Parable: There is a story about a safe who was robbed. As the thief was running away with his wallet, the safe shouted out, “I want you to have it.” (The sage didn’t want the thief to have the sin of theft on his moral tab.)
So too, initially, we were forbidden to steal fire from the god(s), to eat from the tree of knowledge, to open Pandora’s box, etc. but as we were walking away, the divine said, “I want you to have it.”
This is why the Torah is called a “gift”—what began as rebellion (scaling heaven by means of the Tower of Babel)—was transmuted, as God said, “I want you to have it.”
Do I believe this? I don’t know know. It’s an experiment. Is knowledge/insight a gift or theft, or both? For the ancient poets it was the former, for Baconian scientists, the latter.
Maybe the scientists thought “property was theft”—and so felt entitled to take what was never God’s to begin with. Perhaps they thought the knowledge was their due as reparations for the calamity of having been created (without consent).
Sage* (autocorrected to sage)
The original catastrophe, according to Beit Shammai, is that none of choose to be born.
Perhaps when knowledge is transmuted from stolen object to granted gift, we transmute ourselves from resentful earthlings to to beings who accept our earthly condition, much like, during Purim, the people transformed their coercive origin at Sinai into something voluntary...
Yom Kippur is God's "truth and reconciliation"; God brings a sacrifice, apologizes for creating us against our will; we forgive God, and all move on.
Yom Kippur is like Purim in that on both days God is effectively forgiven by us as we are forgiven by God. The original crime on which existence is based becomes not a blemish, but a virtue.
As one sage puts it, sins of which we genuinely repent don't simply go away, but become de facto commandments for which we get reward.
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