Eve

Friday October 21, 2022

Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA

We return this week to the beginning of the Torah, and we come to the old familiar story. The creation of the first human being, the garden of Eden, and the two trees—the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, whose fruit is forbidden, and the Tree of Life. And then God says “Lo tov heyot ha-adam levado. It is not good for the human to be alone” and the woman is created out of the body of the first human, and now they are two.

Then comes the very first dialogue in the Torah, the first conversation…ever. The snake speaks to the woman: “Hi.” “Hi snake.” The snake catches the woman off guard, asking “Did God really say “Do not eat from any tree of the Garden?” “No,” she says, “we can eat from any tree in the garden, but from the tree in the center of the garden, we may not eat and we may not touch it, or we will die.”

“You won’t die,” says the snake. “God knows that in the day you eat that fruit, your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil.”

We know what happens next. In fact, anyone hearing the story for the first time can guess what will happen as soon as we hear that the Tree was in the center of the garden, and that God had said, “just not that one.” From the moment it was forbidden, it was just a matter of time before they would succumb to temptation and eat from it.

We have been reading and telling this old story for thousands of years, and we have not grown tired of it. We still have so many questions.

I was reading the story with the 7th graders last week, and after we read it, I asked them each to write down one real question that they had. A serious question about the story, which they then shared with the class. Every single question was different, and we could have spent the entire night discussing any one of their questions. But the question that hit me hardest, that left me completely unsettled, was from Sabrina, a very thoughtful young woman in the class, who asked: “why does the Torah tell this story which leads to the long history of women being treated as inferior to men?”

It's not that I haven’t heard Sabrina’s question before. In over forty years of reading this story with students of all ages, the problem of how this story has been used against women over the centuries has come up over and over again. Sabrina’s question left me shaken because, after all these years I still do not know how I, as a male rabbi, should help her. She is a young Jewish woman making fundamental decisions about her Judaism. She and her classmates are asking “What is the Torah to me? Will it give me wisdom? Will it help me be a good person? Should I embrace the Torah as my sacred book, or is it not worth the trouble?” My job as Sabrina’s rabbi is to give her the information and the tools to make these decisions; and in general, I believe that the best thing I can do is to share as openly and as honestly as possible my own experience, my own journey in relationship to the Torah.

But as a man I have never had to grapple deeply, and personally, with the Torah’s depiction and treatment of women. I have watched and listened as the women in my life have grappled with it: Marian, my sister Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, my mother and my daughter Rachel, and my soul sisters with whom I have studied over the years. But I know that ultimately, as a man, I remain outside of the problem of what this story says about woman, and the much bigger problem of how this story has been used against women for centuries. So as an outsider, what can I say? How can I be rabbi for Sabrina in this pivotal moment in her life, when she is deciding what the Torah is for her?

I decided to venture out of my comfort zone, and to open the new Women’s Commentary to the Torah. It may sound funny to hear that opening a Torah commentary was venturing out of my comfort zone, but I’m serious. I know and respect Dr. Tamara Eskenazi, one of the co-editors of the women’s commentary. But I know that book is specifically for women, and as a man, I thought: It is not meant for me. The editors explain that they decided, after giving it some thought, not to include anywhere in the book, any commentaries by any men. So, in the universe of the Women’s Commentary, I understand that I am an outsider.

In my entire life, I have never had the experience of reading Torah as an outsider. That was new for me, and strange. Perhaps not entirely different from the experience that women have had, over all these centuries, if they ever dared to venture into the Jewish house of study. I had to learn to enter quietly, and to simply listen to all the voices in that book. Not to say or add anything of my own. Just to listen.

As I read in the Women’s Commentary on the Torah, I saw immediately that the editors were committed to including a wide range of responses to the Torah text. There is no unified voice in the volume. Some are bitter. Some are sweet. Some express love for the text and some give vent to anger and even hatred. In page after page, I found joy and frustration and playfulness and sorrow. Slowly, I began to feel more at home, because I have felt all of those emotions in reading the Torah.

I remember as a boy feeling frustrated with Adam and Eve for having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. With all of those other fruit trees all around them, why did they have to eat from that tree? How could they give in so easily to temptation, and eat, and in that moment lose paradise? But now, when I read slowly and carefully the verse in which Eve hears the snake telling her that the fruit will open her eyes, and she looks at the fruit and sees that it is good to eat, and her eyes desire it, and it has the ability to make her wise…I identify with her and I love her. Eve in that moment is more vital, more adventurous, more feisty, more curious, more wonderfully alive and free than just about any other person in the entire Torah. She’s a rule breaker, but so is Abraham. And so is Moses when he shatters the tablets of the law.

Maybe God planted The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the middle of garden because we were meant to eat from it, and maybe Eve is the hero of the story. That’s the way I feel about her.

I will ask Sabrina and her classmates about it next Wednesday night. In my heart, I believe that this story has the power to make a young woman fall in love with Torah, and as she grows older, to choose to remain Jewish.

Shabbat shalom.

thank you Phoebe Light for helping me think this through.