Because of David’s immediate submission to God’s rebuke spoken through His prophet Nathan, he is considered the exemplar of lowliness before God and the dean of all who seek to repent before God. As such, David’s confession is viewed as an important rectification for Adam’s attempt to deflect guilt for having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. David’s descendant, the Mashiach is destined to bring all of humanity to rectify this predilection to shun responsibility for our actions.
The All-Inclusive Sins
The Torah describes many sins that might be candidates to be included in this group, but there is no clear rabbinic source that lists what the most important might be. So it is helpful and perhaps even surprising that we can use mathematical analysis to guide and then support our decision to include particular sins in our group.
Let’s begin by noting the most general sins that are easy to identify. The first is of course the sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. No sin has affected humanity more than this one and, in a sense, all of human history, all the difficulties, all the strife, are the result of this sin. By eating from the Tree of Knowledge, our eyes were opened, but our natural connection with God was severed. Since then, we have been seeking a way back.
The sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge began the process of pushing the Divine Presence, the Shechinah, up seven levels from dwelling in our reality. The return of the Shechinah to human consciousness began with the life and efforts of Abraham and was completed at the Giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, seven generations later. The sages describe that the poison injected into Adam and Eve by the primordial snake was neutralized by the Shechinah descending upon Mt. Sinai.
However, the healing was short-lived and forty days later, the people sinned with the Golden Calf, an all-inclusive sin that once again cast the Jewish people into a state of dissonance from God.
The third prominent all-inclusive sin of the Torah is the Sin of the Spies who went to see the Land of Canaan and then came back with a defamatory report, which caused the people to distrust God’s ability to bring them into the Land. The result of this sin was forty years of wandering in the wilderness and ultimately led to Moses not entering the Land. Had Moses led the people into the Land of Israel, he would have constructed the permanent Temple in Jerusalem and the Messianic age would have begun.
