Trees of Knowledge

Bereshit 5779 / 6 October 2018

Yesterday, as I was reading the New York Times, I recalled the part of parashat B’reishit in which Adam and Eve’s eyes are opened after they eat from the Tree of Knowledge.  You know the story, the serpent seduces Eve into eating from the one tree whose fruit was forbidden; she takes of the fruit and eats it; she shares it with Adam who eats it too; and, when God realizes that Adam and Eve have disregarded his injunction, he proceeds to punish each of them – the serpent, the woman, and the man.  

I want to focus on what happened to Adam and Eve when they ate of the tree.  Initially, the Torah says that “the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived that they were naked.”  Later, the Torah quotes God to say that “man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad.”

Referencing diverse commentators, the footnotes in our Etz Chaim describe Adam and Eve’s new-found knowledge in numerous ways:

• an “acquisition of conscience,”
• a “gaining of the capacity for moral awareness,”
• a “crossing of the boundary from animal to human,”
• a “graduation from the innocence of childhood to the problem-laden world of living as morally responsible adults,”
• a “transition from  being innocent as children to being self-conscious as adolescents, new to the world of knowing good and bad.”  

Having spent my most recent hours in our sanctuary pouring over those footnotes in anticipation of preparing this D’var Torah, I was reminded of that part of our parsha yesterday when I read an op-ed in the New York Times written by one of the teenage survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Emma González.

The article was titled: A Young Activist’s Advice: Vote, Shave Your Head and Cry Whenever You Need To.  It was the effort of one of the Parkland students to remind us all that we are responsible to vote, to hold our elected leaders responsible, to make our voices heard when, as the student wrote, “the environment is getting poisoned, families are getting pulled apart and deported, prisons are privatized, real-life Nazis live happily among us, Native Americans are so disenfranchised our country is basically still colonizing them, Puerto Rico has been abandoned, the American education system has been turned into a business, and every day 96 people get shot and killed.”

But it’s not her conclusions that led me to associate Emma’s op-ed with today’s story of Adam and Eve.  Rather I was struck by a few paragraphs in the middle. After writing about first learning that her friend Carmen Schentrup had died, giving her first speech a few days later at a gun control rally, joining the movement to organize the March for Our Lives, and working incessantly to plan the march on Washington calling for better gun laws, Emma goes on to explain why those Parkland students worked incessantly on planning for the rally:  

To stop working was to start thinking. And thinking about anything other than the march and the solutions to gun violence was to have a breakdown.

One day all of us seemed to have a breakdown around 4 p.m. Cameron [the organizer of the movement] ran off, and I ran after him, because I was worried. Once I saw that he was O.K., I realized that I was having a breakdown, too.

I lay in the grass. The sky was spotted with clouds, so when they passed over the sun, it felt too cool, and when the sun was out, it felt too warm. There were trees all around, and I was fully realizing, once more, how miserable we all were. How miserable I felt. How much I wished I could just be a tree so that I didn’t have to know people who had been murdered in a mass shooting in a life I thought would be forever safe from this kind of mourning.

Suddenly I couldn’t stand being alive. I didn’t want to kill myself — let me make that very clear. I just didn’t want to have a human consciousness. Trees face many difficulties, what with deforestation and pollution, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be one — to just stop feeling and live.

I wanted to go back to when blood hadn’t stained the walls of our campus. Back to when I would hang out with Carmen on the bus. Back to before people would stop me to say, ‘Aren’t you one of those kids from Parkland?’

But we couldn’t go back.

I read those paragraphs of Emma’s in the New York Times and, steeped as I was in the B’reishit footnotes, I thought to myself how ironic it is that Emma wanted to be a tree, when sadly she and the other survivors at Parkland had been forced to eat from the Tree of Knowledge – learning about good and evil in the world – much too early.

It’s indescribably heartbreaking that those students had to eat from that Tree at such young ages. Yet in the end, each of us humans experiences some event in our lives that reveals our nakedness, that ends in our knowing the difference between good and bad, that underscores that we have a human consciousness.

After any such event, we wish to re-enter the Garden of Eden, to return to the days of childhood before we knew certain things were wrong.  But like the students of Parkland, we cannot go back.

Our Bible nowhere characterizes the eating of the apple as a sin, let alone the Original Sin.  There is no indication that Eve and Adam’s eating the apple resulted in a rupture of the divine human relationship.  Indeed, because God fashions clothing for Adam and Eve to protect them outside the Garden, it seems clear that God is not unalterably angry at our ancestors.  

Some commentators see the serpent as God’s agent:  God wants Adam and Eve to grow up and become fully human, acquiring a knowledge of good and evil, rather than remaining at the level of animals.  

As humans, we are compelled, one might say blessed, with the capacity to distinguish good from evil.  Rashi teaches that by gaining the capacity for moral awareness, the human being has become one unique on earth, as God is one, unique in heaven.  

The Tree of Knowledge of good and evil represents the force of conscience.  Throughout our lives, we are forced by events around us to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and have our eyes opened to good and bad in the world, the wrongful conduct that we undertake ourselves, the troubles that befall us through the wrongful conduct of others, the losses that we experience through inexplicable accidents and tragedies.  Those events make us realize that we are naked.

Early in the parsha, when God creates man, we read that God created man b’tzalmo – in his image.  Later, after the story of the eating of the apple, God concludes that man had become ke-achad memehnu, like one of us.  I suggest that the inclusion of the story in this week’s parsha underscores that it is the capacity to distinguish between good and evil that makes us God-like, that makes us human.  

As humans we have the capacity, the consciousness, to distinguish between good and evil.  Like the students of Parkland, may we be inspired by the knowledge we acquire in living each day to strive to make the world a better place.  

Shabbat Shalom.