The opening Scene

            There is rare disorder called congenital analgesia.  Really, it should be every person’s dream to contract the disease.  It is a disorder that takes away the sensation of physical pain. Many people are scarred by physical trauma that happens to them and it can take years to heal from such wounds.  But, it turns out that pain is an indispensable part of a human being.  Sufferers of this disease live shorter lives because pain is used in the body as a tool to signal danger.  Therefore, without signals, the people with the disease, especially as children, get in to many dangerous situations that can cost their limbs and life.  So while they may not suffer physical pain, there is no lack of tragedy to their condition, and if asked, they would probably tell you they prefer some pain.

            What we just discussed is that pain is a crucial part to normal function.  Rather than a foe, pain can be our most trusted friend.  But it is much deeper than that.  There is a type of pain that defines humanity more than any other-shame.  Right after woman was individualized and separated from man, the Torah’s first description of the internal state of man is that ‘they were both naked, but they were not ashamed’.[1]  Of all the descriptions we could have ascribed to man in the opening scene, it chooses a negative description; he was not something.  Not only that, is shame the most important thing to tell us about man?  Tell me he was really happy to finally have a wife, or tell me about the love he felt at that moment. Why is shame, or lack thereof, the fundamental snapshot that tells us about what man is all about?

            Shame is a strange pain because it is spiritual.  We are wired to have a gauge of spiritual progress. When we meet our spiritual standard, we feel great.  If we don’t, we feel a strange pain called shame.  Shame is the proof that by man the physical world finally met the spiritual one.  They were now going to be interwoven and their destinies tied.  Not surprisingly, the face is the canvas for this pain.  Our face reveals our inside (in fact, the word face in Hebrew, פנים, means inside) more than any other part of our body and that is why it carries the physical manifestation of the pain.  

            The Talmud states that a person who embarrasses, ‘or whitens the face’ of another it is like he killed him. It sounds like hyperbole in order to scare children into following a nice moral lesson.   But it really isn’t.  Death is the process of destroying a body to a point where it can no longer house a soul, and therefore, they disconnect.  Shame is destroying the dignity of a soul and so it temporary leaves the body- it is the same disconnection.   

            Perhaps, the biggest ailment to the world is that this pain is nearly extinguished.  This pain is too difficult to deal with for most, and so it is better left numbed. The problem is that shame is our fuel to grow.  Through the pain of knowing what we could be, we strive.  That is why it is the most important attribute to man.  The first thing to know about man is that he was the first creation that could connect the spiritual and physical world and that his goal in life is to reach his spiritual potential on pain of shame.

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[1] Based on Rabbi Lopiansky Bereishes

[2] Genesis 2:25