Seventh Day: The Sabbath
4. These are the products of the heaven and the earth when they were created on the day that HASHEM God made earth and heaven. … God created the world for the sake of Abraham, because he was the epitome of kindness, one of the pillars of the world. …. He was the progenitor of Israel.
HASHEM God. which denotes God in His Attribute of Mercy. At first, God created the world exclusively with the Attribute of Justice [Elohim}, because the ideal state is for Man to be judged according to his deeds, without a need for special mercy, but God knew that Man cannot survive without mercy and forbearance.
6. A Mist ascended from the earth and watered the whole surface of the soil. 7. And HASHEM God formed the man of dust from the ground, and He blew into his nostrils the soul of life; and man became a living being.
dust – body; Adam: man, red, blood, earth, soul
God thus made Man out of both lower [earthly] and upper [heavenly] matter: his body from the dust and his soul from the spirit. Man’s soul is part of God’s essence, as it were.
9. And HASHEM God caused to sprout from the ground every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food; also the Tree of Life in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad.
15. HASHEM God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden, to work it and to guard it.
The Garden of Eden
From then on, Man was born with evil impulses, such as greed, selfishness, and lust for whatever suits his developing appetite.
It refers to Man’s unwholesome capacity to choose what is superficially sweet [good] even though it is harmful to him, and to reject what is superficially bitter [bad] even when it is truly beneficial.
17. but of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, you must not eat thereof; for on that day you eat of it, you shall surely die.
On that day the evil impulses of jealousy, lust, and honor will be aroused within you, making it impossible for you to attain the goal of complete spirituality as long as you are still on earth. Thus, eternal life will be an intolerable burden for you.
23. And the man said, “This time it is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This shall be called Woman, for from man was she taken.”
24. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and they shall become one flesh.
- homiletically
- allegorically
- irrefutably
- vileness