Two Adams, No Accident
Friday, October 24th, 2008
Each year when we begin again from the beginning, we see immediately that the Torah does not let us warm up before our workout; the Torah begins challenging our intellect and our imaginations from the first two chapters of Bereshit. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 give us two distinct and very different accounts of the creation of humanity. What are we to make of this?
Some modern scholars of biblical history and criticism see this as an example of the piecemeal fashion in which our Scripture was assembled over time from a variety of traditions and authors. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik offers a compelling alternative interpretation to these scholars in his seminal and beautiful essay, “The Lonely Man of Faith”.
Soloveitchik posits that the two accounts of Adam’s creation, far from being an editorial accident or a mini-anthology of competing myths, represent a deliberate articulation a dichotomy in human nature.
In Genesis 1, God creates man (whom Soloveitchik calls Adam the First) seemingly ex nihilo in the divine image and tells him to procreate, proliferate, and dominate the natural world.
In Genesis 2, God forms Adam the Second from the dust of the earth, places him in the Garden, and tells him to get to work tending to the natural world.
Adam the Second plays the title role — “The Lonely Man” — of the essay, illustrating Soloveitchik’s feeling of vast, existential loneliness shared by people of faith, or stewards of nature and humanity per God’s instruction, in the modern world, an era defined by our regard and respect for humanity’s capacity for creativity and domination.
If you can find a copy of this essay — I got mine at the local library — I highly recommend it as a complement to your study of Bereshit. Whether or not you agree with Soloveitchik’s Orthodox reading of Scripture, I’ll bet you can relate to this intensely personal articulation of the difficulty of remaining driven by faith in the age of reason. Modernity aside, this is a struggle within the human soul that Bereshit shows has been with us from the beginning.
