Adam awoke on his back; his flesh, the tone and hue of the naked earth, his eyes though, they were filled to the brim with the blue of heaven. "And the Lord God fashioned this Man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." Head up, a newborn, fathoming the unfathomable, a waking dreamer. Is it any wonder that Eve chose to reach forth her hand and seize the Tree of Knowledge?
***
Said Adam: 'I am naked. The four-legged ones, have fur and hide. They rest in the sun, tremble in the breeze, seek shelter in the night. But we are naked. We have not fur or hide.'
Said Adam: 'Woman, what is good and bad? What is death? Why is this fruit different from all other fruits? Do you suppose Knowledge tastes like a lemon or a grape? Death must be where berries go after we eat them.'
Said Eve: 'Look at that four-legged creature with scales! Where is its fur or hide? Why Adam, It touched The Tree! It snatched a fruit! Adam, it--
Let me try first!'
***
They knew they were naked, then, they burnt in the sun and shivered at night. They knew fig-leaf coverings were good, they knew to wither and tremble was pain. They knew worry. They knew fear. They feared the Lord. 'What shall God think of man-made fur and hide? What shall God think of our disobedience?' They hid from the voice that is in every wind and every windless day. They hid from the soundless sound and the furious sound that pursues Man as Ahab once pursued his whale, to the ends of earth and back, to the ends of time. Had they known of Jonah, they would have still tried. Is there a woman or man who has never hid from "the voice of the Lord God walking the garden in the evening breeze?"
***
We think of good and bad as virtue and vice, good deeds and misdeeds, kindness and injury, charity and harm. The serpent, which slivers unnoticed, that crouches at every door, which searches always to bring the mighty low and the low lower, which seeks always to sink its jaws into every heart, yes the serpent is temptation, it is our inclination to sin. But Good and Bad are more than moral terms (not merely good and evil), they are joy and sorrow, they are sacrifice and triumph, they are pleasure and pain, suffering and salvation. The consequences of eating the forbidden tree were powerfully physical because good and bad are not solely categories of the conscience. To reap in joy, one must sow in tears. The raising of children is hardship, but on account of the pain, we laugh and love them all the more. Marriage is no paradise, for any union to grow there must be some diminishment of the self. We are beholden to our love for the other, as Eve was to Adam, as every man must, who leaves home to cleave to his wife. What would love be without our ever knowing its absence? How would we come to love the few short days we walk this small rock if never once we felt that gaping chasm of mourning? The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Knowledge of Joy and Sorrow. Treasure the good fruit...may it always outweigh the bad.
***
Exile was never meant as a punishment, it was a precaution. "Now that the Man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad, what if he stretch forth his hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat, and live forever." We were not thrown out because we ate of one fruit, we were thrown out lest we be tempted to eat another. Eternal life, and its pursuit, was deemed more deadly than knowledge and her many fruits.
For to seek eternal youth is to tar the Tree of Knowledge with pitch and feather, to paper over evil and disappointment, to dismiss all that is painful and vanish every negative thing in a dissipating cloud of oblivion.
Life eternal is escapism. It is pure fantasy that our days will never come to an end, that there can be profit without labor, that satisfaction can be seized without sacrifice. It is an illusion of enduring power that all the love in the world can be had, that childhood beauty can be retained, that innocence can be clung to forever. "Let his days be a hundred and twenty years," says Scripture. The striving for the Tree of Life is vanity and empty wind.
Man is born face to the sky. His potential is near limitless. Reach for the fruit of one tree, beware the fruit of the other.
