I always look back at the story of creation, a story where the perfect human being was created, a being who ruined everything for himself and his wife. And the general masses tend to think that Adam’s mistake was eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and they tend to blame his wife for his misfortune. First off, I think this idea of Adam being the victim of his wife’s mistake is culturally one of the reasons why women have been treated with such disrespect over time and to this day. The masculine supremacy that tends to be abused nowadays has a biblical root, and it comes from the beginning, literally.

But it’s clear in the literal text, that Adam was not punished because he ate from the Tree. When he is confronted by Hashem, he blames his wife for his mistake and Hashem doesn’t punish him for eating from the tree, he punishes him for something else, for listening to his wife (Genesis 3:17). But more importantly, God punishes him for not owning up to his mistake, for using his wife as a scapegoat, for threatening the connection between him and his wife for his selfish need to be accepted by Hashem. But Adam’s mistake was EVEN deeper than that.

Adam was under the impression that there was something wrong with being imperfect, he thought that Hashem would love him less because of what he did. It was Adam’s insecurity, his lack in the love he had for himself that caused him to play the “blame game”. God was never really mad at him, because He gave him another chance to enter Eden on Shabbat. He wanted Adam to realize that making a mistake only meant something if you let it get to your head.

One of the greatest errors is to think that there’s something wrong with having a little bit of ugly in us. It’s been put there for a reason. It’s written “I have created the evil inclination; I have created the Torah as its spice [remedy].” (Kiddushin 30b). The reason why we have ugly in us, the reason why we make mistakes, is because we’ve been made that way, it’s our nature. It would be boring to be perfect; where’s the spice in that? Moreover, many Torah Scholars agree that Adam had to sin, that it was preordained for him to make a mistake. The test was: could he be himself regardless?

I can’t BEGIN to describe how many people say we live in a lowly generation, that we’ve been corrupted, that we’re no good. And we’re just reliving that past, we’re making Adam’s mistake again. And the whole idea is to disconnect from that, to realize that we’re the same souls of all the previous generations. The biggest change is to love ourselves despite our limitations. The term “Love thy friend as thyself” is not a commandment, it’s who we REALLY are, and we can’t love others if we don’t love ourselves first.