Visiting Paradise
1.
I’ve been thinking about Eve and Adam
I’ve been thinking about how, after they eat the fruit and everything changes
How God doles out the punishments
And banishes them from the garden
And how God puts an angel with a fiery, spinning sword to guard the 1110garden
Now on the surface it is clear:
They had literally one commandment: (You have one job)
Don’t eat from the tree
And they broke that one commandment, and so are kicked out
There’s another reading (and I remember my father teaching this many years ago)
That the whole thing is a set up.
C’mon, the forbidden tree right in the middle of the garden? A talking snake? There’s only two people in the world and God doesn’t know what they’re up to? Seriously?
But whether you think Eve and Adam completely messed up and it was so good again
Or whether it was part of a plan to invent freedom
The consequences that come with freedom
The result is the same:
Eve and Adam are hurled into the very non-garden, the
Uncontrollable, ever-changing
world.
So this week, I was thinking about, how after it is all over
I was thinking about how Eve and Adam never try to get back in.
I was wondering about that.
Like, at least in Torah, neither Eve nor Adam (nor their children) ever so much as write a postcard to their animal friends in the garden
They never google “snake” to see what he’s up to these days, that rascal
Don’t seem to wonder if anyone else lives there now
Don’t drive by, pretending to look casual
At least on a simple level, Adam and Eve more or less fade away,
Leaving us to imagine that they except the terms of their banishment
Or that, perhaps more interestingly, Paradise has no drawing power, they outgrew it.
But, you know me, I couldn’t let it rest. They NEVER go back? Not once?
Then I found a thread that Adam (and I’m adding Eve here — please, she is pretty much the pivotal character of the whole thing)
One little known tradition that says (!) Adam and Eve were allowed to go back
In fact, Radak teaches that the angels guarding the gate, with the fiery spinning swords were not real.
They were figments of the imagination, apparitions, phantoms only created to inspire regret in Adam and Eve. To help them understand what they had done.
(Radak to Gen. 3:24)
Maybe God created these images in a moment of tough love or maybe the fiery spinning swords were a product of the active minds of Eve and Adam, maybe both. It is not clear.
But the purpose of eliciting this regret was to lead Eve and Adam towards claiming responsibility for what had gone wrong and to begin the work of trying to make it right
Work of t’shuvah, repentance
In a strange way, the angel guarding the gate was there to lead them to make t’shuvah
And, says the teaching, once Adam and Eve began their t’shuvah, of leaving aside the hiding, the games, the distancing from God, from each other
Once they began to reclaim the fullness of who they each could be,
That image of the angels guarding the garden with fiery swords would disappear
It would disappear because it was never really there to begin with (!) and in fact, midrash says
those angels or guards alternately appeared as men or women or even wind (BR 21:9) because before we make t’shuvah
Everything stands in our way,
Everything guards the garden
Every person is suspicious, a source of potential harm
And even the spring breeze looks like a fiery sword
But after we make t’shuvah, nothing stands in our way, not really
We can return even to the most frought places, places of deep struggle,
if not with ease, than with dignity
AND there’s more
because once the angels or whatevers were revealed to be imaginary, once Adam and Eve made t’shuvah, it says
I am not making this up
That Eve and Adam would indeed return to Paradise. (!)
Why? It says they would work in the garden from time to time (!)
They would work with the soil that they took from there
Notice: their relationship with Eden was not the same
They are no longer innocents in Paradise
But they could go back, and they did go back, it is just they could not go back as they once were
And when Radak says they worked with the soil,
Remember this is not just any soil
This is literally the earth from which they were created
God created them from the dust of the earth
This earth is as close as they have to a mother or a father
So, after understanding and taking responsibility for the parts of what they did,
They were able to dissolve the phantoms, go back and work with the soil from which they came.
I can only imagine what they grew with that t’shuvah, with that holy freedom.
2.
This is a story for each of us
And it is also a story for this moment in America
We are at a moment in this country where it is fair to say we are out of Eden
Our current reality the result of decades of systemic neglect
The deeply embedded racism, class inequality, environmental damage, sexism, and hyper individualism
problems we’ve helped to make with our own hands
Each issue presenting fundamental questions and staggering consequences all at once
The moment, without any exaggeration, is dire
But if we think our only choices are either a return to an idyllic, fantasy garden,
Or leaving the garden behind as if everything in it, everything we dream of, the good and the just, will never be realized
Then we will never grow as a nation towards what we aspire to be
Instead of running from phantom to phantom
We must instead understand that t’shuvah is ours for the taking
It’s true God doesn’t grow things for us anymore
But that doesn’t mean we can’t grow new things in the old holy soil.
3.
At the end of our parasha, mishpatim
Which is full of a collection of laws
Ethical and ritual and religious and personal all jumbled up
Sukkot next to strangers next to
warnings against sorceresses (or anyone who says they know who’ll win the upcoming election),
next to the nuanced law that says that even if your enemy gets the equivalent of a flat tire, you have to help, you cannot gloat as you go by leaving them alone on the road.
At the end of our parasha
We are a newly freed people
and while we are not completely pure innocents
You can’t really say we are savvy either
We’ve been an independent people for like an hour, give or take
God is giving a speech, getting ready to give us the Torah and we’re getting ready to sign on
If Adam and Eve had only one commandment,
In this moment there’s also one command that God really emphasizes again and again in all kinds of ways
Don’t worship other gods /
In other words: Don’t get sucked into serving another Pharaoh even before this whole new freedom thing has had time to settle
Do what I say, says God
And I will give you everything! Land! No problems!
I will conquer your enemies, enemies you did not even meet yet,
(never mind this contradicts the law just given about our helping our enemies who are stuck with the flat tires,)
these enemies will be totaled and did I God mention there will be no illness and no problems getting pregnant or getting food to eat
The tradition (Bamidbar Rabbah 16:24) says, “That moment was just like when God was introducing the rules to Eve and Adam in the garden!
God said then and here: You can be like angels, you can live forever, like me.”
“I’ll take care of things you didn’t even know you needed.”
And just like Adam and Eve, who I’m sure nodded solemnly and respectfully when God told them to not eat from the tree
Because they didn’t really know what it was they were promising
Because they had never met temptation nor choice nor scandal nor curiosity nor the seductive rush that comes with claiming unearned power
Just like Adam and Eve nodding solemnly
We, the brand new people of Israel
say, several times, “Sure! Sounds good! All that you said we will do!” “Sign us up!”
And Moses goes up to the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights.
4.
You can practically script the next part in.
Sure, there are some more laws conveyed in between but not even one narrative verse goes by before
We not only worship another god, we go and and build one
Using the gold we took from Egypt
A failure of spectacular proportion
Perhaps we build it out of real fear or despair, it was not so unreasonable to imagine, we were just recently slaves after all
Or maybe, like God planting that forbidden tree right in the middle of the garden and putting a talking, opportunistic, social climbing snake right next to it, we just played our part
Maybe it was a set up
If it wasn’t in Torah I wouldn’t dare teach it
But maybe, I’m just saying, it was God who told us to take the gold out of Egypt into the middle of the wilderness where it would have no possible use
What did God expect?
I am not saying God planted the gold on us and kept Moses away up on the mountain 40 days and 40 nights (which is, last I checked, approximately 33 days longer than the creation of the entire world), and some say Moses was up there even longer than 40 days — I am not saying God did all that so we would build the golden calf —
believe what you want
I’m just saying that perhaps God understands that real freedom is born out of choice,
sometimes, often, even out of the wrong choice, out of rupture
Out of our crashing out of Eden so we can learn to come back
Out of our breaking our first promise at Sinai so we begin to understand what it means to keep a promise, to have one altogether.
Maybe that’s why when Moses smashes the first tablets
The ones written by God’s-own-very-divine-finger
The ones that hold all those simple promises
and eager vows
When Moses destroys those first tablets, God barely reacts
In fact, there’s a tradition that God tells Moses to break them
Or another saying that even if Moses acted on his own, he is lauded by God for this act, it is seen as an act of strength.
5.
And wouldn’t you know, when Torah describes this first set of tablets it says:
וְהַ֨לֻּחֹ֔ת מַעֲשֵׂ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים הֵ֑מָּה
וְהַמִּכְתָּ֗ב מִכְתַּ֤ב אֱלֹהִים֙ ה֔וּא חָר֖וּת עַל־הַלֻּחֹֽת
The [first] tablets were a creation of God
And the writing was God’s writing
Engraved / charut on the tablets
Only the rabbis say, and it is so beautiful
Don’t read charut / engraved, read cheirut, freedom
God put freedom into those first tablets (Bamidbar Rabbah 16:24)
How do you put freedom into laws, into a contract, into a real, covenantal agreement?
You let those laws, that agreement, those promises live in the world, in the gardens with the snakes, in very empty deserts where our fears wait for us.
It is a perilous way but it is the only way.
In fact, I think God put freedom in the tablets when God allowed them to break.
Or maybe God in fact created the first set to be broken, I don’t really know
I just know that the beginning of our freedom and our commitment as a people was born from that rupture, from the smashing of that first set
I just know, that no one tried to glue those tablets back together or pretend it never happened,
I just know a second set was written and was a less ‘top down’ endeavor
And I just know the first set stayed with us, famously, we carried those heavy broken stone pieces around,
And some say we still do
6.
It is a moment in America, a tempting moment
We look around and see our grave mistakes, promises broken, and the wreckage a long denial has brought,
But this shabbat I’ll say from me to you: Don’t be afraid of the phantoms with the flaming swords
Don’t get paralyzed when you see the broken pieces of justice on the ground
Because our Torah teaches us: This is how freedom usually begins.
