God Made Adam With Justice and Holiness and Judged Him With Both

Adam stood in the Gihon with the water at his neck and would not come out.

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He was not washing. There was nothing on him to wash off. He had eaten, he had been tried, he had been sentenced, and the sentence had been carried out, and this was what he had decided to do afterward. He walked into the river and stopped where the current came up under his chin and stayed there. A hundred and thirty years, in the same water, waiting.

The Two Hands That Made Him

God has a right hand called Just and a left hand called Holy.

Sinai was made with the right hand only. The mountain of revelation, the whole burning weight of it, took one hand. Heaven and earth took both. The Temple took both. And so did the man in the river, who had been assembled out of law and sanctity together and could not be taken apart into one or the other. Whatever was going to be decided about him would have to be decided by both hands at once, which is why it took so long, and why he was still standing in the water.

Second From the Top

He knew where he stood in the order of things. Everyone did.

At the bottom, the firmament. Above the firmament, the stars, because the stars give light and the firmament gives none. Above the stars, the trees, because a tree makes fruit and a star makes nothing you can eat. Above the trees, the violent winds, because a wind crosses the country and a tree cannot leave the spot it grew in. Above the winds, the animals, because an animal works and eats and a wind does neither. Above the animals, the man, because he can weigh one thing against another and they cannot.

And above the man, the ministering angels, who go from one end of the earth to the other in an afternoon while he stands in a river up to his chin and cannot go anywhere at all.

The First Day of Tishrei

The court had sat on the first day of Tishrei. The charge was the tree. He was found guilty, and there was nothing to argue, and he was put out of the garden with the sentence read over him.

Then he went into the water, and God watched him stand in it, and saw that the grief was real and not a performance for the bench. So God absolved him. He was not given the garden back. He was given the Torah instead, a thing he could carry out of Eden and use in a world that was about to be much harder than the one he had been built for.

And God said to him: you are the pattern. What happened to you on this day is going to happen to your children on this same day, every year, as long as there are children. They will be judged the way you were judged. If they deserve it, they will be let go the way you were let go.

Ten Generations of Waiting

Ten generations ran from Adam to Noah, and every one of them provoked heaven, and the water did not come. It did not come because there were righteous men scattered through those generations, and God would not drown a world with them still standing in it.

Methuselah was the last of them. While Methuselah drew breath, no flood. Everyone knew what he was holding up, and nobody changed anything, and when he finally died the sky still did not open. There were seven more days first. God kept the mourning week for the old man before releasing the water on his neighbors.

The Seven Days They Were Given

Those seven days were not empty.

On the first of them the sun came up in the west. It crossed the sky the wrong way and went down in the east, and it did that again the next morning, and the morning after, so that anyone standing in a doorway with a cup in his hand would have to notice that the order of the world had been reversed on purpose, and would be frightened, and might turn around. They watched the sun rise where it had never risen. They went to work.

So God set a table in front of them and put on it the food of the world to come, the whole bounty of it, the reward, laid out where they could look at it and smell it and understand precisely what was being taken off the menu. The point of the display was to get one sentence out of them: woe to us for all this good that we are losing. They looked at the table. They corrupted their way upon the earth for seven more days.

On the eighth day the water came up out of the springs and down out of the sky at the same time, and it fell on a generation that had been shown the sunrise in the wrong place and had gone back to bed.