OCTOBER 15 • 2020 | 27
Spirit
torah portion
T
he story of Adam, Eve
and the forbidden fruit
is commonly studied as
a story about disobedience.
God gave Adam and Eve a
single (negative) command-
ment: Do not eat from the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
From this story, Jewish
Torah commentators
constructed one of the
pillars of Jewish belief:
the requirement to
observe Divine com-
mandments or reap the
consequence.
Yet, observance
of commandments,
importance notwith-
standing, is not the only
message that this story
conveys. Between the
moment of disobedience when
Adam and Eve eat the for-
bidden fruit and the moment
when God inflicts punishment
on them, there is a crucial step
that we sometimes overlook:
Adam and Eve, offered by God
a chance to accept responsi-
bility, choose to pass the buck
instead. Adam, in response
to the question, “Did you eat
of the tree from which I have
forbidden you to eat?” shifts
blame from himself to Eve and
even to God: “The woman
you put beside me gave me
of the fruit and I ate.
” Eve, in
response to, “What have you
done?” blames the serpent.
That’
s when God imposes pun-
ishment.
The sequence of actions sug-
gests that God is not angered
by the choice to disobey, per se;
but rather their failure to accept
responsibility incurred Divine
wrath and elicited God’
s harsh
punishments. Adam and Eve
made not one but two unwise
choices: eating the forbidden
fruit and then failing to accept
responsibility, but are driven
out of paradise by the second
poor choice. In other words,
this is a story about choice and
responsibility and understand-
ing consequences. The
human ability to choose
wisely or poorly drives
this story.
In a world where Adam
and Eve have everything
and know nothing else,
their inability to under-
stand that choices have
consequences and even
that consequences exist
should not surprise us.
This also explains the
meaning of their Divine
punishments. Life will now
have challenges and difficul-
ties that will build character,
including the ability to under-
stand that actions and choices
have consequences.
This is the first of many sto-
ries in which biblical figures are
given a choice and, depending
on whether they choose wisely,
they’
re rewarded or punished,
beginning later in this week’
s
Torah portion with Cain.
This is the first step toward
constructing a paradigm
that Jews have lived by ever
since. The ability to choose
is a Divine gift that must be
handled with care, among
other ways by recognizing and
accepting responsibility for the
choices we make.
Dr. Howard N. Lupovitch is an asso-
ciate professor of history at Wayne
State University and director of
WSU’
s Cohn-Haddow Center for
Judaic Studies.
Parshat
Bereshit:
Genesis 1:1-
6:8; I Samuel
20:18-42.
Howard
Lupovitch
Choosing The
Right Path
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