Are We Sinners?

You are now embarked upon an intriguing journey, an effort to understand the beliefs and thoughts of historical Judaism and Christianity, as expressed in classical texts, regarding sin and evil. I appreciate your willingness to delve into a fairly serious subject, one that does not lend itself to absolute, concrete truths. The worlds of Jewish and Christian thought on any subject and especially on sin and evil are vast and cannot be defined succinctly or comprehensively. What I will try to do here is explore the basic components of historical teachings, writings and thoughts on the subject, relying on the Hebrew Bible, the rabbinic literature of Talmud and Midrash, Paul in the New Testament and the writings of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther. You the reader will walk away with a basic understanding of what these religious traditions teach and promote about sin and evil. For some, this will be enough and for others it will be the beginning of a deeper exploration. On a personal note: I am a rabbi, ordained by the seminary of the Reform movement of Judaism, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in 1979. From ordination until 2003 I served as spiritual leader of three Reform congregations in Massachusetts and Southern California. In 2003 I left my congregation to be able to devote most of my time and efforts to teaching Christians about Judaism and the Bible. I established the Alliance for Christian and Jewish Studies to promote and advocate the classes I have been teaching in Orange County, Greater Long Beach and San Diego in Southern California and in the Phoenix area in Arizona. Over the span of several years I had also begun academic research into the Jewish doctrine of the evil inclination in the Talmud and Midrash (see an explanation of these and other texts at the end of this Introduction, in the section, “Texts and Sources. “) In the translations of Hebrew texts in the book I will refer to the evil inclination by the original Hebrew, yetzer hara and the good inclination by its Hebrew, yetzer hatov. In the Talmud and Midrash, the rabbis wrote extensively about their idea of the evil inclination. It is the evil inclination that leads people to commit sins. In teaching about Judaism to Christians I came to realize that while my understanding of the Jewish doctrine of sin and evil was growing and flourishing, my understanding of the Christian doctrine, especially of Original Sin, was woefully inadequate. I thus began, with the guidance of devout, devoted and knowledgeable Christian friends and scholars, to study Christian writings on sin and evil. This book is the result of documentary and personal research, an effort to compare the thought and writings of traditional scholars and sages of Judaism and Christianity on the subject at hand. My teaching, primarily with Christians about Judaism, specifically about the Jewish context of Jesus’ life and words, has expanded greatly over the last few years. I have taught at over twenty-five churches, sometimes coming back to the same church multiple times to teach new classes. I have been profoundly impressed by the eagerness, the enthusiasm, even the hunger among so many Christians to learn more about the Jewish world in which Jesus lived and taught. People have been keenly interested in learning more about Judaism, including the Judaism of today, the ways in which our respective faith systems are similar and different and the roots of those similarities and differences. We live in very different times than past generations, in a period of understanding, collaboration and harmony, and it is good that we acknowledge and appreciate this new reality. In these pages I will examine some fundamental problems that Christianity and Judaism and virtually all people of faith must confront: the undeniable reality that humans sin. Secular people may have another way to understand this behavior, but in the religious community when people violate God’s expectations and requirements, harming others, engaging in hurtful or illicit sexual relations or in needless violence we understand it to be sin. As people of faith we believe God had at least some responsibility for creating humans. We may or may not believe in the creation story in Genesis, but we accept the premise that God played some role in the existence of the world and of us as humans. And there is the conundrum—how and why would God create humans with the inclination, capacity or even inevitability of committing sin? What is the source of our sinful behavior, what leads us to engage in evil deeds? Why couldn’t we have simply been created to do good? What is the meaning of the existence of sin and evil in a world created by a good and just God? I will not attempt here to define, in any comprehensive way, sin or evil, relying on an analogy of the Supreme Court’s famous definition of pornography: “We know it when we see it.” We might all disagree on whether one act or another is sinful, but all of us in the religious community agree that humans commit sin. Now we want to understand what Christianity and Judaism have to say about this problem in their classical texts of antiquity. The title of the book would seem to presume that we do not know if we are sinners, contradicting what I have just written. The title is intended to ask the religious question of whether we are, according to the faith of Judaism and/or Christianity, inherently sinners or whether God created us as neutral or good and the sinning is a choice we make in our lives. Are we sinners by our very nature, is sinfulness woven into the very fabric of our being? Did God create us as good and sin is an external corruption of that creation, or did God create us as beings inevitably disposed to sin? And what conclusions flow from our answer to those questions about our constitutional nature as beings created by God? This book will conclude with a comparison of the different faith systems’ views on the topics at hand. Neither system of thought and faith can be defined in monolithic terms, as if there is one Jewish or one Christian idea on sin and evil. I will try to synthesize the ideas and reduce them to digestible and comprehensible schools of thought for each faith tradition. The biblical and rabbinic traditions of Judaism are incredibly diverse and expressive of different ideas on this and myriad other topics. It is in the nature of Judaism not to have a unified article of faith on a matter as complex as sin and its origin. Christianity is also a fully developed, rich and diverse faith tradition and within both Catholicism and Protestantism there exist divergent beliefs and ideas regarding sin and evil. Both in the case of Judaism and Christianity we will examine the dominant and major ideas that have been propounded over the last two thousand years, focusing on primary historical texts, including the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Talmud, Midrash, writings of Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther and more. Finally, I will compare the two and look at how they are similar and different. My approach to the comparison of Judaism and Christianity is to acknowledge points of commonality and areas of divergence and not try to paper over, diminish or resolve the differences. We learn to live together, even love each other, not by pretending we are the same, but by acknowledging what we share in common, respecting what separates and distinguishes us and loving each other despite the differences.