Second Innocence

Innocence is bound to shatter, but hope lives in the possibility to cultivate a second, more sober and mature, kind of innocence.

Point to Ponder #21 for the weekly Torah portion Ki Tissa

What’s more painful than when something precious breaks and cannot be mended?

I’m not talking just about broken objects, which are usually replaceable (although some are certainly irreplaceable, and their loss is very upsetting). I’m also—and especially—talking about matters of the heart. Such as innocence lost.

If a child looks up to his father and believes he’s perfect and righteous, and then discovers his father is sinning in some way, whether privately or publicly, he’s heartbroken and will never be the same.

If one believes in the good-heartedness of people, and then innocently falls prey to a scam that leaves him penniless, he’ll never trust again the way he did before.

If a young woman gives her heart to a man, trusting him to reciprocate her with the same love, only then to discover he was just taking advantage of her, the wound in her heart will leave a permanent scar.

The Rocks of Reality

These things are painful but unavoidable. We grow up in protective bubbles, happily sheltered from, and oblivious to, many of the harsh “facts of life.” Our soul is like a great, blue wave rolling out from the heart of an ocean of innocence, which sooner or later is bound to shatter against the rocks of reality. The loss of innocence is a one-way street.

In the Torah, the topic of loss of innocence is expressed most prominently in the story of the sin of the golden calf. After weeks of wandering, the newly liberated nation arrives at the foot of the mountain where God is about to reveal Himself. The heavens open, there’s thunder and lightning, the voice of God bursts forth from the cloud, and the faithful shepherd Moses ascends for forty days of seclusion, preparing to return with the long-awaited Torah.

The forty days pass, but just before they end, something cracks. Maybe it was Moses’ delay, maybe an act of the devil, or maybe sorcery on the part of the erev rav (the mixed multitude that joined the Children of Israel during the exodus). But one thing is certain: The people fell from grace. They yielded to temptation and replaced a flesh and blood shepherd with an inanimate idol of gold and jewels, around which they start dancing intoxicatedly.

All parties involved lost their innocence there: the nation, which never believed it could fall so hard; Aaron, who didn’t think his stalling tactics would lead to this; and Moses, who was shocked to see what his people had degenerated into. Even God feigns disappointment and anger: “I have seen this people, and behold it is a stiffnecked people. Now leave Me alone, and My anger will burn against them, and I shall consume them” (Exodus 32:9–10).

The crisis assumes a very physical form: The Tablets of the Law lie shattered at the foot of the mountain, the words of the Living God reduced to shards.

Living with Shattered Tablets

Once innocence is lost, one stands at a crossroads. One option is to frantically gather the broken pieces up and try to glue them back together, pretending nothing has happened. Loss of innocence is so painful, we’ll try anything to turn the wheel back. This is the way of romantics, who refuse to come to terms with their loss.

Another option (often chosen after the first one fails) is to place the shards on a pedestal, turning the crisis itself into idolatry. If my heart is broken, that means the whole world is broken—one great abyss we’re all trying to find our way out of. There’s no hope of change, of love, even of hope itself. All we can do is stare back at the darkness. This is the way of cynics, for whom the hole in their hearts has becomes a source of bleak inspiration.

But somewhere between the fools’ paradise and the hell of sobriety lies a third way, which combines the best of both. This approach doesn’t attempt to glue the shards, nor does it leave them scattered on the ground. It collects them, puts them gently in an ark, and sculpts new tablets alongside them. That’s what Moses did. From then on, throughout the years of wandering in the wilderness, and even upon entering the Promised Land and later building the Temple, the life of Israel revolved around an ark containing two sets of tablets, one whole and one broken, lying side by side.

This way can be called second innocence. Second innocence is somewhat like the first one, but is actually the opposite in almost every way.

To begin with, it’s not the first. Another version preceded it, and it remembers vividly what happened to that. In other words, second innocence isn’t naïveté; it’s a mature and sober kind of innocence, one that recognizes the bad and marches on in spite of it, rather than trying to convince itself it isn’t there.

Secondly, while our first innocence is something we’re born into, the second one we choose, willfully and consciously. We know we can choose otherwise. We could go the skeptical, pessimistic route, which sees only darkness—but we choose not to, despite the warm embrace of victimhood it offers. Rather, we opt for the path of hope and rectification.

Based on these two differences, a third emerges, which is the most important of all: Second innocence is unbreakable. It’s immune to breakage, simply because it’s been broken already. It has integrated the possibility of loss of innocence. Therefore, of these two types of innocence, it’s this second one that’s most worthy of its Hebrew name, temimut, which literally means “wholeness.” The second innocence is more whole, because it encompasses both a sense of wholeness and a sense of brokenness.

Open Eyed Faith

The twentieth century was a century of crises. We lost all our innocence. Secularization robbed us of our innocent faith in God. Science stole our innocent wonder at the enchantment of nature. Globalization deprived us of our innocence regarding the uniqueness of our culture. And then, when all we had left was faith in mankind, came two world wars and snatched even that.

After all these crises, is it any wonder we’re so angry and jaded?

Yet we needn’t succumb to bitter cynicism, nor do we have to drown in sweet daydreams. There’s a third path: to live with the shards and hew new tablets alongside them. Not to plaster over the cracks, but not to fall into them either. To continue believing in humanity, in the soul, in love, and in God—only this time not out of habit but by choice.

The twentieth century isn’t just a tragedy of lost faith; it’s also an invitation to embrace another kind of faith, an open-eyed faith, one that lives in peace with the possibility of doubt. That’s the original faith of Sinai that we’ve carried in our hearts all these years: whole tablets and broken fragments, side by side.

In memory of Hili bat Raphael