One of the primary themes of the beginning of the Torah is that of accepting responsibility or failing to do
that. For example, in the story of Adam and Eve of eating at the tree, Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the snake,
when they are confronted with their mistake. And then in the latter part of the portion, when Cain kills Abel,
God asks him where Abel is and he pretends he doesn't know, and then he says, “Am I my brother's keeper?”
Now we kind of trace back with the story of King David, when King David sinned with committing adultery with
Bathsheba and having Uriah the Hittite her husband killed. The Prophet Nathan comes to talk to him and apprise to
using a metaphor, explained David's sin and the Bible relates that he says, “Where there was a fellow who had one
sheep and the other fellow who had a lot of sheep. Somebody came for dinner and the fellow who had a lot of
sheep took the one guy's sheep instead of taking one from him his own flock.” And David said, “Whoever does this
thing should die.”
Then Nathan said, “Well, you are the guy.” And David said, “Yes, it is my sin, he owned up to it.” And think
about this today, in the context of three stories that were in the news this week. The first was a study which
said that half the people claim medals from military valor that they didn't earn.
When confronted with it, they had several excuses. One said, “Well, the mission was so top secret classified, and
of course there is no evidence about it.” Second blamed that I am editing from who is who, somebody had another
kind of excuse involving somebody else who made a mistake in putting on their record, a bad editing. Then you
have the story from US senator who was just convicted by jury of several crimes having to do with accepting money
for renovations from his house from a supporter denied claiming it and apparently, during one phase of the trial
he blamed his wife since she was in charge of the whole project, he didn't know anything about it.
Even though, evidently, there was evidence on a tape that had him saying that we could go to jail for this. And
then you have this very mysterious case about a basketball coach who used to be a great NBA star, a college star,
who evidently took an overdose -- sadly he was having a lot of problems, reportedly took an overdose of medicine
and then when confronted with it he said, that it was his daughter who did it.
We have all these examples of people failing to take responsibility of when they should. And so I think, one of
the great messages coming out of the tower that rings loudly in our ears, western civilization is we are trying
to pass the hat or pass the book, excuse me, for the sin of eating of the tree when God forbade it, failing to
accept responsibility for the killing of Abel, contrasting that with King David who when confronted with his sin,
said, “Yes, I did it”. So it was really about being a man, being a woman accepting responsibility. As Albert
Einstein once said, “Try not to become a man of success, rather become a man of value.” And a man of value would
accept responsibility. That's really what we do and you will keep the work, acknowledging our translations and
then trying to get a clean start.
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