By Zalmen Richmond-Shazeer
This week’s parshah, Breishit, is a pretty well known one as parshahs (parshiot?) go. The first one in the Torah, Breishit is the story of creation. God creates the world in six days, including light, heavens, earth, trees and plants, the sun, moon and stars, fish and birds, wild land animals, and finally people. On the seventh day, God rested. While this part of the story is very interesting and truly a very speedy creation of the world (just like the writing of this dvar will be as time is running short), the part of the story that I want to focus on is the story of Adam and Eve. God created this beautiful paradise of a garden called the Garden of Eden. God put Adam in the garden and Adam had a great time naming all the animals and eating the delicious fruits (a juicy kumquat sounds just splendid right now). But Adam was lonely as the only human in the garden, so God put Adam to sleep and performed a quick easy surgery and BOOM! Where before there had been a rib there was now a woman. Eve. Adam and Eve had a great time in the garden but they were forbidden one thing. The fruit of the tree of knowledge, for if they ate that, they’d become like God and know the difference between good and evil. A snake tricks them into eating some delicious fruit (mmmm kumquats!) and they come to know good and evil. As a punishment, God banishes them from the garden of Eden, throwing them into a hard life where they have to work for what they have.
This is generally not viewed as something particularly good. Humanity disobeys God, loses its immortality, and gets banished from the beautiful garden of Eden and its delicious fruits(a supple grape would really hit the spot right now). I’d like to argue that this was inevitable and generally not that bad. First of all, if Adam and Eve stayed in the garden of Eden, none of us would have been alive and the world wouldn’t have been graced with the presence of Zalmen Richmond-Shazeer. Secondly, I think while Adam and Eve had a harder life outside the garden, it was also a more fulfilling one. While in the garden there was nothing to do, outside there were things to accomplish, from simply surviving to starting a family that would eventually become the human race. They could earn what they had, and build their own happiness, instead of having everything handed to them. I also think that eating from the tree of knowledge was something God would have wanted to happen eventually. Before then, the humans were little more than the animals they lived with. When they ate the fruit, they gained an understanding of morals, of right and wrong. One of the big ideas of creation was that there would be beings that could think for themselves so they could choose to serve God. For that to happen, Adam and Eve had to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. This is further supported by something I remember Rabbi Liben saying once in a dvar. He interpreted the way Adam says that he would eat the fruit again not as something to be said out of spite, but simply an honest self assessment. Adam was put in the garden to eat from the tree.
So if this was something that had to happen, why make the garden of Eden in the first place? Why forbid the Tree of Knowledge? I have a few ideas about this. I think God needed to create the garden of Eden so people could see what it was like when life was peaceful and creatures lived together in harmony. They needed to see how good life could be so they could have a goal for what they wanted to create on earth when they were banished. God had to forbid the Tree of Knowledge so that they could make the choice to eat from it, knowing the consequences of banishment and eventual death. They had to choose for themselves to strive after God even if in doing so they lost their lives. They had to choose to leave the garden of Eden and create something of their own, the first humans to create and innovate and learn.
Well, that’s the end. God made the seventh day a day of rest and that day is approaching quite quickly. Shabbat Shalom!
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