Temple B’nai Israel

Torah Portion Bereshit (Genesis 1:1-6:8)

What is the truth about the tree of knowledge?

Before getting to the tree, I want to talk about how we view the wisdom of the past, individually and collectively. In times of progress, as these are supposed to be, we have mixed perspectives. We honor really, really smart individuals, recognizing their towering wisdom and intellect by listening to them and following them (sometimes slavishly). But when we look at how smart people of a certain time were as a whole, we tend to reflexively think–know–that we are today better and smarter.

Much scholarship tells us that the attribution of the Torah to Moses is almost certainly apocryphal, and that the text we now read is the patchwork of generations of writers and editors. (Jews are far from alone in this. There is reputable Christian and Buddhist scholarship that has taken some of the words out of the mouths of Jesus and the Buddha too.) For some this a problem requiring outright rejection of the hypothesis; for others it is accepted as a welcome marker of 21st century enlightenment.

There is a middle ground between rejection and acceptance. To reach it, we first have to believe that many people in the long past, now individually lost in the collective, are smarter than us, maybe a lot smarter than us. In Judaism, we are used to thinking about the big names, Rashi and Maimonides and dozens of others. But the wise men behind the Torah have no name. Yet there they are, this week and every week, generation to generation. We call them Moses, not to take anything away from that figure, but to give those unnamed wise men the respect and attention they deserve.

This wisdom of the Torah is on display from the beginning, and certainly in the story of the tree of knowledge.

Some Torah stories are so familiar that we take the details for granted. We know what the Torah says, we’ve heard it a million times, so let’s move on. Nothing to see here. On top of that, we ignore the details about the tree of knowledge the way that we don’t care about the details of a gun in a crime drama. It may matter to detectives whether it is a .22 or a .38 or a .45, but let’s just get to the good stuff. Serpents, naked people, death.

The tree of knowledge, though, isn’t just a prop in a bigger, juicier story. It is the story.

Exactly what kind of tree is it, and exactly what knowledge makes it so important?

That’s easy. It’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

That convenient answer only raises more questions. If it is good and evil, why aren’t we supposed to know about them? And if it is good and evil, why would that knowledge lead in this story to suddenly realizing we are naked when we have no clothes on, and to the end of human immortality?

Why shouldn’t we know the difference between good and evil? Prohibiting that knowledge makes absolutely no sense in light of everything else that happens and is commanded in the rest of the Torah, starting with the rest of this portion. Isn’t the Torah-in fact all of Judaism-about being able to make those distinctions and acting accordingly? If nothing else, the Torah is all about one way or the other, right choices that are rewarded, wrong choices that are punished.

But maybe it is not “good and evil” at all. Richard Elliott Friedman suggests that the Torah word “ra” is not limited to the simple moral category “evil,” and from the various connotations he chooses the word “bad” to make this clear. Even with this choice of language–”good and bad”–he goes on to suggest that by focusing on that word alone we are taking our eye off the ball. It may be that God/Torah is warning Adam/us to quit focusing on distinctions and dualities.

This concept is a part of all religious traditions, Judaism and others. Simple to say but not always easy to grasp, the idea is that we suffer when make distinctions and too tightly embrace those distinctions. If we look at the commandments, or even at the rest of this portion, we can see this in action. Don’t be greedy, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t kill, etc.

In general, we place relative values on things (including our own brilliant thoughts, our good looks, etc.). You have more, I have less, so I take yours, or I’m miserable, or both. Or just the opposite: I have more, you have less, you are inferior, so I overvalue my trivial qualities, and can’t see your more important qualities. And so on. In particular, the stories in the Torah and in this portion are all include difficulties resulting from these distinctions. Cain and Abel, the Smothers Brothers of the Bible, are all about this. In Cain’s vision of duality, Cain thinks that God likes Abel’s offering better, so Cain gets angry and kills him. The fruit of the tree of knowledge itself is about coveting and stealing something bigger, better and Yours-all of these comparative distinctions.

Let’s look at this portion’s two stated consequences of this knowledge, that is, of being bound up with this duality and these distinctions. Adam’s nature was to be unaware of his clothing, or actually his lack of clothing. Clothed versus naked means nothing to him. He is who he is, he looks like he looks. But suddenly he is aware of how he looks, and in the process forgets who he is, focused only on looking better, or at least more decent. At a much higher level, the same thing applies to the loss of immortality. Buddhism and other traditions talk about “defeating” death with the realization that life and death are in essence no different (they appear to be different, or more carefully are and are not different, but that will have to wait for another discussion). Here, immortality was possible as long as Adam/us didn’t make the life/death distinction. But Adam being Adam, and us being people, we live with and by all kinds of distinctions, this one and many others.

God and Adam are at a standoff at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or good and bad, or good and not-good, or whatever.

Adam can’t stop himself. He is a typical guy (as he later proves when he turns Eve in), and he is going to make these distinctions, and he is going to suffer for them.

God, as usual, is in a much more complex position. On the one hand, he does want people to know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark, etc. He knows the world will be better for it. On the other hand, he knows that people would be happier, would suffer less, if they got past the distinctions that actually get in their way. The world would be better for that too. On top of all this, there is the danger that people won’t easily understand that they can and should hold both of these thoughts at the same time, that is, know and follow the important distinctions while also letting them go. Even God’s head is hurting from all this.

In the end, here is what God and the Torah decide. People will start out in a position of non-duality, which is a position of non-suffering. They will be told/warned that this is a precious gift, an ultimate way of being that is easily lost. People being people, they will lose it, they will spoil the gift, they will live lives filled with distinctions of all kinds, and with these and because of these distinctions, they will be good and not good, they will heal and they will suffer. Maybe they will get back to where they were before the tree, maybe not. So begins the Torah and so begins history.

God knows all this when he puts the tree there. The truth, God knows and the wise men of the Torah write, is there in the story of the tree. If we can handle it and learn from it.

Bob Schwartz