Welcome to our first installment of Soul Sketches featuring: Adam, the first human being.
Why does Adam matter?
Just as our sense of Jewish identity depends on our sense of Jewish history, so too our sense of our own humanity depends on our narrative of human history.
Let’s leave aside for a moment what you may know from the fields of geology, evolutionary biology, archaeology and anthropology. Imagine that the text of the Torah can be reconciled with established scientific facts1.
From a purely psychological point of view, if we look at ourselves, and teach our children that all human behavior can be entirely reduced to same primal drives and aversions that animals possess, we shouldn’t be surprised to observe humans behaving increasingly like animals. Nor should we be surprised if our grandkids look at us as if we’re two generations closer to primates, and therefore less evolved than they.

Contrast this narrative of humanity with that of the Torah. Although you may have expected the Torah’s account of the origins of humanity to be too idealized to be relatable to our imperfect lives, when you study it and give it thought, it’s all too relatable.
The story of Adam speaks to the universal struggle with perfection, and our wrestling with our own theoretically limitless potential.
The Torah describes humanity as stemming from a single man named Adam-אדם, who was named after the earth (adama-אדמה) from which his body was formed.
Of all things, why name him after dirt?
Dirt is about actualizing potential. Put a seed in dirt and it will germinate. Dirt will grow what you plant in it, and yield real estate returns based on what you build on it.

No creature is more blessed and cursed by its potential than the human being.
What we can make of ourselves and the true impact we can have through our lives is at the same time motivating and terrifying, and can haunt us for a lifetime over missed opportunities.
Although the notion of perfection gnaws at every person’s mind — imagine the pressure on Adam. He was “hand-crafted” by God without flaw. All the other creatures were created with God’s verbal command, as if through a cosmic, voice-to-image AI interface. But Adam’s inner identity and consciousness is described as having been created from God Himself breathing His own breath into him — meaning, man’s essence is somehow akin to that of the Programmer Himself.
This begs the question: how could he ever make a mistake if his soul was Divine?
The Talmud further describes Adam’s consciousness as spanning from one end of the cosmos to the other. God did not withhold from him any of His secrets. Adam could know everything that there was to know. Just by looking at the other creatures, Adam could perceive their essence and gave them each the perfect name to describe them — names that remained as such in the holy language until this day. All was revealed to him.
And yet, he failed to see the gravity of the error staring him in the face of eating from the one tree God told him not to eat from?
How is it possible?
Adam was placed in paradise, a garden of pure pleasure (“Eden” means undiluted pleasure), and lived with a dread of messing it up…
and yet he did...
Adam was given both male and female aspects of mind and therefore didn’t need anyone else in his life. He was literally perfect. ּ
Perfection, however, is overrated.
He could see to the other end of the universe, but felt that he had nothing left to learn (except maybe by making a mistake).
He was also lonely. He knew so much, but had no one to share it with. He had no partner to challenge him, and complement his perspective with her own.
So, God gives him a partial lobotomy. He removed the feminine aspect of his mind, and from it developed the perfect partner for him. Adam was ecstatic to meet her, but soon afterwards he left her on her own, vulnerable to the intellectual assault of a snake, feeling the need to press on with his endless work in the Garden of Perfection.
What is so compelling about Adam is that although he possessed all the knowledge in the universe, he had the maturity of a newborn.
He had never made a mistake. No one had. And therefore he had no notion of taking responsibility for his mistakes. And so when he made that mistake of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, he cowered in fear from God confronting him over it. He hid “among the trees of the garden” as if to say:
“Don’t look at me — I couldn’t possibly be responsible — blame my circumstances!”
When he finally accepted the truth of his error, and was dismissed from that perfect place, he fell into a deep depression for 130 years in which he sat alone, separate from his wife, and cried over his own doom, and the darkness he had brought to the world.
The possibility of teshuva, real personal change, had not dawned on him.
He had popped the bubble of perfection and there was clearly no way to un-pop it.
As far away as Adam seems, I think that we can all relate to him. Every “Ben Adam” (“human”, literally “son of Adam”) struggles, on some level, with the pressure of perfection. After Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we can appreciate that Hashem does not look for perfection. If He wanted us to be perfect, He would have made us perfect. In fact, He did make us perfect, and look how it turned out.
What He wants is the sincere desire and effort to get better.2 This should inspire us as we begin this new year to strive everyday to learn and grow, and rebuild when we’ve made mistakes.
Next week, we meet Noach-נח (Noah).
“The Truth cannot be at odds with facts” is a paraphrase the comments of Rabbenu Nissim Gaon (990-1062 CE) on the Talmud in Sukkah 2a, and is echoed by many of the Rishonim (medieval authorities) — not the least of which was Maimonides.
Here’s a great, short article by Natan Slifkin about reconciling evolution with the Torah.
If you are not familiar, read about Carol Dweck’s research on Growth Mindset.