אדם הראשון

Adam was the only man ever to know a world without sin. Formed by God's own hands, made in the divine image and filled with the breath of life, he walked in the Garden while everything was still whole. And then, in a single day, he lost it all. His story is not only one of a fall, but of what a person does after falling.

The Torah does not whitewash him. He ate from the Tree of Knowledge, hid, and when questioned, shifted the blame onto the woman and the serpent (Genesis 3). Yet our Sages teach that Adam was also the first penitent: when he saw that repentance is accepted, he opened his mouth and said, 'A psalm, a song for the Sabbath day.' The man who lost Eden taught humanity that one can return.

And everything descends from him. The Sages asked: why did God create the human being as one, alone, and not as many? 'To teach you that whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture accounts it as if he destroyed an entire world, and whoever sustains a single soul, as if he sustained an entire world' (Sanhedrin 37a). Every human being, of every nation and tongue, is a child of that one man, bearing the same image.

What do we learn from him? Two things we cannot do without. First: 'for my sake the world was created', every person is a whole world, not a number. Second: the fall is not the end of the road; repentance is woven into creation from the very first man. We are all his children, and these two gifts too we inherited from him.