• • •

Not content to live with the vestiges of the past, Adam and Eve planned their future. They built a house on the ruins of their shattered existence. Alone. Without outside help. They worked on fashioning their future, their own immortality. Eve bore Adam two sons, Cain and Abel. In the apocryphal “The Testament of Henoch” we find the following tale. One morning Eve tells her husband: I had a nightmare; I saw Cain kill his brother . . . The first nightmare in history. And like the others, it later came true.

The years went by. The couple had a third son, Seth. They loved him; he was their hope. One Midrash has it that Adam gave him a book and that this book was the Torah. He thus placed on Seth the responsibility of transmitting its teachings to his sons and their sons after them, to the end of all generations.

Then Adam, who was old and weak, fell sick. His grandchildren gathered around his sickbed: What is the matter with you, Grandfather? — I am sick. — What exactly does that mean, to be sick? — I feel pain. — Pain, what is that . . . ? The gap between the generations had become wide enough to be apparent; each one had its own preoccupations. Adam spoke and his grandchildren did not understand. He suffered and his grandchildren could not know.

Only Eve and Seth shared in his sorrow. They went and knocked on the gate to paradise, seeking assistance, pleading for an herb potent enough to cure all ailments. But they were turned away and their request refused. They insisted, they wept. In vain. Finally, they were told the truth: Adam was to live no longer; his time had come to die.

Adam thus bequeathed us his death—his death and not his sin. The concept of original sin is alien to Jewish tradition. We do not inherit the sins of our fathers, even though we may be made to endure their punishment. Guilt cannot be transmitted. We are linked to Adam only by his memory, which becomes our own, and by his death, which foreshadows our own. Not by his sin.

• • •

Midrashic literature contains magnificent and detailed descriptions of his funeral. Processions of angels and seraphim escorted him straight to paradise, where he still dwells. From there he watches his descendants leaving one world for the other. And as they tear themselves away from the living, they in turn are watching him. No man dies, says the Zohar, without seeing Adam and questioning him about his guilt. On his deathbed every man turns to Adam with the reproach: It is because of your sin that I must die.

Legend claims that this was precisely what Adam feared most. Therefore he pleaded with God never to reveal the true nature of his guilt. One text claims that his wish was granted; that the full story of what took place under the Tree would never be told. But then, of course, another source states the opposite. No matter; Adam found a way to defend himself. Whenever a mortal reminds him of his transgression, he replies: I have committed only one sin—you have committed many; every man is responsible for his own death.