"The fleshy part of Adam’s heel outshone the globe of the sun" (Zohar 1:142b).

"When the Holy One, Blessed be He, was about to create Adam, the Attribute of Kindness said: ‘Let him be created,’ but the Attribute of Truth said, 'Let him not be created.' God took Truth and cast it to the ground. Said the ministering angels before the Holy One, ‘Why do you scorn Truth?’ While the ministering angels were debating the issue, The Holy One created Adam" (Genesis Rabbah 8:5).

Even at the beginning of God’s creation there was complexity. Adam, who was brought from the earth (adamah) on Rosh Hashonah (as Tradition, which knows no bounds of history or time, tells us) was the most precious of all God’s creatures, closer to God than that of the ministering angels. He was bigger than all succeeding human creations. Until he sinned, Adam physically extended from the earth to the sky. After he and Eve disobeyed the Almighty, the Holy One placed His Hands upon Adam and diminished him.

The idea of the perfect human being was always limited, and because of its limitations, and because of man’s indigenous corporeal nature, God would almost surely find fault with Adam and all his progeny. Yet the quest for perfection, spiritual and religious, despite the impossibility of its achievement, was injected into the first pages of the Biblical narrative. And yet even that noble if unachievable idea was already mitigated by another idea, set forth in a parable from Genesis Rabbah cited above, that man’s very existence is founded upon the tomb in which Truth is imprisoned. The first man owed his existence to God’s mercy. The message? One must sacrifice veracity for the sake of love and compassion.

The counterpart to this is man’s search, employing all his God-given intelligence and perception, for the Truth, despite living in a world of falsity. Indeed, no other human being in history received a harsher lesson in reality than Adam, since he was expelled from Paradise and descended into the baseness of the world, knowing the good and the evil, the purity and the sin, the compassion and the cruelty which inured in each human being. That Adam had walked in both worlds - known the reality of both Heaven and Earth - has created for all civilization - past, present, and future - a paradigm for human behavior. Man and woman are surely the crown of God’s creation. Yet their very existence, their experience of the pull of earthly as well as heavenly rewards and pleasures, have been beset with as much hardship, anxiety, and guilt as with discernment, love, and blessing. To perceive the goodness of Creation but not to perceive the inherent difficulty of the human condition from the beginning and at the beginning of the Biblical narrative would be to oversimplify the intent of the Bible, which always has recognized our tendency to fall to earth each time we try to ascend heavenwards.