The Moral and Natural Order

God created the Earth, the sun, moon, and stars, planets, and all living creatures, including Man.

He breathed the breath of life into the first Man, and took the first Woman from his rib.

He spoke directly to the first Man and Woman; there was no veil yet, no wall between them.

He spoke directly to the children of the first Man and Woman, and then to Noah, and then to Avraham. Yet the more mankind rejected Him, the harder it became to hear His voice.

God found ways to speak to man: through dreams, through prophecy. And His presence dwelled in the first Beit HaMikdash, that embodiment of the relationship between God and man, the only time when our relationship with Him was made manifest. 

From Moshe to Malachi, God transmitted messages of rebuke and redemption to prophets. But eventually, mankind strayed so far from God that the veil between Creator and Creations thickened and became like a wall. Prophecy stopped. His presence departed. By all appearances, the physical and spiritual realms were split. People lived and died in this wholly physical realm, completely detached from and unaware of a spiritual realm beyond.

Yet God had maintained some clear, physical vestiges of His existence, reminders of His presence that were difficult to ignore.

He gave us a book, the Torah.

He chose a people to spread His name far and wide, and carry out His mission, the Jewish people.

And He maintained control over His Creations, allowing them to continue existing and operating under the rules He created. A seed planted would still sprout; a tree would bear fruit and feed man; animals and creatures of all types would continue roaming the earth; all creatures reproduced. Everything still, to this day, follows His beautiful design.

The book He left behind was not meant merely as a book of stories.

It was not meant merely as a chronicle of our early history as humans (or as Jews).

It was meant to teach us, to instruct us, to serve as a guidebook for eternity, a blueprint for man and his behavior here on Earth. 

The Hebrew root word for Torah, horaah (הוראה) means “instruction.” We are meant to be instructed by it.

Generation after generation can turn to the pages of the Torah and draw incredible wisdom and lessons from it. It is, in essence, our instruction manual for building Godly families and societies.

And it is the Torah, and the stories and laws contained within it, which gives us the potential to pave a path of return to God, a tool with which to break the walls between us.

The Torah is as applicable today as it was 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago, and over three thousand years ago when it was first given at Mount Sinai to the Jewish people, those who were meant to build up society according to it, and, in so doing, spread its light.

In previous essays, we studied the first few chapters of Genesis (Bereisheet), discussing how our collective moral regression directly stemmed from our rejection of God and, therefore, our original design and purpose.

First, we examined God’s design and purpose of man in Of Man and Earth, analyzing the first man and woman’s relationship with God in the context of a moral and natural order. We analyzed man’s first job description: to “work it and to guard it [the Garden of Eden,” (Bereisheet 2:15). In short, man was tasked with the responsibility of being a steward of God’s creations: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and they shall rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the heaven and over the animals and over all the earth and over all the creeping things that creep upon the earth” (Bereisheet 1:26). 

Thus, beyond the incumbency to listen to God’s moral laws – which, at least in the plain text, was limited merely to abstaining from eating from the Tree of Knowledge – man had a natural order he was required to follow as well: to work the land, to guard it, and to take responsibility for the creatures of the earth.

Yet the first man and woman chose to disobey God, therefore disrupting the natural order: Adam and Chava were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, demoted from being caretakers of it, and were given various curses, including pain in childbirth and difficulty in working the land. In short, we saw that man’s desecration of God’s moral order directly disrupted the natural order.

Then, in The Building Blocks of Cities, we explored how the first city recorded in the Torah came about due to Cain’s murder of his brother Hevel. Once again, a disruption in the moral order (murder) directly caused the natural order to become disordered; Cain the farmer was cursed so he would no longer be able to work the land and yield produce. 

As described in that essay, although the development of a city was a practical solution for Cain’s curse, it deepened the disconnect between God and mankind. A city, by definition, is removed from the land and revolves around man’s innovation. One who depends directly on God for sustenance will more readily discern Him and engage in a relationship with Him; one whose livelihood is derived from and revolves around man’s innovations will quickly lose touch with the daily miracles of the earth. And the further man strays from his God-given design and purpose to work the land be steward to His creations, rather pursuing the designs of his heart, the less he is inclined to recognize or acknowledge God as the Creator and Provider of all man needs. 

In short, the first mention of cities in the Torah is described in the context of a severe disruption of God’s moral order, the murder of Hevel. Judging by the subsequent story in the Torah, that serious desecration of God’s moral order set in motion a process that culminated in mankind’s annihilation.

The Flood

When reviewing the stories of the Torah, one sees the same thread running throughout: reject God and His moral order, and the natural order becomes disordered. Adam and Chava rejected God, and the ground would no longer yield produce easily. Then, Cain murdered his brother Hevel, and the ground wouldn’t produce at all. 

The moral fallout that followed Cain’s murder of his brother, which represents a serious transgression of God’s moral order, as well as his subsequent move to develop cities, encouraged a continued process of corruption, a progressive descent into degeneracy and dissociation from God.

And the culmination of that was God’s decision to destroy humanity with the Flood.

And the Lord saw that the evil of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of his heart was only evil all the time. And the Lord regretted that He had made man upon the earth, and He became grieved in His heart. And the Lord said, "I will blot out man, whom I created, from upon the face of the earth, from man to cattle to creeping thing, to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

Bereisheet 6:5-8

The degree of evil which God observed must have reached such an extreme that it elicited the equally extreme response of complete destruction of mankind. Furthermore, destruction was not limited to mankind, but extended to other creatures on earth as well, which is an indication of some corruption of the natural order. 

In fact, Malbim asks a pertinent question: why is the evil of man connected with “the earth” in the phrase, “...regretted that He had made man upon the earth”? This suggests there is, in fact, a connection between the evil of mankind and the earth. Malbim suggests this statement is meant to indicate that “man perpetrated evil deeds on the body of the earth,” in addition to the moral evils of sexual corruption, violence, and stealing.

And, according to Rashi, who references Bereisheet Rabbah, the creatures also corrupted their way; nevertheless, whether we are to understand that animals also acted evilly, or there was some disruption of the natural order in the animal kingdom, the point remains the same: man’s evil impacted far more than just themselves; the other creations, even the earth itself, had been materially damaged by man’s corruption.

Ultimately, God’s sentence of annihilation came about due to corruption to the highest degree – not only of the moral order, but of the natural order as well.

We are lucky there was one person on earth, Noah, who “found favor in the eyes of the Lord” (Bereisheet 6:8); otherwise, I would not be here to write this piece. God decided to communicate His plan for mankind to Noah, and save him and his family. 

And God said to Noah, "The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth has become full of robbery because of them, and behold I am destroying them from the earth…”

Bereisheet 6:13

Noah alone was worthy of redemption, and this should further impress upon us the appalling state of the world at the time. In view of this, it is important to examine why Noah and his family merited salvation. 

First of all, according to the plain text of the Torah, Noah was “a righteous man, blameless in his generation, [who] walked with God” (Bereisheet 6:9); in other words, he followed God’s laws, His moral order. 

Furthermore, confirmed by Rashi and other commentators, it was Noah who broke the curse of Adam.

And he named him Noah, saying, ‘This one will give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands from the ground, which the Lord has cursed.'

Bereisheet 5:29

Before Noah came, they did not have plowshares, and he prepared [these tools] for them. And the land was producing thorns and thistles when they sowed wheat, because of the curse of the first man (Adam), but in Noah’s time, it [the curse] subsided…

Rashi on Bereisheet 5:29

It seems he was working the land and fulfilling his God-given role as steward of His creations, staying true to his role of preserving the natural order. Indeed, it seems fitting that the one man who honored the moral and natural orders in a world where mankind had abandoned both should merit salvation; it is in his merit that creation would continue.

As previously mentioned, Malbim notes that mankind was abusing the earth and violating moral law; thus, Noah, who honored both, was protected whilst God meted out justice to mankind. As a reward for Noah's righteousness in observing both the moral and natural order, God broke Adam’s curse and restored the natural order, allowing man to work the land once again with relative ease. This dynamic suggests that when man serves God and follows His instructions, both of the moral and natural order, God offers unique protection and guidance.

Thus, Noah, his family, and various animals were saved from the Flood that wiped out life on earth. The worldwide devastation of the Flood is clearly another significant disruption of the natural order.

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on this day, all the springs of the great deep were split, and the windows of the heavens opened up…

And the waters became powerful, and they increased very much upon the earth, and the ark moved upon the waters…

And the waters became exceedingly powerful upon the earth, and all the lofty mountains that were under the heavens were covered up.

And it [the Flood] blotted out all beings that were upon the face of the earth, from man to animal to creeping thing and to the fowl of the heavens, and they were blotted out from the earth, and only Noah and those with him in the ark survived.

And the water prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.

Selected verses from Bereisheet 7

The annihilation of mankind was almost complete. Noah and his family, according to the plain text, were the only survivors.

The Duality of the Divine Order

We learn from the first stories of the Torah, and certainly later stories and laws as well, about the direct relationship between following (or not following) God’s moral and natural orders and the resulting maintenance and harmony of the natural order (or lack thereof). The two are inextricably linked; as previously discussed in Of Man and Earth, our original design as humans necessarily includes an alignment with the natural order: “the fundamental physical role of human beings, the purpose of God’s creation of man, was, from the very beginning of creation, to be a steward of His creations… It is only through working with our physical roots – the earth from which we originated – that we can cleave to our spiritual roots: the essence of God, the nishmat chaim He breathed into us at the beginning of our creation.”

Indeed, our very purpose and design as humans is bound up in both the moral and natural orders, and to remove ourselves from one or the other proves to have devastating consequences.

We see this reality in the present day. In all the folly and arrogance of man, he believes now that through his own innovations – surgery and pharmaceuticals – that a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man, directly denying and mocking God’s act of creation, wherein it plainly states: “And God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; man and woman He created them” (Bereisheet 1:27). In addition to violating the natural order, this concept of gender fluidity rejects moral law. In Devarim (Deuteronomy), the law clearly states: "A man's attire shall not be on a woman, nor may a man wear a woman's garment because whoever does these [things] is an abomination to the Lord, your God" (Devarim 22:5).

The trans movement is a prime example of the violation of both the moral and natural order. It is evident that choosing such a path paves the way for destruction and chaos. We are witnessing that destruction and chaos in the world today, in a world that is awash in confusion, violence, and despair. 

It is man’s failure to adhere to God’s divine order that has led to this, since man’s rejection of His laws necessarily leads to total corruption and narcissism. When man turns away from God and His laws, he develops a god complex and worships himself. For when man was created by God and placed in the Garden of Eden to “work it (לעבדה) and to guard it (לשמרה)” (Bereisheet 2:15), he was tasked with a role that necessitated a certain set of responsibilities, and adhering to that role was meant to inculcate within man a recognition of God’s mastery, and in so doing, deepen the relationship with Him.

Our responsibilities can be understood from the words of the verse: “work it and guard it.” By briefly analyzing these terms, we may interpret what is incumbent upon us.

Various commentators on the Torah interpret “working” and “guarding” both from a literal, practical perspective – that man was tasked with working the land, tending the soil, and guarding the Garden from predators – and from a spiritual perspective, that man was meant to work on himself and on keeping God’s laws, since the other interpretation for the word לשמרה is “keep it,” much like we are tasked with “keeping” Shabbat: “keep (שמור) the day of Sabbath…” (Devarim 5:12).

On the concept of working the Garden, Sforno comments: “to work it,” [is] a reference to perfecting his own personality, that which was supplied by G-d in an as yet unrefined state.” In regards to guarding, Ibn Ezra and Chizkuni comment that it means “protect it against animals that would trample it.” Radak describes working as “constructive labor, furthering the growth and fruit-bearing capability of the trees” and guarding as “the taking of preventive measures to counter invasion of the garden by predators, and other measures to prevent its deterioration.”

We may gather from these different commentaries that man’s task to work and to guard the Garden of Eden pertains to both aspects of God’s divine order, the moral and the natural, and the careful adherence to both must dictate man’s role on earth.

While the moral order is one that man is tasked constantly to work on – for it takes considerable refinement in order to uphold God’s moral order to the smallest minutiae – the natural order, on the other hand, is the one which God Himself designed, in all His wisdom and complexity. We are meant to be the guardians of His natural order, the stewards of His creations. Yet if we divorce ourselves from either order, if we abominate the very rules within which He placed us, we are effectively rejecting God and His rules in their entirety.

So, returning to the previous example, we can use this as a case study for how moral and natural law can interact; natural law is that God created man and woman (Bereisheet 1:27); moral law is that a man may not wear a woman's garment or vice versa (Devarim 22:5). As it says at the end of Devarim 22:5, violating this distinction between man and woman by cross-dressing is an abomination to God. Guarding that distinction between man and woman is an essential divine law which preserves our relationship with God and enables us to truly live up to His calling: "And God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; man and woman He created them” (Bereisheet 1:27).

When man and woman violate this distinction God created, it is an abomination of the fact that we were made in His image as separate entities, man and woman. As soon as there is an attempt to negate the fundamentals of creation, then creation itself is in jeopardy, since by definition, creation relies upon the distinction of male and female. After all, only a male and a female can continue the human race and fulfill the commandment God gave us to be fruitful and multiply.

In addition to procreation, God tasked us with this great responsibility of being masters over the earth, but we are not masters in our own right. Our mastery of the earth must adhere to His rules and His design. When we embrace this mission in its entirety, we play partner to God; when we fail in any part of that mission, we disrupt the divine order.

Once we acknowledge that God, in all His wisdom, made the laws of creation such that they should not be abrogated, we must understand that we, too, were made in such a way that we must follow the laws of our own intrinsic design. For example, the inhabitation of cities by man is as much a distortion and disrespect of our natures as animals inhabiting a zoo. Likewise, a man living and behaving like the animals is a rejection of our Godly natures.

The moral and natural order God created relates directly to the duality of man’s nature as both a nefesh chaya (the soul that all living beings, including animals, have) and a nishmat chaim, which was breathed into us by God Himself. We must honor and guard both. It is impossible to serve one over the other; just as we cannot abide by God’s moral order only and reject the natural order or vice versa, so, too, we cannot embrace one aspect of our God-given nature and reject the other. We cannot choose to follow one aspect of God’s law (i.e. the moral order) and expect to uphold all His laws, or live up to our potential to its fullest extent, if we fail to adhere to the other aspect of His law (i.e. the natural order).

This is the beauty of Noah. Noah was righteous and lived up to his potential, embracing his God-given role by observing the moral and natural order. It was in his merit that God preserved humanity and His creations. And while the first man and woman were rebellious against God’s moral law and were cast from the Garden of Eden, Noah rose to the call and became, effectively, the first man once again. The Flood was a reset, and since Noah had become the first man, a renewal of the terms of creation was in order. 

These were, in fact, the terms God had originally made with the first man and woman - with some explicit additions.

After the waters of the flood had subsided, God reiterated His first commands to Noah and his sons:

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

Bereisheet 9:1

The fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the animals of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky—everything with which the earth is astir—and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand.

Bereisheet 9:2

But there is an intriguing twist, another indicator of a shift: God gives the animals to mankind to be eaten.

Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grasses, I give you all these.

Bereisheet 9:3

This change in the order comes with a caveat, and explicit moral laws around eating animals and shedding blood. God closed His commands to Noah and his sons by sealing a covenant with them, famously symbolized by the rainbow, that He will never again destroy mankind by means of a flood. 

After that, Noah once again embraced his natural role:

And Noah began to be a master of the soil, and he planted a vineyard.

Bereisheet 9:20 

Unfortunately, despite the catastrophic event that impacted the entire earth and all living beings, humans had short memories.

Immediately following the story of the Flood, we have a description of the generations that descended from Shem, Ham, and Yaphet, the sons of Noah, followed by the infamous tale of the city and the tower of Bavel, in which humanity waged a war against God.

In the next essay, we will analyze this war against God and how the story of Bavel mirrors our own times and culture, and how man's hubris leads to punishment and destruction.

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Although each piece in the series on Bereisheet can function as standalone articles, our analyses of these stories in Bereisheet should ideally be read in the following order:

Of Man and Earth

The Building Blocks of Cities

The Moral and Natural Order