A First Commandment and Blessing

It is so easy to live in G-d Al-mighty's Blessings if we just keep our calculations away.

I was at a bar mitzvah recently and a distinguished speaker was saying that Adam and Chava (Eve) in the Garden of Eden had only one Divine Commandment and that was not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and, even with only one command to follow, they did not listen.

We hear this all the time, but this time something struck me as missing.

This was not the first command.

The first Command was to be Fruitful and Multiply. (Genesis-Bereishis 1:28)

And they did listen. (4:1)

Immediately as a matter of fact!¹

The first man and woman responded immediately to their Creator’s Command. To their great blessing and ours. Because of their actions, we have the joy of life today.

And, perhaps we can now suggest the solution to the eviction from the Garden of Eden. At the outset we followed G-d Al-mighty’s Command and Blessing without calculation in the flow of life and love - life is for love. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil brought into our awareness the possibility of apparently undesirable situations and outcomes and, out of fear, we began to calculate how to avoid them and move out of love and expansion into fear and contraction. Calculations are the hallmark of the constrained soul, mind and heart. (Rambam Hilchos Shemittah and Yovel at end.)

Men will even begin to limit offspring individually and collectively, encouraging or forcing others to do so, based on the calculations which only spirals the world downwards. The calculations are used to create further fear and further contraction and further self-constriction.

In fact, if Adam and Chava had been introduced to calculations and fearful scarcity thinking before they procreated, they may never have procreated at all!

The solution, individually and collectively, is to take action, המעשה הוא העיקר action is the main thing, that defies the calculations. The calculations cannot be disproven from within a framework of human logic, observation and measurement. They can only be bypassed, לכתחילה אריבער jumped over as if they are not there, to take action to fulfill G-d Al-mighty’s Command of Be Fruitful and Multiply.²

Thus when man acts and follows G-d Al-mighty’s command without regard to the “numbers” he redeems himself from the exile and imprisonment created by his own calculations (thinking). Then the G-dly Blessing flourishes in himself, his family and the world in glorious ways that only G-d Al-mighty can foresee and deliver.

Read part 2 of this series:

Part 2: Who would object to 80 Billion men and women?

1. The verse declaring that they followed G-d Al-mighty’s Blessing and Command to be Fruitful and Multiply is verse 4:1. In the sequence of verses, this is recorded after the verses about the incident of eating from the Tree (2:16-17 and 3:1-24). Verse 4:1 is starting again this time focusing on the generations of men, beginning with the first procreation, from which the generations of men sprung. So, they were occupied with procreation before they ate from the Tree and then became troubled in their thinking and were, because of this, ejected from Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden).

2. I encourage you to watch this video compilation of my teacher, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, speaking about the Greatest Blessing, the Commandment to be Fruitful and Multiply. https://videos.jem.tv/video-player?produced=464. Unfortunately, the video is no longer available as a stand alone DVD and it’s not yet available as a VOD - the only way to watch it is to subscribe to the JEM video membership and then after you watch it you can cancel. (Not that I am encouraging you to cancel that but this is what was suggested to me for readers by JEM itself.)