7

DEADLY
SINS
A V E R Y PA R T I A L L I S T

Aviad Kleinberg
Translated by Susan Emanuel in collaboration
with the author

The Belknap Press of

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
2008
Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org.

This book was originally published as Péchés Capitaux,

copyright © 2008 by Editions du Seuil, Paris.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kleinberg, Aviad M.
[Péchés capitaux. English]
Seven deadly sins : a very partial list / Aviad Kleinberg : translated
by Susan Emanuel in collaboration with the author.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-674-03141-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Deadly sins. 2. Sin. 3. Sins. I. Title.
BV4626.K5313 2008
241′.3—dc22 2008016574
 Contents

1 The Lizard’s Tail 1

2 Sin for Beginners 10

3 Sloth: Acedia 32

4 Envy: Invidia 44

5 Lust: Luxuria 62

6 Gluttony: Gula 81

7 Greed: Avaritia 97

8 Anger: Ira 113

9 Pride: Superbia 132

10 Self-Righteousness 150

11 Advanced Sin 163

Notes 167

Index 185
 1
THE LIZARD’S TAIL

There is no sin without context. There is no sin in itself. The very no-
tion of sin is always the result of a comparison, explicit or implicit, be-
tween a specific ideal and a specific reality. Without this comparison, in
which an act is weighed in the moral balance and found wanting, there
is no sin—there are only actions and passions. Human actions and pas-
sions become sins only in a given moral and cultural context. As con-
texts and rules shift, so does the definition of sin. What once consti-
tuted a sin (masturbation, for example) ceases to be wrong; what once
did not constitute a sin (beating up young children or selling human
beings) ceases to be right. Right and wrong are continually defined and
redefined by society. The moral balance tilts toward one direction, then
toward the other. Morality expresses itself in absolute terms: “Never”
and “Always.” It presents itself as a seamless, timeless garment. A closer
look reveals the seams of time and place. Sin is a cultural construct.
Strata of ideas, beliefs, and preconceived notions are features of
every culture. We observe the world, and ourselves, from the upper-
most stratum: the present. But the lower strata, saturated with the past,
have not disappeared. The present is nothing but the latest aggregation
from past events and processes. Our roots traverse all the layers of our
sedimented culture. In pushing up toward the present, contemporary
 T H E L I Z A R D ’ S TA I L

notions are imbued with the stains of our fathers—with someone else’s
recollections, someone else’s guilt. Worse still, we are not a chorus sing-
ing in cultural unison; we are would-be soloists stubbornly singing off-
key. Ethical imperatives are addressed to collectives, but ethical choices
are always individual. In the realm of right and wrong, everything is
personal.
Every person is an accident, a collision between individual im-
pulses and cultural options. Before attaining the age of reason, we ab-
sorb, without real examination or scrutiny, the internal contradictions
of our environment. The irresponsible judgments, the arbitrary assess-
ments, the passing remarks of adults are filtered through our immature
minds, then mixed with a powerful blend of emotional likes and dis-
likes, and little by little our moral fiber makes its hesitant appearance.
Reaching maturity, we try to impose order on the affective and moral
chaos of our childhood, the impossible compromises and contradic-
tory urges, the personal aches and general anxieties. We try to be rea-
sonable.
It is not easy to be reasonable. The ground seems to slip away be-
neath our feet. The custodians of public morality try to mandate their
own balance, to decree absolute values where everything is relative,
to proclaim clarity where everything is obscure, to declare objectivity
where everything is subjective. They brandish their moral timetables,
promising that those who arrive on time at the station will safely reach
their moral destination. We always arrive too early or too late. We are
too quick to forgive ourselves the unforgivable, and too willing to let
the sour grapes of our fathers set our teeth on edge.1 We sin in our own
individual fashion, breaking rules made especially for us. Succeeding
or failing, we do it our way.
There is no sin without context. And there is no impersonal writ-
ing on sin. All writing on sin is autobiographical, even when the writer
analyzes abstract ideas or discusses the sins of others. This book is not
a confession. To a certain extent, it is a way to avoid confession. Yet

2
 T H E L I Z A R D ’ S TA I L

the book does deal with me, especially when I am not speaking about
myself.
When does the awareness of sin arise in us? When does infantile
narcissism—the conviction that everything belongs to us, that any plea-
sure and satisfaction denied us constitutes a moral scandal—transform
itself into a feeling of guilt, into a sensation that we have done evil in
the eyes of the Lord and of men? Freud thought that this awareness
emerges together with the Ego, with the realization that the child is not
the flesh of its mother, that the separation between mother and child is
definitive and irreparable. Feelings of insufficiency constitute a basic
element of human personality. We understand that we are not all-pow-
erful. We recognize the primary mortal failings—weakness, solitude,
and despair—for it is those (not pride, envy, and anger) that constitute
the prototypes of sin. We measure ourselves against our impossible
dreams of perfection, and the paradise of wishful thinking (to be al-
ways whole, to be always without fear or pain, to be always satisfied)
and we find ourselves wanting. We suffer. We realize that we have been
punished. All suffering is punishment. We search for the reasons for
this punishment. “God of Mercy, we have sinned before You. Have pity
on us.”
But is it right to begin like that, with universal reflections—not
with this particular man, Aviad Kleinberg, but with Everyman? Is it
honest to start with generalities, beyond the embarrassing particulars
of memory, beyond the body, beyond the body of evidence? Surely this
is wrong. There is no sin without context, no writing on sin that is not
autobiographical.
In primary school I had a classmate called Micky. He was lonelier
than me and much weaker. I was endowed with considerable physical
strength and with a talent for sarcasm. This did not win me many
friends, but it was usually enough to paralyze my adversaries. While we
were all trying to become (each according to his possibilities and incli-
nations) caricatures of the typical Israeli macho, Micky remained a

3
 T H E L I Z A R D ’ S TA I L

withdrawn infant, living somewhat autistically in his own world. He

neither tried to be like the others, nor blatantly challenged conventions,
as I did from time to time when I was fed up with my own efforts to
make myself accepted. Micky was quite simply himself. He sketched
odd, delicate drawings in his notebooks and built miniature cities in the
sand. His cities were a tangle of roads among twigs and bits of wood,
minuscule electrical poles made from popsicle sticks, vaguely defined
buildings of matchboxes, and tiny bridges over Lilliputian rivers of
sand. Without complaint, he bore the endless ridicule and contempt
heaped upon him from all sides. He would laugh his strange laugh and
go his own way.
Micky built his towns in all sorts of places. The ones he con-
structed in the schoolyard were systematically destroyed by the other
children. To give free reign to his urban creativity, Micky built another
town in a wadi (a small ravine) near his neighborhood, far from the
barbarians’ eyes. In those days I often roamed the wastelands that ex-
tended between the neighborhoods of my hometown, Beer Sheva. In
school you had to be either “north” or “south.” I was neither. My family
lived between neighborhoods, and I felt at home only in geographic
and social No-Man’s-Land. For hours I would walk by myself, desper-
ately trying to make sense of my loneliness, dreaming of vindication.
Every day I hoped that something would happen and I would be saved,
that I would stumble upon something good, that the pain would stop,
that the circle of solitude would break. Micky’s miniature city was lo-
cated far from the usual circuits of the hevre, the guys. But it was on my
path. It was much bigger than his other urban creations, and one could
see that he had put a great deal of time and effort into it.
I remember studying that magnificent construction for a while,
and then destroying it. I knocked down everything—roads, bridges,
trees. I don’t think I enjoyed the destruction. I’m quite sure I was im-
mediately invaded by a strong feeling of shame. I understood that I had
become just like the barbarians, the classmates I both detested and en-

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 T H E L I Z A R D ’ S TA I L

vied. For Immanuel Kant, awareness of the wickedness of one’s act

transforms it into “radical evil”—a wrong stemming neither from over-
sight nor from thoughtlessness, but committed with full understanding
of the moral fault it embodies.2
I cannot pretend to have surrendered to social pressure. That act
of destruction was not a means for gaining acceptance by a gang. Later
in life, I was occasionally pressured to harm other people—women, Ar-
abs, weak individuals—in order to prove my toughness, my manhood,
my solidarity to the group. I always refused to do so. But in school, I
did not belong to any group. Indeed, not-belonging was my main attri-
bute. Besides, nobody knew I had destroyed the little city—not even
Micky—and I find it hard to believe that my feat of senseless vandalism
would have impressed boys. I was not performing a social rite of pas-
sage. This was solitary trespassing. Years later, I came upon the famous
passage in Saint Augustine’s Confessions where he recounts an episode
of stealing pears in his native town of Thagaste (in present-day Alge-
ria). Some years ago I even translated the Confessions from Latin into
Hebrew.3 Here is the description from Book 2:

There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit,
though attractive in neither color nor taste. To shake the
fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of
naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our pesti-
lential way) we had continued our game in the streets. We
carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our
feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a
few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not
allowed. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart.
You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss.
Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I
became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wicked-
ness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I

5
 T H E L I Z A R D ’ S TA I L

loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object

for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul
leaped down from your firmament to ruin. It was seeking
not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its
own sake.4

Setting aside, for the moment, the psychological and ethical ques-
tions raised by Augustine’s description, I would like to focus on the ba-
sic assumption underlying this text. Augustine is certain that the rules
of the ethical game are clear and that a man who is honest with him-
self always knows the specific weight of each of his acts. For him, there
is no Freudian denial; there are only lies. What is more, evil is never
banal; it is always radical.5 Misdemeanors, like stealing worthless pears,
may be insignificant so far as their consequences are concerned, but
the motivation that underlies them is not really different from that
which pushes us to horrible crimes. We love evil for its own sake. And
our faults are never really hidden. God walks in our gardens and His
spirit hovers over our abysses. He sees, remembers, and exacts ac-
counts. The intrusive presence of God in the Augustinian world para-
doxically transforms intentional evil into a heroic act, tragic in that it is
essentially without hope. It is impossible to contest the tyranny of di-
vine justice, impossible to escape punishment. The sinner brings about
his own ruin in the name of an impossible and absurd desire for free-
dom.6
“Therefore in that act of theft what was the object of my love, and
in what way did I viciously and perversely imitate my Lord?” wonders
Saint Augustine.

Was my pleasure to break your law by deceit since I had not

the power to do that by force? Was I acting like a prisoner
with restricted liberty who does without punishment what
is not permitted, thereby making an assertion of possess-
ing a dim resemblance to omnipotence? Here is a runaway