October 21, 2022

How do we tell the story of failure?

In 1923, Franz Kafka and his companion Dora Diamant went for a walk in Berlin. While out, they met a little girl in a park who was crying because she had lost her doll. Kafka told the girl not to worry, because the doll had actually gone away on a trip; in fact, the doll had written her a letter. When the girl asked for the letter, Kafka explained that he didn’t have it with him, but that if she would return the next day, he would bring it to her.

And so it began. For three weeks, Kafka would compose letters from the doll to the girl, to keep her informed about the doll’s “travels.” Diamant explained that Kafka gave these letters the same attention he gave to his other literary works. But then came the question: How would Kafka end this story, and bring the letter writing to a close? Dora told the French essayist Marthe Robert that Kafka “married off” the doll: He (Kafka) searched about for a long time and finally decided to have the doll marry. He first described the young man, the engagement, the preparations for the wedding, then in great detail, the newlyweds’ house. Having moved away with her husband, the doll could no longer write or visit the little girl. And finally, after the letters concluded, Kafka made sure that the little girl received a present of a new doll.

This fascinating story contrasts sharply with the bleak, pessimistic character of much of Kafka’s writing. But it offers a powerful example of the mindset needed to find a way forward when everything seems to have come to an end. And at some point in life, all of us are searching for our missing doll.

Mindsets stand at the center of a critical debate regarding this week’s Torah reading. The Tanakh begins with a debacle. Adam and Eve, in their first hours, violate the one and only commandment they are given, not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. Because of this transgression, they are expelled from the Garden of Eden and condemned to lives filled with death, disease and difficulty.

This story of sin and expulsion appears to be an absolute tragedy. Humanity is cast out of a utopia and into an unmapped reality, left only with dreams of a paradise lost. Some took up the quest to return to paradise. Brendan of Clonfert, a 6th-century Irish monk, gathered 16 fellow monks on a boating expedition to search for the Garden of Eden. (They may have discovered Newfoundland instead.) Who wouldn’t want to escape this vale of tears?

Others took an exceptionally pessimistic reading of this text. The Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo sees this “original sin” as something that taints all of humanity. The sin of Adam and Eve is hereditary, and every person is cursed from birth. Augustine asserts that “no one is free from sin in [God’s] sight, not even an infant whose span of earthly life is but a single day.” Since Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, human nature is so badly corrupted that every baby is a born sinner.

It is important to emphasize that Augustine sees free will itself as suspicious, something that can lead to disobedience. He writes that even before the sin, man should not have exercised his free will. Obedience to God, not autonomy, could have been Adam’s true glory: “since man has been naturally so created that it is advantageous  for him to be submissive, but disastrous for him to follow his own will.”

Augustine lobbied hard for his view to be adopted by the church; there is a rich history of the political intrigues he undertook to promote his view of original sin. Pelagius, a contemporary of Augustine’s who championed free will, was condemned and banished by the church, and to this day, Augustine’s view has remained dominant within most Christian denominations, and has had a profound influence on Western thought.

In Jewish theology, free will is a foundation of faith; the 613 commandments are meaningless unless a person can choose whether or not to do them. And because of this, many Jewish thinkers take great exception to the idea of “original sin.” In his commentary to the Torah, Rabbi Samson Rapahael Hirsch explains that

the dogma of original sin is a most regrettable error of an alien faith … to say that because of “original sin” sinfulness is innate in man, that man has lost the ability to be good and is now compelled to sin—these are notions against which Judaism raises its most vigorous protest … To this day, every newborn infant emerges from God’s hand in purity, as did Adam in his time; every child comes into the world as pure as an angel, to live and become a man. This is one of the cardinal points in the Torah of Israel and in Jewish life … Man as an individual and mankind as a whole can, at any time, return to God and to Paradise on earth.” The sin and expulsion from the Garden of Eden are tragic failures, but they don’t define humanity.

All of the above describes a fairly straightforward debate: Can humanity overcome this initial sin? One side maintains that the sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge fatally corrupted humanity forever; the other says that each human being is born innocent, and has complete free will. Failure can always be overcome.

But what if failure is part of the plan? There is a fascinating third view, that says the sin of the Tree of Knowledge was actually what God wanted to happen.

But what if failure is part of the plan?

The Midrash Tanchuma (Vayeshev 4) says so explicitly, and reports that Adam complained to God that sin was merely a ruse to throw him out of the Garden of Eden. Eden was always a way-station, and Adam and Eve were never meant to live there.

Bezalel Safran has argued persuasively that the Ramban saw the sin and expulsion from the Garden of Eden as preordained, and notes that the Ramban makes several baffling comments about this passage that can only be understood in this manner. The Ramban says Adam and Eve were created to be perfect, and had no free will; they would have done what was good automatically. This explanation is baffling for two reasons; one, it denies free will, which as already mentioned, is a fundamental belief of Judaism. Second, if Adam and Eve had no free will and could only do what was good, how did they sin by eating from the Tree of Knowledge?

The only possible answer is that God programmed the initial sin of Adam and Eve, so they could acquire free will by eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The Ramban drops several other hints to this effect. One significant hint has to do with the aftermath of the sin. It says that “Adam and Eve heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden.” The Ramban quotes the Midrash, which explains that the divine presence was leaving, in response to the sin. Remarkably, the Ramban offers the opposite explanation: God was arriving to speak to Adam and Eve because of the sin. But why would two sinners be deserving of experiencing a special revelation?

These unusual comments, when pieced together, offer a very different interpretation of this passage. Adam and Eve were created perfect, and could have remained so. But only imperfect people can transform and grow; only with failure could Adam and Eve actually experience life.

And that is why God had to create failure. In order to enter the drama of history, with all of its imperfections, Adam and Eve would have to leave paradise.

The Ramban’s view is the polar opposite of Augustine’s theory of “original sin.” Augustine sees the fall of man as final and fatal, a curse from which humanity can never recover. The Ramban says, that on the contrary, it was God who forced humanity to fail, to leave behind perfection; it was God who engineered this sin, and opened the door for free will and personal growth. Our exit from paradise, as painful as it may be, was part of God’s plan, and allows us to live an authentic life.

What I find most compelling about this debate is that it represents two fundamentally different ways of seeing the world. The mindset of Augustine’s view, which sees humanity as fundamentally broken, is so different from the Ramban, who sees this sin as the foundation of spiritual growth.

Mindsets determine how we react when we are broken and imagine ourselves to be beyond repair, when paradise has suddenly disappeared. To see the world as fundamentally corrupt leads to a pessimistic mindset and a passive acceptance that little can be done.

But the Ramban offers us a different mindset. Failure is woven into the very fabric of our reality; but that is very much a part of the plan. It is left to us to find a way to overcome failure. Even after the doll is gone, we must find a way to write a new story, and search for new beginnings.

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York.

Editor’s note: Excerpted from the new three-volume set, “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings,” edited by Gil Troy, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People, to be published this August marking the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress. This is ninth in a series. 

Amid all of Theodor Herzl’s personal, professional, and movement tensions, this remarkably resilient man was deep in the writing of his utopian novel “Altneuland,” “Old New Land,” which he published in 1902. “Der Judenstaat” was one of a series of nineteenth-century nationalist manifestos, asserting claims to various homelands. “Altneuland” was unique, Herzl’s biographer Shlomo Avineri explains, because it was “not just about Jews having a right,” but also about Jews making the right kind of state.

The novel was progressive and prescient. It envisioned equal rights and dignity for women – and for Arabs, whose ties to the land Herzl respected.

The novel was progressive and prescient. It envisioned equal rights and dignity for women – and for Arabs, whose ties to the land Herzl respected. It anticipated some of modern Israel’s tensions pitting secular versus religious Jews and non-Jews versus Jews. Most important, “Altneuland” provides a vivid if romantic vision of what a Jewish state would be reassured Jews that a Jewish state could be. 

The novel’s Hebrew translation captured Herzl’s alluring mix of romanticism and pragmatism, of dreaming and problem-solving. The Zionist intellectual and translator Nahum Sokolow rendered the title poetically as “Tel Aviv” – the ancient rubbled hill of spring. A tel is an artificial mound built up from archaeological relics and ruins, while the phrase comes from that most redemptive book of the Bible, Ezekiel 3:15. Seven years later, in 1909, the first Hebrew city, Tel Aviv, sprang up from the sand dunes just north of the ancient Jaffa port where Herzl had landed.

For a newly crowned King of the Jews, who knew little about Jews, Herzl did a masterful job of keeping the Zionist movement together. He usually harmonized his disparate diplomatic, organizational, and ideological initiatives, while carving a reasonable consensus around most issues. Alas, what might have been his greatest diplomatic breakthrough almost broke the movement.

Joseph Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for the Colonies of the United Kingdom, was as properly dressed as Herzl – and with a monocle to boot. As a liberal sympathetic to the Jewish plight, and an imperialist happy to keep Britain dominating the international arena, he was open to Herzl’s proposal in 1902, for a temporary Jewish home in Cyprus or El Arish. Consultation with the Cypriots and Egyptians redirected Chamberlain. When they met again in 1903, the colonial secretary offered Herzl 13,000 square kilometers at Uasin Gishu in the East Africa Protectorate – today’s Kenya. 

Somehow christened the Uganda Plan, it gained momentum after April 1903, when antisemites rampaged in Kishinev for two endless days, beating, raping, and murdering Jews. Coming six years into Herzl’s crusade, these Kishinev Pogroms validated his Zionist project, reinforcing his happy conclusion that the Jews were one people – with nerve endings overlapping and uniting them – and his unhappy conclusion that the Jews had no home in Europe. Desperate for an immediate solution, seeing dark clouds over Europe most Jews denied, Herzl presented the British offer at the Zionist Congress in August 1903 – and almost destroyed the movement he had sweated so hard to build.

Max Nordau would call the idea a “nachtasyl,” a refuge in the night. Menachem Ussishkin, who had been the secretary at the First Zionist Congress, was one of many Russian Zionists who felt the proposal repudiated the Zionist idea. If Herzl pursued such folly, Ussishkin and others threatened “to organize an independent Zionist Organization without Dr. Herzl.” Equally indignant, Herzl mocked the dissidents as typical hacks – for the “first thing they acquire are all the bad qualities of the professional politicians.” Showing his imperious side, he threatened to “mobilize the masses of the lower class … then cut off their funds.” 

This time, the masses abandoned Herzl.

There was good news hidden in the bad news from that volatile, vehement, angry, anxious Congress. The British government was treating the Zionist Organization and its leader Theodor Herzl seriously, marking a milestone in Jewish history. And when people take a young institution seriously enough to walk out of it, if it survives, it proves it is alive. Even a subsequent assassination attempt by a Uganda opponent on Max Nordau’s life confirmed Zionism’s growing relevance – “It does show love for an idea,” the wise Italian King Victor Emmanuel III, whose own father was shot dead in 1900, told Herzl. As one Altneu-nationalist to another, the king said. “I like this love for Jerusalem.”

The Sixth Zionist Congress voted 295 to 178 in Basel to explore the proposal. Nevertheless, the initiative’s formal defeat two years later would settle it: Zionism was about settling in Zion, nowhere else; it was a Jewish homecoming, not a spinoff to the European colonial adventure.

Herzl also enjoyed some diplomatic success with Russia’s interior minister, Count Wenzel von Plehve. This Jew-hater was open to schemes that might rid his country of the Jews. Herzl was realistic enough to focus on results and ignore motives. In retrospect, this recognition from Russian officials, followed by meetings in January 1904 with King Victor Emmanuel III and Pope Pius X, legitimized the movement and cemented Herzl’s legacy. Herzl kept trying to finalize a deal with the Ottoman Empire, sensing the “Sick Man of Europe’s” weakness, but multiple contacts and interactions never resulted in anything concrete.

With each passing year, Herzl realized that Zionism was also about reinvigorating Jewish identity and resolving many human dilemmas, not just solving the Jewish problem. “Zionism is a return to Jewishness even before there is a return to the Jewish land,” he explained. Herzl’s ideological journey, which tens of millions of Jews have now replicated, proved that the quest for Jewish normalcy is chimerical. Zionism does not work as a de-Judaized movement or a movement lacking big ideas or transformational values. It is as futile as trying to cap a geyser; Jewish civilization’s intellectual, ideological, and spiritual energy is too great.

Professor Gil Troy is the author of “The Zionist Ideas” and the editor of the three-volume set, “Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings.” the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People, to be published this August marking the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress.