On original sin according to Judaism.

It should be interesting, for those who are unaware of it, to know the doctrine of the Jews relative to original sin. We take the following explanation from the Israelite journal La Famille de Jacob, which is published in Avignon, under the direction of the chief rabbi Benjamin Mossé; the July 1868 issue.

“The dogma of original sin is far from being found among the number of the principles of Judaism. The profound legend related by the Talmud (Nida XXX, 2) and which represents the angels, making the human soul, at the moment when it is going to incarnate in a terrestrial body, take the oath to keep itself pure during its stay on this planet, in order to return pure to the Creator, is a poetic affirmation of our native innocence and of our moral independence from the fault of our first parents. This affirmation, contained in our traditional books, is in conformity with the true spirit of Judaism. “To define the dogma of original sin, it will suffice us to say that the account of Genesis is taken literally, whose legendary character is disregarded, and that, starting from this false point of view, all the consequences arising from it are blindly accepted, without concern for their incompatibility with human nature and with the necessary and eternal attributes that reason confers upon the divine nature. “Slaves of the letter, they affirm that the first woman was seduced by the serpent, that she ate a fruit forbidden by God, that she made her spouse eat of it, and that, by this act of open revolt against the divine will, the first man and the first woman incurred the curse of heaven, not only for themselves, but for their children, for their race, for the whole of Humanity, for Humanity an accomplice, whatever the distance in time at which it may find itself from the guilty, an accomplice in their crime, for which it is, consequently, responsible in all its present and future members. “According to this doctrine, the fall and the condemnation of our first parents were a fall and a condemnation for their posterity; thence, for the human race, innumerable evils, which would have been without end, but for the mediation of a Redeemer, as incomprehensible as the crime and the condemnation for which he was summoned. Just as the sin of one alone was committed by all, the expiation of one alone will be the expiation of all; lost by one alone, Humanity will be saved by one alone. Redemption is the inevitable consequence of original sin. “It is understood that we do not discuss these premises with their consequences, which to us are no more acceptable, from the dogmatic point of view, than from the moral point of view.

“Our reason and our conscience will never accommodate themselves to a doctrine that effaces human personality and divine justice, and that, in order to explain its pretensions, makes us all live together in the soul as in the body of the first man, teaching us that, however numerous we may be in the course of the ages, we form part of Adam in spirit and in matter, that we participate in his crime, and that we must have our share in his condemnation. “The profound sentiment of our moral liberty refuses this fatal assimilation, which would take away our initiative, which would chain us, in spite of ourselves, to a distant, mysterious sin, of which we have no consciousness, and which would make us suffer an ineffectual punishment, since, in our eyes, it would not be merited.

“The indefectible and universal idea we have of the justice of the Creator refuses still more energetically to believe in the compromising, through the fault of one alone, of the free beings successively created by God in the succession of the centuries.

“If Adam and Eve sinned, to them alone belongs the responsibility for their error; to them alone the degradation, the expiation, the redemption by means of their personal efforts to reconquer their nobility. But we, who came after them, who, like them, were the object of an identical act on the part of the creative power, and who must, on that account, have a worth equal to that of our first father in the eyes of our Creator, are born with our purity and our innocence, of which we are the sole masters, the sole depositaries, and whose loss or conservation depends absolutely on nothing but our will and the determinations of our free will. “Such is, on this point, the doctrine of Judaism, which could admit nothing that was not in conformity with our conscience enlightened by reason.

B. M.

[1]

[In the original Benjamin Massé — In the article An angel of Heaven on Earth, the name of this rabbi of Avignon appears as Benjamin Mossé.]

[2] [The Talmud (in Hebrew: תַּלמוּד, transl. Talmud) is a record of the rabbinical discussions pertaining to the law, ethics, customs, and history of Judaism. It is a central text for rabbinic Judaism, surpassed in importance only by the Hebrew Bible.]