ספר בראשית

Another approach to the allegory of: “river, garden, and ‘Eden.’” It is well known that every Jew is ‎obligated to acquire and maintain good character traits and to make them second nature. By doing ‎so he provides G’d with satisfaction. When serving his Creator by personifying these positive ‎virtues, he enables the Creator to ”boast” of His creatures, [as for instance we find when G’d ‎‎“boasted” to Satan about the piety of Job. (Job 1,8) Ed.] These “virtues” are described in ‎‎Avot 2,1 as ”in the eyes of his peers.” The author of the mishnah, Rabbi ‎‎Yehudah hanassi, uses the expression ‎תפארת לעושיה‎, to describe that man’s ‎Creator can use this as “boasting” or justifying His having created the human species. When ‎reading these words superficially we must wonder why G’d is interested i.e. in “need” of our ‎actions, seeing He has myriads of angels ready to do His bidding. However, the very fact that His ‎people, the Jewish people, who have been assigned the “lower” portion of the universe as their ‎habitat with all the disadvantages that are prevalent in that region, distinguish themselves by their ‎loyal service to Him nonetheless, is something extraordinary, that cannot be compared with ‎angels. This is what Rabbi Yehudah hanassi had in mind when he described loyal service to ‎G’d by His free-willed creature, man, as being ‎תפארת לו מן האדם‎, “something glorious for Him ‎performed by man.” G’d certainly has reason to “boast” about such devotion when telling Satan ‎that in spite of his activities as seducer and spoiler, there are people who have not been deterred ‎in their loyalty to Their Creator. Genesis 2,10-14 describes this whole process of man being ‎encouraged by G’d to develop the appropriate virtues and how having acquired them his Creator ‎derives great satisfaction from that. The simile used by the Torah of describing man’s watering ‎G’d’s “garden” read: “worlds,” as something that He takes pride in, is therefore a well chosen ‎euphemism.‎