 The rabbis teach us that the first time a concept, a word, appears in the Torah, that tells us something that is inherent, something that is foundational to understanding that concept. The first time sin appears in the Torah is in the incident that took place in the Garden of Eden. The serpent persuades, Chava persuades Eve to eat from the forbidden tree, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and she persuades her husband. And that was the first sin in the Torah. And since it's the first sin in the Torah, this is supposed to be a paradigm. This is supposed to be an example that tells us something about every sin. What are we supposed to learn from this particular sin that tells us something about every sin? What is so foundational about this event, this story? The way the Torah records the conversation between the serpent and Eve is as follows. The serpent tells Eve, do you know why God told you not to eat from that tree? Because God knows that if you will eat from that tree, you will be like Him. You will be like God. You will become competitors with God. The underlying point of the serpent's argument is that the commandment not to eat from the tree, the commandment that God gave Adam and Eve that forbade them, that didn't allow them to eat from the tree, was not given to them for their benefit. It was given to them for their detriment. That was the argument of the serpent. See, God created a beautiful world. And everything in the world is finished. Everything, we have apples and we could eat finished apples. The world is a beautiful world is finished. There was one part of the world that God left uncreated. He left for man to create. And that is the narrative in man's mind. The way we think about the world, the way we understand the world around us, we have the option of filling in that blank positively or negatively. We could think about the world as something that is an obstacle, a challenge. It's the world that God put in front of us was not for our benefit. We have to find a way to get around His commandments, to get around the challenges and get to what we need to get to for our own benefit. If we won't be taken care of ourselves, no one will be taken care of ourselves. That's the negative narrative. And that's the narrative that the serpent gave. The narrative that the serpent gave Adam and Eve was, God gave you this commandment in order to prevent you from getting what you rightly deserve or what's beneficial from you. But we have the option of taking the other narrative, of filling in the blank, the narrative in our mind, understanding that if God gave us a commandment, it's for our benefit, whether we understand it or not, but understand that God is loving, God is good, God created us, He wants our benefit, just like a parent wants the benefit of a child. If God gave us the commandment, it's for our benefit. And if we look at the commandments that way, if we look at the commandments as, I don't know why it's prohibited. I really wanna do that thing which is prohibited. But if God told me, don't do it, it's good for me not to do it, we will never sin. It applies to a positive commandment as well. We have a situation where God tells us, do something. We might tell us, it's so inconvenient, it's so difficult to do that, but if we understand that God gave us the commandment for our benefit, it will be easy for us to do whatever it is that God commanded. That is the teaching, the example, the foundational aspect of this sin in the garden which teaches us about all sins. But this has a particular relationship with the sin of Christianity, with the persuasion of the missionary. The missionary's argument is that God put you in this world and he gave you a raw deal, you're stuck. Unless you come to the services of Christianity, unless you come to Jesus, you have no way out of your sin, you're basically created to be damned to hell. And the sin in the garden, the story that the Torah records about that first sin tells us that's not the way to look at the world. If God created a world, he saw everything was good. He didn't create a world to damn everybody to hell. God created a world for our benefit, for our good. And if we believe that God meant for our benefit, God meant for our, to elevate us, to give us the tools that we need to go forward, we will understand that the missionary's teaching has to be wrong. The missionary's argument is similar to the argument of the serpent in the garden that the commandments of God are not here for our benefit. The world as it stands is a raw deal. It's not a good deal. You need their trick there to bypass the negative plan that God put before us. But we know that everything that God did is good and everything God does is for our benefit. And if we keep that in mind, we won't fall for the persuasion of the serpent or for the persuasion of the Christian missionary.