing what people are: the only creatures who choose for themselves. In the Moreh Nevuchim he is describing what Adam lost by choosing wrong. Either way, for the Rambam, Adam could already choose before he ate. That is why God could command him.

Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin (a student of the Vilna Gaon) explains this in his book Nefesh HaChaim. Before the sin, Adam had full free will. But evil was outside him, like a fire is outside you: you can walk into it, but it is not part of you. That is why the snake had to come from outside to tempt him.

He says this explains the name of the tree. Da'at (knowledge) can mean "connecting," as in "Adam knew Chava." The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is the tree that mixed good and evil together inside people. Rav Dessler explains what this means for us: today the yetzer hara speaks to us in the first person, "I want," while the good side speaks to us as "you must." For Adam before the sin it was the other way around. The good was his own "I," and the snake had to talk to him as "you."

A Midrash (Tanchuma, Vayeshev 4) says that the angel of death was created on the very first day of creation, before Adam existed. When Adam sinned on the sixth day, he became the reason death came into the world. But death was already there, waiting.

The Midrash gives a parable. A man has decided to divorce his wife. He writes the get (divorce document), comes home holding it, and asks her for a drink. She hands him a lukewarm cup, and he says: "That's it, here is your get."

Adam makes the same complaint to God: the Torah existed before the world was created, and it already had a law about "a person who dies in a tent" (Bamidbar 19:14). If You had not planned for death, You would not have written that law.

The Midrash is really about Yosef. Yosef's brothers chose to sell him, and they were guilty for it. But God used that sale to bring Yaakov's family down to Egypt, as He had told Avraham would happen. The point: people make real choices and are responsible for them, and God can still use those choices for His plan. As Yosef tells his brothers, "You meant it for bad; God meant it for good" (Bereishit 50:20).

Other sources say similar things:

The best-known version is from Rav Eliyahu Dessler (1892-1953), in his book Michtav Me'Eliyahu. Before the sin, Adam had no evil inside him. Everything in Gan Eden helped him do good; the Gemara says angels even served him (Sanhedrin 59b). So Adam felt that his own effort was very small compared to all the help he was getting. Then he had a thought:

Rav Dessler even uses the phrase yerida l'tzorech aliyah ("going down in order to go up") for this. He says Adam had two paths in front of him, and both were for the sake of Heaven: to rise even higher in Gan Eden, or לִשְׁאוֹף לִירִידָה לְצֹרֶךְ עֲלִיָּה, to go down into darkness so that more of God would be revealed from inside it. He adds that the idea that Adam sinned lishmah, for the sake of Heaven, comes from the Arizal (vol. 2, p. 123).

So what went wrong? Rav Dessler gives three reasons:

1. He misjudged evil. Adam had never felt evil, so he could not imagine how dark it really is. He thought it would be only a little dark.

2. He put his own reasoning above God's command. He thought the command could be set aside, just this once, as an aveirah lishmah (a sin for the sake of Heaven).

3. Underneath, a tiny bit of ego. The second path came with צֵל צִלָּהּ שֶׁל אָנֹכִיּוּת, the faintest shadow of self-interest: Adam felt that this way, his own part in revealing God would be bigger. Even Adam did not notice it.

Others go even further. Rabbi David Shlomo Eibschutz writes in his book Arvei Nachal:

His reasoning: for people to have real choices, good and evil have to be mixed together, and God does not do that mixing Himself. Rabbi Chaim of Czernowitz (Be'er Mayim Chaim) says the tree itself was holy, and that if Adam had waited, eating from it would have been a mitzvah. The Radbaz (Rabbi David ibn Zimra) says simply: אדם הראשון לטובה נתכוון, Adam meant well; he wanted to be like one of God's angels (Responsa 1:256).

But the Meshech Chochmah (Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk) warns about this whole way of thinking. He says the snake's main argument to Chava was not "this will taste good." It was a religious argument: God doesn't really want you to hold back. He secretly wants you to eat, beat the evil, and come closer to Him. He forbade it on pain of death so you would show how much you are willing to give up for Him.

This is an important lesson. The most dangerous temptation is not "forget about God." It is "God secretly wants you to break this rule." God's answer is simple: when I tell you something, I mean it.

The Izhbitzer Rebbe (in his book Mei HaShiloach) points out something surprising. Right after the sin and the punishment, Adam names his wife Chava, "because she was the mother of all life" (Bereishit 3:20). Why give her a name of honor right after she led him to sin? He explains that by then Adam had done teshuvah, and he now understood something new:

He explains being sent out of Gan Eden the same way. If Adam had stayed in Gan Eden, he could have done complete teshuvah and fixed the sin right away. God wanted the fixing to take time, so that every generation after Adam would have a part in it and could earn its own good deeds. In his words, כְּדֵי שֶׁהַטּוֹבָה יִהְיֶה נִקְרָא עַל שֵׁם יְגִיעַ כַּפָּיו, so that people would earn the good through their own work.

He also says that in the future, God will show that Adam ate only the good part of the tree, and that the sin was only a sin from Adam's point of view. He compares it to קְלִיפּוֹת הַשּׁוּם, the thin peel of a garlic: a very small thing (Mei HaShiloach vol. I, Bereishit).

Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen applies this to anyone who does teshuvah. The Gemara says that when a person does teshuvah out of love, even his deliberate sins turn into merits (Yoma 86b). Rabbi Tzadok explains how: after full teshuvah, a person comes to see that even his sins were part of God's will (Tzidkat HaTzaddik 40). He bases this on the Arizal's explanation of how God's knowledge and our free will fit together. Both are true. From our side, we really choose. From God's side, nothing happens outside His will.

Rabbi Tzadok also writes about Adam himself. Right after a sin that brought death to every generation, Adam experienced the light of Shabbat. That, he says, is how the world works: בְּרֵישָׁא חֲשׁוֹכָא וַהֲדַר נְהוֹרָא, first darkness and then light. It is the level of a ba'al teshuvah, which the Gemara says is even higher than someone who never sinned (Peri Tzadik, Kedushat HaShabbat 5; Berachot 34b).

1. What the snake offered. The snake told Chava, "you will be like God." Rashi explains God's words "man has become like one of Us" this way: now man is alone in the lower world, the way God is alone above. Onkelos and the Rambam see this as a good thing: our free will. The Sefat Emet says it was the sin itself. The snake offered Adam the chance to be independent, not needing God. But a person can only become complete by making room for God, not by doing it all on his own.

2. Why we have free choice. There is a well-known teaching that God gave us free choice so we can earn what we get. If someone gets everything for free, he feels embarrassed, like a person eating someone else's food. The Sefat Emet asks: before the sin, there was no evil in the world. So how was Adam supposed to earn anything? His answer:

In other words: in Gan Eden, Adam was so close to God that nothing felt like it "wasn't his." He had no need to earn anything. The struggle of choosing between good and bad belongs to a world where we are distant from God. Free choice is not the prize Adam won by sinning. It is the way back from the distance the sin created.

3. Being sent out was also a mission. The Torah says God "sent him out of Gan Eden to work the ground" (Bereishit 3:23). The Hebrew word וַיְשַׁלְּחֵהוּ can also mean "He sent him on a mission."

He adds that this is true for every person. Before a soul comes into this world, it is shown Gan Eden and the Torah. Each of us is sent here on a mission, like Adam was.

4. Someone can rise higher than Adam was. The Sefat Emet says that in Gan Eden, Adam was like a son of God. After the sin, he became like a servant, working the ground. Then Avraham, whom God calls "My servant," rose from servant back to son, and became even greater than Adam. At Har Sinai, the whole Jewish people became God's children again (Bereishit 5661). As the Midrash says, Avraham was the one meant to fix what Adam broke (Bereishit Rabbah 14:6).

That is the Sefat Emet's version of "falling up." People really can rise higher than Gan Eden. But the credit goes to the work of fixing things afterward, not to the sin. He adds that every Shabbat we get a small taste of what life was like before the sin (Bereishit 5644, 5650, 5661).

Reish Lakish says that when a person does teshuvah out of love, even his deliberate sins turn into merits (Yoma 86b). Rabbi Abahu says that a ba'al teshuvah stands in a place that even a completely righteous person cannot reach (Berachot 34b). The idea of "going down in order to go up" rests on these two teachings. The going up never comes from the sin. It comes from what a person does after it.

The Midrash tells a story about Adam himself. After Kayin killed Hevel and was punished, Adam met him and asked what happened at his judgment. Kayin said: "I did teshuvah, and my punishment was made lighter."

Rabbi Levi adds that Adam wrote this psalm, it was forgotten, and Moshe later restored it. So when we sing Mizmor Shir L'Yom HaShabbat every Friday night in Kabbalat Shabbat, according to the Midrash we are singing Adam's song about discovering teshuvah.