Taking the First Bite

The following sermon was delivered at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan on Shabbat B'reishit.

I’ve lived in New York for over a year now, and I have a pretty good sense of direction, but there are still times that I find myself gettin lost. Maybe it’s when I come up above ground from the subway and I’m not sure which direction I’m facing. Or maybe it’s when I’m down in the West Village and the streets start to run diagonally. Sometimes I feel lost when I start something new—the first day of a new job and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to wear; the first time going to that bodega and I’m not sure where the Cheerios are. 

Whether we recognize it or not, each of us is getting lost all of the time. It happens to us when there’s some information that you don’t have, when there’s something that you need to know in order to make sense of it all.

This week, in the very first parshah of our Torah cycle, we find the story of a character who was tired of getting lost—Eve. Eve spent the first part of her life in the Garden of Eden walking around without a clue about the world around her. There were some nice plants, some friendly animals, this nice guy named Adam, but she didn’t have any real purpose. Every day, the same routine, day in and day out. And yet, despite the routine—or maybe because of it—Eve felt lost. There was nothing to do, nothing to know, nothing to get excited about.

So when Eve saw that piece of fruit hanging from the Tree of Knowledge, she realized “nechmad ha-eitz l’haskil / that the tree was worthy was a source of wisdom.” “Why should I continue to stumble around this Garden,” I can imagine Eve saying, “lost, without purpose, when a perfectly good source of wisdom is hanging right there?”

And so, Eve chose to no longer be lost. She chose to eat the fruit. Suddenly she saw the world as she had never seen it before. Suddenly, she realized that there were such things as good and bad. Can you even imagine how radically amazing it must have been for Eve to go from an amoral, partially-blinded, gray-scale view of the world suddenly to morally aware, 360-degree, Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat vision of reality? Suddenly, Eve had a moral compass. Suddenly, she had self-awareness. And of course, that self-awareness was sometimes inhibiting, but for a previously un-self-aware person, it was incredibly liberating. Eve ushered in a whole new era in the human history, in era in which a person could feel lost and still know where to get the information she needed in order to find her way home again. Eve gave us the power of knowledge.

The choice to eat that fruit and to gain her self-consciousness was, no doubt, a hard decision. I wonder if Eve recognized that in the majority of Western religious literature, she’d be remembered not as a radical free thinker but as a weak-willed sinner.

But even regardless of the reputation it would eventually earn her, Eve’s choice to eat that fruit and gain her self-consciousness would come with a price. Sometimes, self-consciousness can sometimes be a burden. Sometimes, we imagine that it would be easier not to know the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes, we imagine that we might be better off if we could just ignore those pesky parts of our personalities with which we’re uncomfortable. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Maybe your joking nature masks a deep insecurity. Or maybe there’s something in your past that you’re ashamed of, a long-ago trauma that you can neither let go of nor fully face. It hurts us to look at these things. It makes us feel lost. But to bury them back down deep inside of us will only cause us to continue to feel lost. We can’t find our way out of the woods if we’re constantly returning to bury our traumas. We have to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.

I wonder how many of us can say that we’re as brave as Eve, that we’re willing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge? How many of us are willing to give up saying things like “Ignorance is bliss,” and “What grandma doesn’t know can’t hurt her”? How many of us are willing to give up the safety of living in our personal Gardens of Eden for the sometimes-painful world of self-knowledge and wisdom?

I read this summer in the New York Times a personal essay by James Carlos Blake in which he describes the pain—and ultimately, the reward—of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Blake describes how at the age of three or four, he remembers his grandmother telling him that he had had a twin brother who died at just a couple of days old. His grandmother told him that it had been a very painful experience for his parents, and she swore him to secrecy. But of course, a few nights later, Blake asked his parents about what his grandma had told him. His mother burst into tears and left the room, while his father explained that “Grandma was getting very old and sick, and sometimes she mixed up stories in her mind. That’s the reason why mommy was crying.” His father asked Blake that he never mention it again. And so, he didn’t.

Meanwhile, Blake describes how in his teenage and young-adult years, he lived with what he calls “a chronic loneliness.” Blake was lost. “It wasn’t just clinical depression,” Blake writes. “It wasn’t the blues. It was a confusing sense that I was somehow incomplete.”

Many years later, as an adult—after Blake’s mother had passed away and as his father was nearing the end of his life—Blake remembered for the first time in years the incident with his grandmother. “Was it really a senile fantasy?” he asked his dad. His father grew silent, shocked that his son had remembered this incident from the age of three or four. He then told Blake that yes, he had indeed had a twin brother, that yes, he had died at only a couple of days old, that yes, it was a very painful experience, and that no, no one in the family had ever talked about it.

I don’t pretend that I could even imagine the pain that Blake’s mother and father must have felt to loose their infant child. I don’t pretend to know that I would have done anything differently. And God forbid that anyone should ever have to find out. And yet, I recognize that for years, Blake—and his mother and father—were all lost.

It’s true that eating from the Tree of Self-Knowledge will sometimes cause us pain, or shame, or even cause us to grieve—as was the case with Blake’s mom. But without knowledge, there can be no healing. Without knowledge, there can be no growth. Without knowledge, we’ll always be lost in the woods.

In her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, author and doctor Rachel Naomi Remen writes, “When Eve ate the fruit, she became an adult, and gained the freedom of an adult to go out into a world of complexity, adventure, responsibility, and change. To have her own life and to make her own choices.”

As Remen correctly identifies, eating from the Tree of Knowledge means embracing complexity. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge will require facing the parts of ourselves that we’d rather not know. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge will require the bravery to live face-to-face with a broken world, and if we’re lucky, to no longer feel lost, but find ourselves amidst the brokenness.

In our popular culture, we imagine that the forbidden fruit was an apple. But the Torah doesn’t specify what kind of fruit it was. And so, the ancient Rabbis set out to creatively determine what was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

One sage declared that it must have been a fig—for, after Adam and Eve discovered that they were naked, they sewed themselves clothing out of fig leaves. Another sage declared that, although they don’t even grow on trees, it must have been some sort of grape—for a grape may sometimes taste bitter, like the bitterness of leaving the garden.

But I tend to agree with the sage who suggested that it was an olive. An olive’s pit, the sage points out, is very close to its skin; its core is not too far from its edge. The olive is the symbol of a person who is, as much as possible, the same on the outside as she is on the inside. An olive is a person who is powerfully self-conscious. An olive is a person who gets lost in the woods just like the rest of the rest of us; but when she does get lost, she knows how to look within herself and find herself again.

This week, we begin again with the first parshah of the Torah. Year after year, we come back again to this very spot, where the story of our people begins with one tiny, radical moment. A woman eats an olive, and the entirety of Jewish history, of Jewish wisdom, of Jewish thought is catapulted out of this moment—this courageous, terrifying, transformative moment of awareness. Every year, we come back to this beginning. And we discover that the first step in finding ourselves is the knowledge that we’re lost.

And wish for all of us on this Shabbat, and in the coming week, and in the year ahead is: that when we meet again next year, back at this beginning, it will have been a year of self-knowledge, a year of wisdom, and a year filled with the courage to take the first bite.

Shabbat shalom.