The Tree of Knowledge

What's that all about?

Man was created with a mind, and was charged with using it to his best advantage. This is the essence of the commandment: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”, a commandment given to the entire human race, and not just to the Jews.

Man is the only mobile creature on earth that isn’t born with instincts. We have to use our powers of reason, and starting with the knowledge passed down to us by other thinkers, use those powers of reason to survive.

So the story of the Tree of Knowledge seems a bit contradictory. It sounds, at first take, to be saying that knowledge is bad, and that we essentially stole it, and were punished for it.

There are a lot of misunderstood stories in the Bible. None more misunderstood than this one. Here’s what really happened:

When Adam and Eve were created, they were plopped down into the Garden. The Garden, like everything else in the world, belonged to God, by Creator’s right. He made it, He can decide what to do with it. God told them that they could eat anything in the Garden except for the fruit of one tree. Fair enough.

It’s widely held that the sin of Adam and Eve lay in eating of the Tree of Knowledge, and that this story is fundamentally anti-intellectual. But that’s wrong. In the first place, that’s not what the Tree was. If we look at the Hebrew, we see that the Tree is actually called, “The Tree of Knowledge, Good and Evil. (Etz ha-da’at, tov va-ra)” The word translated as “knowledge” is Da’at.

In Hebrew, there are three basic types of knowledge:

1. Factual/Identification Knowledge (Da’at)

2. Practical Knowledge, or Wisdom (Hokhmah)

3. Theoretical Knowledge, or Understanding (Binah)

To use a simple example, Da’at is when I look at a light switch and know that it’s a lights witch. Hokhmah is when I know that flipping that switch one way will turn the light on, and flipping it the other way will turn the light off. Binah is when I understand that flipping the switch to “on” closes a circuit, allowing electrical current to flow through the light bulb.

Good understanding is understanding that most nearly approximates perfect knowledge of how the world works. If my understanding of the lightswitch is that there’s a demon inside it, and the switch flicks him in the rear end so that he glows with anger, producing light, I have a bad understanding. Why? Because as we know, that’s not how it works, so trying to derive further knowledge from that understanding isn’t going to lead anywhere (except possibly the plot for a fantasy novel). So understanding can be good or bad.

Good wisdom is wisdom that works best. Throwing a bucket of water onto the light switch may result in the light going out, but it is a bad method, because it has bad side effects, like blowing the circuits of the whole building, or sparking and starting a fire. So wisdom can be good or bad.

But factual knowledge is only true and false. The biggest error in the world today is the perception that facts can be good or bad. Is it bad that a person jumping off of a high building will probably die? No. It’s a fact. Jumping off of that building may be unwise (if the person isn’t interested in dying, for example), but the rejection of unpleasant facts is the reason why the world is in the mess it is today. Good and bad are null terms when it comes to Da’at.

Anyway, back to the Garden. Man was created with the ability to distinguish between good and evil. He was created with the ability to choose to do good or to do evil. When the serpent came along and gave Eve a rationalization for the evil act of theft (oh, didn’t you realize that the first sin was theft? — that fruit didn’t belong to them), she had the choice to use her mind or to be swayed by the faulty logic of someone else. She blew it. And then when she “played serpent” to Adam, he had the same choice, and he blew it too.

What was the fruit? As I mentioned before, the Torah calls it, “The Tree of Knowledge, Good and Evil.” עץ הדעת טוב ורע. Commentators have commented on the strangeness of this term. Because we would expect something like the usual mistranslation: “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” עץ דעת טוב ורע. But that’s not what it says.

The fruit of that tree was poison. A moral poison. It was a drug that caused a kind of moral synesthesia. Synesthesia is when a person’s sensory input gets all screwed up and he sees flavors and hears texture (for example). The fruit caused Adam and Eve to perceive good and evil in facts. Which is why one of their first reactions after eating the fruit was to notice that they were naked, which they had obviously known before, and get embarrassed. Before eating the fruit, they saw they were naked and thought, “Okay, we’re naked.” After eating the fruit, they saw they were naked and thought, “The fact that we’re naked is bad.”

All the of the punishments Adam and Eve received for eating the fruit were simply the consequences of perceiving the world in a warped fashion. Childbirth was always accompanied by pain. But it never would have occurred to Eve before eating the fruit to think of that as something bad. It just was. Now it was a curse. Raising food to eat always required hard work. That is the nature of the world. Now it was a curse.

Interestingly enough, the Sages tell us that when the Children of Israel received the Torah, they were miraculously returned to the state of Adam and Eve before the sin. Seemingly unrelated to this is the Torah’s description of the Revelation, where we are told that the Israelites “saw the sounds” that were coming from Mount Sinai. Was this related to their minds being readjusted to correctly perceive the world around them?

But if the Children of Israel were as Adam and Eve were, then they needed to be tested again. This time, the “serpent” was the “mixed multitude” that came with them out of Egypt. And the temptation was the Golden Calf. And we blew it again.

Most of the world’s ills today stem from people trying to evade the consequences of their own actions. Of their own choices. Those consequences are simply a fact. But perceiving them as bad induces people to try and fake reality.

I’d go into examples of that in daily life, but that would make this a very long post. So I’ll save it for later.

Shabbat Shalom.