R' Bachya starts his analysis of the sin of eating from the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Bad with the observation that it would seem that
we gained something from that meal. The simple reading of the text is
that originally man did not comprehend how to discern between good and
bad. The snake proposed that in so many words. If that were the case,
though, then we would find that חוטא נשכר/the sinner would have
benefited. Mankind would have a new level of understanding that he
heretofore lacked. That, declares R' Bachya, is patently impossible.
We must therefore re-evaluate how to understand what that tree had to offer. R' Bachya says that until this point, man had absolute clarity about his world: everything went into on of two buckets, (1) אמת/True and (2) שקר/False -- mutually exclusive and there was nothing that didn't fit into one of those buckets. Good and bad (note: it was with intention that I didn't use the usual translation of good and evil) are relative terms. Something like pleasant and icky. By eating from the fruit of that tree, they gained nothing; they lost clarity. From that point forward, each decision would be clouded with a personal interest in whether it felt good or bad to me.
This analysis was particularly striking to me because of having gone through chemotherapy some 30 years ago. When the options were explained to me, it was: (1) do nothing and die from this cancer; (2) follow a difficult course of chemotherapy and be cured. It was challenging, but I never had anything but clarity about what to do. During one quite difficult week in the middle of treatment the nurses told me about a previous patient who had found the treatment so difficult that he took a week off in the middle. When he returned they told him that he had put himself at risk by taking that break. Moreover, if he took another break, he shouldn't come back, because the treatment would not work and he would die anyway. I took the mussar. Not that I was thinking of taking a break, but the story helped me to endure the rest of the treatment.
That is the world in which we now live. The Torah certainly does
give us clarity about True/False, but we are wearing grimy glasses on
our minds that infuses every decision with a dose of "but how will it
feel?" Baruch HaShem that we have our Holy Torah, which at least gives
us a fighting chance!
The term חוטא נשכר/the sinner benefits is used throughout Shas as a push back on a proposed solution. It was interesting for me to see R' Bachya use it in this situation. The fact that there cannot be a benefit from sin is much more than a "Shas concept"; the concept that sin inevitably results in a loss to the sinner is fundamentally built into the fabric of reality.
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