Sin—the Way Out of Evil
In the Kabbalistic version, the story of the original sin has a twist or two that you may not know. Adam was commanded not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge so he would not entangle himself with desires he couldn’t handle. But his internal female, Eve, told him that if he did eat, he would be able to give to the Creator even more than if he didn’t. She was right, too, because in doing that, he would be using greater desires to receive in order to give to the Creator. But what Eve didn’t know was that to give to the Creator with such strong desires, you need to have a very strong Masach to handle them. Adam did not have that. You may justly ask, “Why didn’t the Creator tell Adam that he couldn’t handle such desires, did He want him to fail? What kind of a giving Creator lets his creation suffer?”
To understand why the Creator did that to Adam, we must remember the Thought of Creation, and that this is what Adam really wanted. To teach Adam about his own desires, the Creator had to expose them to him. And how can you expose a desire to someone without letting him or her experience what that desire feels like?
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This is a good place to remind ourselves that all that the Torah (Five Books of Moses) and Kabbalah write about unfolds in the spiritual worlds, not in our world.
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From the perspective of the Creator no harm was done by Adam’s sin because from His perspective, this is just another step toward teaching creation how to receive everything that He wants to give. The greatest gift the Creator can give to us is His Thoughts, so that’s what He had to show us. Now that we have this memory in our Reshimot we can begin to correct ourselves and learn how to receive it.
Tiny Gold Coins
The first step in the correction of Adam’s soul was to split it into “digestible” pieces, small bits of desire that weren’t so hard to correct. For this reason his soul shattered into no less than 600,000 pieces. It continued to shatter and splinter and today we have as many pieces of his soul as there are people on Earth. Yes, you understand correctly. We’re all parts of the same soul. In Part 3 we’ll talk about the practical aspects of this fact.
The splitting happened in the following way: when all the desires in Adam ha Rishon had a common intention to bestow upon the Creator, they were united as one. When the intention in the desires was reversed into an aim for self-gratification, each desire sensed itself separated from the others, and the single soul became divided. All souls, therefore, are extensions of the general soul of Adam ha Rishon (literally translated as “the first man”).
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The more egoistic we become, the harder it is correct each bit of soul, and the more we have to divide and multiply.
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Here is an allegory by Baal HaSulam that explains the splitting principle: A king needed to send a large quantity of gold coins to his son who lived overseas. He had no messengers that he could trust with a big sum, so he split up the gold coins into pennies and sent them by many messengers. Each messenger decided it was not worth stealing such insignificant loot and delivered it. Once the pennies reached their destination they were reunited into the original large sum.
In the same way, many souls over many days can redeem the fragments after the apple incident. All the pieces combine to successfully complete the original task of receiving all the Light in order to give to the Creator. Our job is to correct our individual portions, the roots of our own souls.