Tonight, Friday, September 11, Rosh Hashana begins: the Jewish New Year, a day of celebration and of reflection. On this day we begin the process of Teshuba, “repentance and change.” The Shofar announces it (this year, since the first day falls on Shabbat, we will hear it on Sunday).
THREE STEPS
Maimonides teaches that Teshuba has three steps:
HAKARAT HACHET: acknowledging personal responsibility for what we did wrong.
VIDUY: confession, saying our bad habits and wrong deeds out loud.
AZIBAT HACHET: the decision to leave those habits behind and correct our actions.
Hakarat haChet, admitting our mistakes, comes first, and it is probably the hardest of the three. Because our natural instinct is to justify and rationalize whatever we did. Or because we fall into the oldest psychological trap in human history: blaming someone else, also known as “the blame transference syndrome.” It works like this. Something goes wrong, and before we even feel the discomfort of having failed, our mind has already found a culprit: a spouse, a boss, a friend, the circumstances, the way we were raised. The relief is immediate. And it is a trap, because whatever is not my fault I cannot fix. The person who transfers the blame has, without noticing, given up the possibility of change.
WHAT WAS THE SIN?
We all know that HaShem punished Adam and Eve by expelling them from paradise. But what exactly was their sin? Did God punish them for eating the forbidden fruit, as everyone assumes?
Try an experiment. Cover a table with treats: candy, cookies, pastries. In the center, on a special plate where it cannot be missed, put a fruit or a vegetable. It does not have to be an apple; the Torah never mentions an apple. Make it a tomato, something no child craves. Now call in a five- or six-year-old and say: “You can eat anything you want, except the tomato in the middle of the table.” I promise you it is only a matter of time before the child ignores every sweet on the table and grabs the tomato. The forbidden fruit, simply because it is forbidden, awakens curiosity and a desire that cannot be resisted.
RABBI ALBO’S ANSWER
Rabbi Yosef Albo (Spain, c. 1380-1444) argues in his Sefer haIqarim that the original sin of Adam and Eve was not eating the fruit. HaShem knew that sooner or later they would give in to temptation. Like a loving parent, He wanted to teach the first humans a lesson they would need for the rest of their lives: what to do after you make a mistake. The Creator knows that human beings have desires, face temptations, and fail. So He set up the scenario in which Adam and Eve would “fall,” and in falling, learn to recognize their error, correct it, and grow in experience and maturity. God knows that making mistakes is part of being human. Otherwise there would be no Mitsva of Teshuba, no commandment to repent and correct ourselves. HaShem gave the first man the chance to learn how to repair his relationship with Him.
For Rabbi Albo, then, the original sin was not Adam’s disobedience. It was his denial: his refusal to take responsibility for what he had done. Instead of admitting it, apologizing for disobeying God, and learning the lesson, Adam shifted the blame to Eve. “The woman that YOU gave me,” he told God. Notice the “You.” Adam did not only blame Eve. Indirectly, he blamed HaShem. “She tempted me to eat the fruit, and I ate.”
Then HaShem asked Eve. She dodged responsibility the same way: “It wasn’t me. It was the serpent.”
Blaming others for our mistakes is one of the main obstacles to Teshuba. And it is the oldest excuse in history.
TONIGHT
Rosh Hashana is the anniversary of Adam’s creation. It is also the anniversary of that great excuse! Tonight, before we ask HaShem for a good year, the first thing He is waiting to hear from us is the sentence Adam could not say: “It was me.”