Beginnings

To modern biblical scholars, the difference between the two different creation stories is interesting because it reflects the different views of two distinct authors. For R. Soloveitchik, a traditional Orthodox Jew...it reflects the different ways that human beings can understand themselves. The first type, which R. Soloveitchik calls "Adam the first," sees the world as an object to be mastered. Adam the first believes that the human being's task is to impose order upon chaos and to provide the means for his best survival within a hostile and indifferent nature. He sees the essential human quest in overcoming vulnerability to nature, which crushes human beings with afflictions such as epidemics and infant mortailty. .. The human relationships that he builds, therefore, grow from a desire to escape from helplessness. He forms a community of interests, defined by the need to master an external world in which the need to overcome poverty, hunger, and weakness cements human beings together in a cooperative effort.

--Hartman, David. Love and Terror in the God Encounter. Jewish Lights Publishing, 2001. pp. 105-106.

Intensity of love and intimacy with the Godhead cannot become the concern until there is a fundamental shift in the interpersonal framework which R. Solovetchik finds in "Adam the second" for whom "it is not good to be alone." The revelatory mode .. is possible only when the type of concerns that the human brings to self-definition changes. The human being must see nature not as an object to be mastered, but as a reality to be met in its qualitative richness. Here human beings seek to anchor their identity and their perception of life within a larger metaphysical picture. The world is not an object to be controlled but a reality to be experienced with a sense of wonderment, puzzlement and surprise... One is not satisfied with knowing Elohim, the impersonal God of the cosmos, one seeks a God who has a personal name, the Tetragrammaton.

--Hartman, David. Love and Terror in the God Encounter. Jewish Lights Publishing, 2001. pp. 107.

On the discussion as to whether the shofar we sound on Rosh HaShanah should be bent or straight ....

One Sage, Rabbi Yehuda, holds that on Rosh HaShana the more a person bends his mind and humbles himself by bending in prayer, the better. Therefore, a curved shofar is sounded as an allusion to our bent minds and bodies. But on Yom Kippur, the more a person straightens his mind and prays with simplicity, the better. Therefore, a straight shofar is sounded. The other Sage, the anonymous tanna of the mishna, maintains the opposite: On Rosh HaShana, the more a person straightens his mind and avoids any crookedness, the better. On fasts, on the other hand, the more a person bends his mind and humbles himself, the better.

(Adapted from B. Talmud Rosh HaShanah 26b)