창세기 2:17의 Halakhah

And thus the utensil, the knife, with which food is cut into pieces is called a ma’akhelet because it annihilates and destroys, as in the expression, “you shall consume (ve-‘akhalta) all the peoples.”³Dt. 7:16: “You shall destroy all the peoples” (NJSB). Ma’akhelet is the term for the knife with which Abraham prepares to slaughter Isaac in Gen 22:10. And the verse which uses va-yokhlu (“they ate”) to refer to what the ministering angels were doing teaches this,⁴Gen 18:8, in the story of the angels visiting Abraham at Mamre. as our sages z”l taught in a midrash about the three calves that Abraham brought to them. “One after another each one went up and disappeared (kalah) off the table, and Abraham when he realized this, brought some more meat almost continually time after time, like a person who kept increasing the number of whole burnt offerings he sacrificed on the altar.”⁵Gen. R. 48:16. And likewise about Adam it is written, “She also gave some to her husband, and he ate (va-yokhal).”⁶Gen 3:6The word va-yokhal (“and he ate”) proclaims his sin both by his deed and by his thought. By his deed: that is that he caused the tree to lose its fruit, and ate it despite his being warned not to: “for as soon as you eat of it, you will die.”⁷Gen 2:17. His thought: that is that he destroyed, cut off, and made like the branch of the tree was a thing in and of itself, and if so, everything suffers destruction and annihilation, in both physical and intellectual things.⁸R. Bahya alludes here to the kabbalistic idea that the sin of Adam also involved “the cutting of the shoots,” the intellectual error of mistaking the part for the whole of creation. This had profound cosmic implications, since by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam not only physically separated the fruit from the tree, he intellectually “separated” it from its heavenly image above, its source of power and energy. This intellectual separation cuts the divine “pipeline” connecting the lower and upper worlds, effectively blocking the empowering flow of divine energy between the two worlds. It is precisely this state of affairs, the consequence of Adam’s sin, that the table blessings R. Bahya discusses in the First Gate is intended to repair. And so when you are found saying the word va-yokhal, it includes the destruction (hashhatah) of both something below and the destruction of something above, as it is written, “your people have gone bad (shihet),”⁹Ex 32:7. This is from the story of the Golden Calf. God is speaking to Moses, and instead of referring to the Israelites as “My people” as He usually does, God calls them “your – i.e., Moses’ – people,” much as parents often pass the buck to one another when their children have misbehaved (as does Moses, too, replying to God in Ex 32:11). I think R. Bahya’s point is that there is both a lower and upper “people “(“your [Moses’] people” vs. “My [God’s] people” that have “gone bad.” and likewise Jeroboam was called a mashhit – “destroyer” – because he destroyed and cut short the shoots.¹⁰See note 8 above. R. Bahya alludes to the midrash in b. Berakhot 35b: “‘He is a companion to vandals (ish mashhit) (Prov. 28:24).’ This refers to Jeroboam the son of Nebat who ruined (she-hishhit) Israel for their Father in Heaven,” by building two golden calves and ordering the Israelites to worship them (I Kings 12:28-32).