Oct 21/06 — Parashat B'reisheet

Commentary by Rabbi Alan Green

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Elliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding V

The most challenging part of the Creation story has to do with the loss of Paradise. What happened? Why did it happen? What are the implications of it having happened? First, the story: Adam and Eve inhabit GAN EDEN—heaven on earth. It’s a place where everything one could possibly desire—peace, serenity, freedom from want, even immortality—are all at one’s fingertips.

What was it like? In its commentary to Genesis 1:3, “God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light,’” the Zohar says, “This is the primal light which God made. It is the light of the eye. This light, God showed to Adam, and by means of it Adam was able to see from one end of the universe to the other.”

According to the Midrash on Genesis, the first Adam was a being whose beauty and holiness rivaled that of God Himself. On the verse, “God created man in His own image” (1:27), Rabbi Hoshia says, ‘At the time the Holy One created the first Adam, the ministering angels mistook him for God Himself, and were about to say “Holy” to him. What did the Holy One do? He cast Adam into a deep sleep, and the angels then realized that he was just a man.’”

There was only one condition attached to life in Paradise: not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. How simple was that? Follow this one rule, and you live in Paradise forever! Yet Adam and Eve were unable to resist the snake’s temptation to eat the fruit of that fateful Tree. Because of this mistake they, and we along with them, are condemned to live by the sweat of our brows. We also die, give birth painfully, suffer from self-consciousness, and experience power imbalances in our relationships.

Had Adam and Eve been aware of these consequences, it’s doubtful they would have given in to the snake’s temptation. But what was the precise nature of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that they were willing to sacrifice Paradise in order to attain it?

The truth is, God really didn’t need to mention the Tree of Knowledge. Adam and Eve would never even have noticed it, except that the Lord brought the subject up. And when God not only called attention to it, but also issued terrifying warnings about the consequences of eating its fruit, it was virtually certain that the first humans would have to give it a whirl. The Lord, in His wisdom, knew quite enough about human nature to know that unreasonable prohibitions are invitations to adventure.

Now, the words for “good” and “evil” in this context have a special connection with skill and craftsmanship. They connote what is advantageous, or disadvantageous; skillful, or clumsy; cunning, or crude, from a technical point of view. Therefore, those who ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would become “as gods,” for they would become masters of technology. They would know how to control events, and they would know how to make things happen: everything from inventing the wheel, to today’s most sophisticated electronics. The desire to know the details about where we will sleep tonight, what we are going to eat, and how and when we will get there, is a terrible temptation indeed.

This is why Adam and Eve’s expulsion from GAN EDEN involves the curse of labour. Because once we start controlling things—cultivating land, building homes, creating roads, setting up transportation grids, and so on—we can no long rely on spontaneity or impulse. There are bills to pay, and paycheques to earn. We have to stop playing, and get serious.

We have to think about the future and plan for it. Thus, we become aware of death in an entirely new way—as a kind of monster lying at the end of the path—a final humiliation of all that we, through our skill and craftsmanship, have achieved and controlled. Our life thus becomes less a matter of living, and more the putting-off of death. And so begins the experience of life as we have known it down through the ages. Losing Paradise is the dawn of the Age of Anxiety.

Once the fruit has been eaten; once the spontaneous life impulse of Paradise has been called into question and repressed, there can be no going back. There is only going on. But, going on to what? We can actually understand all human impulses—both good and bad—and indeed, all of human history, as a constant striving to return to Eden. Having lost Paradise, we have a desperate need to find our way back home. And how do we get there? This forward progress occurs, in fits and starts, by gaining states of greater and greater consciousness.

A great deal of pain is involved in this process. Having lost Paradise, and having chosen the path of willful control through technology, inevitably, we all enroll in the School of Hard Knocks. Over the long span of history, it may well be necessary to make every major mistake in the book and suffer the consequences, as a civilization, before we learn how not to err any more. This is why we shouldn’t expect the Messiah to come any time soon.

Yet hope springs eternal. Every new generation, and every new birth, brings with it the hope of having learned the painful lessons of the past and, on that basis, building a future in which we find our way back to Eden; a future of universal peace, harmony, love, and compassion.

When we finally succeed in eluding the cherub’s flaming sword, and enter the gates of Paradise, it will be an entirely different experience than that of Adam and Eve. They were born into Paradise, and couldn’t know what they had until they lost it. But we, who have never experienced Paradise, have to work to achieve it. “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”

Shabbat Shalom.