Ayekha

Had Adam and Eve the presence of mind to invoke their Miranda rights in the Garden of Eden, the history of biblical religion, if not all of Western Civilization, might have turned out very differently.

Scarcely had they wiped the fruit off their lips, having just positioned their fig leaves in strategic locations, than they heard the sound of God breezing through the Garden. Ayekha? “Where are you?” God asks – the beginning of a deceptively simple, but altogether effective interrogation process. With a single question, the shortcomings not just of Adam but all of subsequent humanity were exposed, and ever since, our understanding of human nature has not been the same.

But the Miranda rights were not read and our story is not drawn from the annals of American criminal justice. God was not on a fact-finding mission. An omniscient God did not require Adam’s confession in order to reconstruct what had just taken place. The Garden was not that big, and to the best of our knowledge, there were only two human beings for God to keep track of. God’s question “Where are you?” was not about Adam’s geographic coordinates, but about his moral location.

Welcome to the Book of Genesis! A book ostensibly about the creation of the world, the first families of the earth, the beginnings of humanity and the Jewish people, and ultimately how Israel ends up in the land of Egypt so they can be redeemed in the second book of the series, Exodus. Genesis is all that and much more, but the millennial traction of this book of beginnings is not merely its historical narrative, but its serving as a window into each and every one of our lives. Sibling rivalry and reconciliation, the challenge and miracle of conception, parental favoritism, leaving home and growing up, loss and grief, love found, delayed and lost – you name it, most of human experience, good and bad, can be found right here. To read Genesis is not just to read of our founding matriarchs and patriarchs, or to study how the ancients understood the human condition. To read Genesis is to experience the unnerving sensation of feeling our own lives – mine and yours – refracted through the lens of our most sacred text.

There is no place better to begin than in the Garden itself. The first human being: part of, but distinct from, the rest of creation. God commands Adam to till and tend the Garden, encourages him to enjoy the fruit of every tree, except the tree of knowledge; from that tree he must not eat. The one becomes two with the creation of Eve, and then with the introduction of the serpent, two become three. To be sure, a talking serpent is not the easiest role to cast, especially for the rationalists in our midst. But what is clear is that at this point of the tale, competing impulses begin to emerge from within humanity. Not only does the appeal and imagined dividend of the single forbidden act grow, but the feared consequences of that act are brought into question. The transgressive behavior itself – eating the fruit – is simple and straightforward; sins usually are. But the Torah seems to take pleasure in elongating the process by which Eve arrives at the deed. “When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband and he ate.” (Genesis 3:6) It is almost as if – or more precisely, exactly as if – Eve does the very thing that we all do when given the opportunity to do something we know we should not do. Our moral defenses atrophy in the face of what we desire. We conveniently provide ourselves with new-found rationalizations and extenuating circumstances, all with the goal of tipping the scales of conscience towards making kosher that which we know is not. Even if it is wrong, it is not so wrong, certainly not just this once, not relative to the rationalizations in our minds.

And sometimes, oftentimes – as is the case in the Garden – when people do something wrong, despite what we are told as children or sometimes read in the papers, people do not get caught and people do not suffer immediate consequences. The serpent may be a lot of things, but let’s not forget one thing: He was right. Not only was there a significant upside to eating the fruit, but the punishment foretold by God never took place. That is not to say there were no consequences. The text makes clear that immediately upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve realized they were naked, arum, not insignificantly, the same Hebrew word that was used to describe the serpent a few verses earlier. Was this a punishment? At this point, apparently not. But their moral condition, at least in their own eyes, was – literally – laid bare. After all, with only two people in the whole world and an all-knowing God, who were they really hiding from, other than themselves? Adam and Eve knew they could not escape the one feeling that came not from above, but from within – the feeling we all have when we do something wrong – the feeling of shame.

All of this helps explain what happens in the next scene, when God draws Adam and Eve out of their moral bunker. God’s questions here – and for that matter, with Cain in the next story - are phrased to elicit a response, and in both cases, humanity falls miserably short of divine expectations. Adam parries, ducks and dodges, passing the blame with both language and tactics that have remained fairly consistent to the present day. “That woman you gave me, she gave me of the tree and I ate.” And the fairer sex does not fair much better. God asks Eve: “What is this you have done?” To which Eve replies, “It was the snake who tricked me, so I ate.” Worst of all, we know, will be Cain, who attempts to redirect God’s inquiry with the rhetorical question that has weighed on our collective conscience ever since, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The more I think about it, the more I think that the sin of Adam and Eve was not eating from the tree. To repeat a terrible pun from my Bible professor Shalom Paul, this story is not about the “fruit on the tree” but about the “pair on the ground.” Anyone could have predicted that left in the Garden as they were, their eating of the fruit was to be expected. The fifteenth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher Joseph Albo explained that their sin, the real sin of the Garden, was Adam and Eve’s avoiding taking responsibility for their actions, Adam blaming Eve and then Eve blaming the serpent. (cited in Sherwin, The Life Worth Living, p 10) The offenses of our earliest ancestors, whatever they may have been, were compounded by their inability to stand accountable to themselves or to God, which is why the punishment for their misdeeds comes not after the act itself, but only after they fail to acknowledge any responsibility for what they did. Given the blessing of free will, the calculus of human nature is that on occasion, everyone will make a poor choice. That fact, in and of itself, does not distinguish a good person from a bad one. Rather, as the great philosopher Maimonides makes clear, it is a person’s ability to admit failing, express remorse and reform oneself for the future that signals moral growth and maturity.

As for the end of our parashah, on the most basic level, serpents lose their legs to become snakes, women experience pain in childbirth, and men must toil by the sweat of their brow. Remember, these stories are meant to explain the origins of the human condition. But on a more profound level, the lasting consequence of both Adam and Eve’s act and that of Cain is to wander eastward forever separated from the Garden. Some take responsibility, some do not. Some are punished, many are not. But once we have eaten of the fruit and our eyes have been opened, none of us can reclaim the pristine naïveté of our former selves. Left to wander out in the world, we must be vigilant in protecting our moral selves from the impulses scattered throughout the world, but most of all within our selves. When we fail, which we all inevitably will, we learn that honor comes not from the attainment of perfection, but from the ability to admit fault, to leverage regret towards self-improvement and from knowing that wherever on this earth we wander, God’s first question continues to reverberate in our conscience: “Where are you?” Ayekha? In the year and years ahead, may each and every one of us heed the voice of the Garden – aware of our potential, admitting our shortcomings, and ever conscious of what it is to stand in the presence of God.