Imu Shalev: I’m Imu Shalev and this is A Book Like No Other. We’re on episode three of mine and Rabbi Fohrman’s trek through the Garden of Eden. And coming off the cliffhanger from last time, things were feeling suspenseful: 

Rabbi David Fohrman:  Imu,. I'll tell you the truth, in my off camera or off mic time pondering this stuff, it's been kind of mind bending for me. How's it been for you?

Imu:  I am on the edge of my seat, just a lot of anxiety here. 

Imu: The source of all that anxiety: the one-tree theory. That wild possibility that the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil and the Tree of Life were one and the same. Brilliant insight or absolutely bonkers? I really wasn’t sure. There was a lot of good evidence for this theory. In case the last episode isn’t fresh in your mind, I’ll recap quickly. 

First, there’s Deuteronomy 30:15, which seems to almost equate the trees and the Torah, as if the trees were some kind of early Torah prototype. Now, most days, that would be mind blowing enough. Because we tend to think of Torah as a text, or a body of commandments. But Rabbi Fohrman argued that the trees in the garden were meant to nourish us, body, soul and the two combined.  And that’s a beautiful way to think of Torah.

But then, Rabbi Forhman went a step further. Occam’s razor: If the trees are Torah, and there’s one Torah… Maybe there’s only one tree.  Maybe… no one less than Rav Yosef Kimchi seemed to think so. And this reading really helps with some textual problems. Chief among them, when the snake asks Eve which tree she can’t eat from, she seems to answer it's the Tree of Life. Big problem if there are two trees. Problem solved if there’s one. So why and I feeling  all this anxiety? Enter Genesis 3:22, one little verse that seems to have the power to topple this whole theory to the ground. And that’s where Rabbi Fohrman and I pick up in today’s discussion. 

How Many Trees Were in the Garden of Eden?

Rabbi Fohrman: . The real theory killer, Chapter 3 Verse 22 and 23: 

וַיֹּאמֶר  ה’ אֱלקים הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע וְעַתָּה  פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם׃

And the Lord God said, “Now that mankind has become like any of us, knowing good and bad, what if one should stretch out a hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat, and live forever!”

This verse seems to settle the question of whether there was one tree or two trees. It seems to unambiguously tell us, This theory is a nice try but obviously there were two trees. Why? Because now that mankind ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “וְעַתָּה  פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים,” what if he also eats from the Tree of Life? It really sounds like there are two trees (Genesis 2:22). 

Imu:  That word is, "גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים." Also.

Rabbi Fohrman:  "גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים," also, really sounds like another tree. And also, let's say it's one tree, if it’s one tree, he already ate from that tree. So if he already ate from that tree, and that tree has the quality of being a Tree of Life --

Imu:  Then he's already going to live forever.

Rabbi Fohrman:  He's already going to live forever. What's God worried about? You already ate from the tree. That's the Tree of Life too. It's only one tree so how come he's not living forever? Well whatever reason he's not living forever by the first bite,  will be the reason he's not living forever by the second bite. So what are you so worried about that he's going to take another bite of the tree? It seems like there's just no way out. There's obviously two trees here. So how is it that we deal with this verse?

The Prohibition of Eating from the Tree of Knowledge

 Imu: Rabbi Fohrman had a possibility in mind. What if the problem wasn’t in the versus themselves, but in the assumptions we were making in what it meant for the two trees to be one. To see that we had to step back and unpack what those assumptions were. 

Rabbi Fohrman: What does it mean to say that both trees are one tree? This is the crucial question. And let me pose that question to you, Imu. What makes this tree a Tree of Knowledge or a  Tree of Life? In other words, if the tree has both qualities to it, then how do you know which one it is at any given moment?

Imu:  I just can't get away from Hashem and Elokim. So there's the Elokim tree and there's the Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei tree. Ok, quick recap part two. As we said last time, Elokim represents the God of power and doing, the big CEO in the sky side of God. The side of God we access via the Tree of Knowledge. Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei is the nurturing God of compassion, who just wants to be with us. And who we connect with via the Tree of Life. But this duality, it’s just a matter of perspective, which lens we happen to be looking through at the time. So, what I meant was that, maybe, the tree was like that too.  And That was Rabbi Fohrman’s first thought also. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  So that was immediately where I went to in my head at that time. I said, okay, I know exactly what's going on here.. There are these two aspects to the tree and what makes it one tree, or the other is whether you're thinking Elokim or whether you're thinking Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei. If you're thinking Elokim then you're thinking judgement. You're thinking good and evil.. So then the Tree of Knowledge is what it is. But if you think, that a loving God is the source of our life, then it's the  Tree of Life.

God’s Name and the Two Trees 

Now if I would have to boil that down to one sentence, Imu, what determines at any given moment what tree it is, is  your mindset.

Imu:  Right. You're saying it’s a matter of human mindset, a matter of  perspective.  If I look at the tree in an Elokim sort of perspective, whatever that means, it's going to be a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But if I mock this just a little bit, if I squint a little bit and I cock my head just so, then it's the Tree of Life. Is that what you're saying?

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yes.  My first instinct was, sure, it's just a matter of mindset. To borrow an analogy from the world of science, it's a Schrodinger's cat kind of tree.

There's this famous Schrodinger's cat experiment. In quantum physics,  there's this paradox of light, is it a particle or is it a wave? At some level the answer is it depends on what you're looking for when you look at light. If you're doing an experiment which requires particles to show up then light will dutifully show up as a particle. If you're doing an experiment which requires a wave to show up, then light will dutifully shed its particle status and will look purely like a wave. Light will become a chameleon depending on what you want it to be. So maybe the Torah is  like light? And it seems like a really attractive notion.  The problem is it doesn't quite jump through all the hoops in the verses.  Here’s why, let's play it out. If we're right, so then when God says, Imu, I'll play God and you play man. Imu, eat from all the trees in the garden --

Imu:  He always does this, by the way, he never lets me be God. I always have to play man.

Rabbi Fohrman:  You can play God if you want but I know it's easier in this experiment if I -

Imu:  You got it (laughter).

Rabbi Fohrman:  I say, Imu/Adam, eat from all the trees in the garden. They're wonderful, There's just one thing.  I want you not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. So now interpret my words according to this theory - what has God just told me?

Imu:  You want me not to perceive the tree as a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil when I eat from it?

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yes. And how instead, by implication, should I view the tree? 

Imu:  I'm welcome to eat of its fruits so long as I’m perceiving it as a Tree of Life.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right. What He really means is, don't see Me just as Elokim when you eat from the tree, see Me more multi-dimensionally than that. See the tree, therefore, as a Tree of Life, don't just see it as a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Imu:  I think I know where you're going. Is your point here that if God really wants man not to cognize Him only as Elokim, he wants him to cognize Him as Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei. Then that means that if man ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the very first thing that God should want man to do was to run back, see the tree as a Tree of Life and eat from it. Not --

Rabbi Fohrman:  Absolutely.

Imu:  God wouldn't freak out and be like, oh no, he's going to eat from the Tree of Life. God should want that. That's the antidote.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Exactly. That's the antidote. In other words, if what makes the tree a Tree of Life is purely mindset and if what I'm upset about is your mindset, that you've seen Me the wrong way, then the antidote is that I want you to see Me in the right way. 

Imu:  Or a whole way. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right. So why would I keep you away from the tree lest you fix your sin and come to a proper understanding?

Imu:  I'm with you.

Rabbi Fohrman:  That feels to me like a fatal problem – or it's a fatal problem for the notion that what makes it a Tree of Life or a Tree of Knowledge, is mindset. It can't be mindset because then God should be happy for us to adopt the right mindset.

Imu:  I'm at the edge of my seat again.  I don't think it's two trees. I don’t think it’s one tree.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Okay, good. Which means that if it's going to be one tree, the only way this theory can survive is if there's another thing that changes, that determines whether it's a Tree of Life or a Tree of Knowledge, other than straight mindset. Let me put it to you this way, it's not that the tree is a chameleon that it could suddenly turn into a Tree of Life or a Tree of Knowledge. What if we took a simpler way of viewing it, which is there's an aspect of the tree which is a Tree of Knowledge and there's another aspect of the tree which is a Tree of Life. In other words, a tree with many parts to it.

Imu:  So you're saying physically?  This is what's mind bending for me here. So how much of this is spiritual heebie-jeebie metaphor and how much of this is an orange?

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right. What if it's really simple? 

Imu:  Are you saying it's like a tree with two fruits on it? 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Maybe. 

Imu: I was on the right track. Rabbi Fohrman was suggesting that solving this problem lay in breaking the tree down into two different parts. One part that made it in a Tree of Life and one part that made it a Tree of Knowledge. But Rabbi Fohrman had something a little more elegant than two fruits in mind. And it was actually his thirteen year old son who he had to thank for the insight. 

What Was the Real Prohibition in the Garden? 

Rabbi Fohrman: So here the answer is came to me through my son, Avichai. So we were puzzling about this over Sukkot and Avichai noticed something fascinating. Here's what he noticed. Avichai said, take a look at the moment Chava disobeys the command and eats from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil because that's surely the moment where the tree is being related to as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. 

So let's go back and take a look at the verse at the moment that she eats from the tree. Imu, can you read that verse?

Imu:  Sure:  "וַתֹּאמֶר הָאִשָּׁה אֶל־הַנָּחָשׁ," the woman says to the snake, "מִפְּרִי עֵץ־הַגָּן נֹאכֵל." So she's contradicting the snake. The snake said, I heard you can't eat from any of the trees. She said, no, we can, we can eat from the fruits from the trees in the garden. "וּמִפְּרִי הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר בְּתוֹךְ־הַגָּן," and the fruit of that tree which is in the center, or in the middle, of the garden, "אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִמֶּנּוּ," God said you can't eat from it, "וְלֹא תִגְּעוּ בּוֹ פֶּן־תְּמֻתוּן," and you shall not touch it, lest you die (Genesis 3:2-3). 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yes. What do you see in those verses?

Imu:  What do I see in those verses?  "Lo tig'u bo," is sticking out like a sore thumb. God does not say, you can't touch trees, but Eve is like, she's --

Rabbi Fohrman:  So she's clearly wrong when it comes to "lo tig'u bo." That's clearly a figment of her imagination but she's adding it in.

Imu:  Right. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  So aside from her added prohibition that you should not touch the trees, what else strikes you in Verses 2 and 3?What Avichai noticed is that there's a discrepancy from the way Eve is looking at eating from this tree and the way God looks at the problem that people might eat from the Tree of Life.Let's go back to that verse for a moment in Chapter 3. She just told the snake she's not eating from the tree, and then, “וַתֵּרֶא הָאִשָּׁה כִּי טוֹב הָעֵץ לְמַאֲכָל וְכִי תַאֲוָה־הוּא לָעֵינַיִם וְנֶחְמָד הָעֵץ לְהַשְׂכִּיל וַתִּקַּח מִפִּרְיוֹ וַתֹּאכַל וַתִּתֵּן גַּם־לְאִישָׁהּ עִמָּהּ וַיֹּאכַל,”  she saw that the tree was good to eat and she took from its fruits and she ate and she gave to her husband also and ate (Genesis 3:6). 

What Avichai noticed is that when eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Eve and the narrator continually focus on the fruits of the tree. She said it to the snake. We're allowed to eat from the fruits of all the other trees, it's just the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. Remember, she never even talks about it as a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, she just talks about it as the one tree in the middle of the garden, it's the fruits that you can't eat from it. Then when she eats, she reaches out and she takes the fruit, and she eats it. And Now go to the verse about the Tree of Life when God banishes them from Eden. "הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע," now mankind has become like one of us eating knowing good and evil, "וְעַתָּה  פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ," lest he stretch forth his hand, "וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם” (Genesis 3:22). 

Imu: and take also from the Tree of Life and eat and live forever. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Interestingly,  When God talks about the Tree of Life and the fear that man will eat from it, there's no mention of fruit. The word fruit is all over the place in eating from the Tree of Knowledge but nowhere in the fear of eating from the Tree of Life.

Imu:  Are you suggesting that God's worried not that they're going to eat -- oh, interesting, they're not going to eat from the fruits of the tree, they're going to eat the tree?

Rabbi Fohrman:  Exactly. 

The Reason for the Prohibition

Imu: Why would anyone want to eat a tree? Is that, like, a hormonal imbalance? If that’s what you were thinking, so was I. But at the same time, there was something really cool and compelling about Avichai’s observation. When Eve is talking to the snake, she clearly specifies “ וּמִפְּרִי הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר בְּתוֹךְ־הַגָּן אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ,”  God told us we couldn’t eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden (Genesis 3:3). The object of that whole discussion is the fruit. But then flip to our theory killer, 3:22, right before the exile, and just take God’s words at face value. He’s worried that man will stretch out his hand - “וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ “– and take also from the tree. We kept stumbling over these words because we thought also, meant also from the Tree of Life, in addition to the Tree of Knowledge. But Avichai was pointing out really a much simpler reading. It means not just the fruit also from the tree itself, as opposed to just the fruit. So, weird as it may be for God to be afraid they’d want to eat the tree, it does seem to be what the verse is saying.  And looking at the verse, I noticed a clue that began to clarify for me what God’s fear was really about. 

Imu:  There's also something interesting here, which is that it's not just that "וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים," it's, "פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ,”  lest he stretch out a hand (Genesis 3:22). That phrase doesn't seem to be necessary. The verse could have just said “Now that humankind has become like one of us,"לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע, “ knowing good and evil - v'atah pen ikach gam mei'eitz hachayim -  Now, what if he takes also from the Tree of Life. No  “יִשְׁלַ֣ח יָד֗וֹ, “ no hand stretching necessary. Yishlach yado is violence. That word is --

Rabbi Fohrman:  When else do you have "yishlach yado," in Genesis?  “אַל־תִּשְׁלַח יָדְךָ אֶל־הַנַּעַר וְאַל־תַּעַשׂ לוֹ מְאוּמָה” - 

Imu:  That's the Akeidah. Genesis 22:12. It’s the angel saying to Abraham: Don’t raise your hand against the boy or do anything to him. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  It's the ultimate violence. It's Abraham at the Akeidah about to take his child. Later on the Chazal will appropriate the word, "shlichut yad," to be illegitimate violence against someone else's things. God is worried, lest man do violence to the tree itself.

Imu:  Yeah, because taking a fruit is not violent. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  That's right.

Imu:  Wow. This is crazy.

IS: Picking a tree’s fruit doesn’t hurt the tree. But eating the tree – that does, that destroys it. So putting aside why Adam and Chava would want to eat the tree, what was becoming clear was how God saw that desire: as an act of violence. 

Rabbi Fohrman:   So here is what emerges from Avichai's diyuk, Avichai's inference. The fruits of the tree are the Tree of Knowledge of it. In other words, literally the fruits of the tree are knowledge of good and evil, but the tree itself is the Tree of Life.

Imu:  This is mind blowing. So it's the same tree.

Rabbi Fohrman:  It's the same tree.

Imu:  The tree, the bark, the essence of the tree is life but its fruits are the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Are good and evil.

Imu:  That, actually, harmonizes beautifully  with our last session because World 1 is a world of fruits, it's a world of products, it's a world of outcomes, it's a world of results. but the actual essence of the tree --the tree itself is all about source. It's all life, breathing life, giving life. Sure, it produces fruits, but it is the source of life.

Imu: I was trying to put the pieces together. Avichai’s insight helped us understand how to read 3:22. If there was only one tree why was God still worried about them eating from the the Tree of Life, because one was the fruit, the other was the tree itself. But I was noticing how nicely this divide fit with Rabbi Fohrman’s reading of Genesis 2 from last time as well. He’d argued that the two trees nourish different parts of ourselves. As doers in the world, we long for God’s practical guidance. And that’s what the Tree of Knowledge gives us. How perfect that that’s the fruit. Think about it even in English, we say things like the fruit of my labor, or we had such a fruitful discussion. Fruit is a perfect symbol for outcomes and bottomline takeaways. But that Tree of Life, Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei, pure soul connection, now that, very appropriately, was embodied by the tree itself. 

Rabbi Forhman: Think about trees. If you read a book like The Hidden Life of Trees, they're incredibly sophisticated creatures. There's neural networks in trees that make the entire forest. Some sort of, you know, huge living organism that interacts with each other, That cares for one another, keeps stumps alive. But no tree has a brain. It's just being.I mean, I remember having this visceral reaction.We were hiking through Huddart Park, there's a gorgeous redwood forest. I'm there with my son and I was just struck at how silent it was. and I turned to Avichai and said, it feels like we're all alone. He says, we're not all alone, look at all these trees. Then it struck me, it's true. There was all these silent trees and these trees aren't alone, they're in relationship with one another. I'm supposed to be in a relationship with them too. There's a whole world of life here that's quiet, it's silent. These aren't trees that do. The whole doing part of life is not the domain of a tree. A tree knows about just what does it mean to be? to experience this world, to experience my life in connection with other trees, in connection with the earth, in connection with the air.? 

Imu: And for no tree is this more true than the Tree of Life. Remember, last time, through our reading of 2:7 and 2:9, Rabbi Fohrman argued that the whole purpose of the Tree of Life in the garden was to connect us to God, by being a source of God’s heavenly breath. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  There are leaves on this tree that exude heavenly oxygen that you're meant to just embrace and take in. Which is why Solomon said, "eitz chayim hi," not "l'ochlei piriyo," it's not a Tree of Life to those who eat of its fruits, "eitz chayim hi lemachazikim bah." It's a Tree of Life to those who are willing to grab a hold of that. He's telling you the mode of how you access the chayim(life)  of the tree.

Imu:  That makes so much more sense. It makes so much more sense than saying, "eitz chayim hi l'ochlei piryio." No one would have said, hey this is terrible poetry.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Of course, that's what he should have said.

Imu:  But we sing, "eitz chayim hi lemachazikim bah." When was the last time you held a tree? It's very counter intuitive and yet that's the only way to interact with the Tree of Life without being violent toward it. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Which is the answer to why God doesn't have to tell me about the Tree of Life. All God has to say is there's a tree in the middle of the garden. Don't eat its fruits. What should I do? Just hang out in the garden. Eat all the other trees. Hang out. It's an impressive tree. Look at it. Breathe it. Be with the tree. Just bask in its beauty. Maybe sidle up to the tree one day. Hold it. It's there for you. That's the magic of the Tree of Life.

Imu: This whole tree hugging thing may seem a little speculative. But it was actually based on a very close reading of our old friend chapter 2, verse 9. 

Rabbi Fohrman: listen to the verse. "וַיַּצְמַח ה’ אֱלֹקים מִן־הָאֲדָמָה כׇּל־עֵץ נֶחְמָד לְמַרְאֶה וְטוֹב לְמַאֲכָל" 

Imu: And God caused to grow from the ground every tree that was pleasing to behold and good for food  (Genesis 2:9). 

Rabbi Forhman: So we know that there are two ways man can relate to all these trees. They're beautiful to look at, and they're delicious to eat. And God says "mikol eitz hagan achol tocheil" From all the trees of the garden you shall surely eat (Genesis 2:17).. By implication, should you also look at them? Of course, you can look at them and you can eat them, but the reason why I'm mentioning the eating part of it is because I'm contrasting it to the one tree b'toch hagan you shouldn't eat from. So therefore what should you do with it? The answer is you should look at it. That's how you relate to it. It's the tree that you just hang out with.

Imu: Just behold it. Just be with it. So, now, we had a reading for 3:22 – Adam and Chava ate the fruit; God was worried they’d eat from the tree itself. Plus we had a way more robust picture of how these special trees, I mean how this special tree provided its different forms of spiritual nutrients. Knowledge of good and evil was packed into its fruits and that is what was off limits. The tree itself nurtured our very souls with God’s breath. All in all, the one tree theory was saved! The mystery of Eden’s setting was solved!  Well, it’s been fun. See you later. 

No, I’m still here. We may have figured out the mystery, but we were far from understanding what it meant. There was still this question: why after eating the fruit would Adam and Eve want to eat the tree itself? And here’s another one: why couldn’t Adam and Eve hang out with the tree and eat its fruits from the get-go? This last question is a variation of one we’ve asked here before: Why would God want to keep knowledge of good and evil from us? Now, Rabbi Fohrman has  already suggested that, maybe, God never intended for the restriction in the garden to be forever. There’s even a midrash that says as much. So, the question isn’t really why couldn’t we eat the fruit. But why did God want us to wait to eat them and just hang out with the tree first? I have to tell you, this question was genuinely eating at me. So, between sessions, I sent Rabbi Fohrman a voice message about it and that sparked a conversation I think you should hear:

Two Trees in the Garden of Eden Become One

Imu: did you get a chance to listen to the voice notes I left you earlier today?

Rabbi Fohrman:  They were voice notes about what we're doing?

Imu:  Yeah.Do you mind just listening to those? 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Sure.

Imu (Recorded):  Hey, good morning. Just wanted to let you know that I've been playing with one of the ideas 

Imu: The voice note goes on to describe how that shabbos I’d shared what we’d been learning at my table. Since no one else had Chumashim, I kept rereading the verses. Especially the one about God creating all the trees. Saying that verse over and over, I noticed a pattern. The first part of it describes the regular trees in two ways: "nechmad l'mar'eh v'tov l'ma'achal," pleasant to behold and good for food. While the second part of the verse also gives us a pair, the two special trees:  Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge. So it’s two sets of two, one after the other. And they seem to parallel each other. Rabbi Fohrman had already made a connection between nechmad l’mar’eh and the Tree of Life. Just beholding is a very  Tree of Life way of relating. But that connection holds true for tov l’ma’achal and the Tree of Knowledge too. Good for food captures such a Tree of Knowledge approach where you’re asking what’s the utility or value of whatever you’re assessing. It was like these descriptors were instructing us how to embody the trees. Seeing it this way, Rabbi Forman’s insight that we were meant to relate to the Tree of Life first, before eating its fruit became more significant to me too. It’s not intuitive that relating to the  Tree of Life should come before relating to the Tree of Knowledge. But that beholding should come before eating – something about that did ring true. But that’s not the only thing. Listen to how Eve describes the tree when she’s talking to the snake: 

וַתֵּ֣רֶא הָֽאִשָּׁ֡ה כִּ֣י טוֹב֩ הָעֵ֨ץ לְמַאֲכָ֜ל וְכִ֧י תַֽאֲוָה־ה֣וּא לָעֵינַ֗יִם וְנֶחְמָ֤ד הָעֵץ֙ לְהַשְׂכִּ֔יל

 the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom. 

(Genesis 3:6).

Very similar list, right? Except Eve switches the order! The first thing she says is that the tree is tov l'ma'achal. It's good for eating. And I couldn’t help wondering if that switch was somehow a catalyst for what happened next, you know, actually eating the forbidden fruit. I was really curious to hear what Rabbi Fohrman had to say about all this. Maybe Eve’s switch was just a coincidence, a negligible difference. But, on a personal level, it made me think of so many different situations, times my kids are upset, or I’m struggling with a colleague at Aleph Beta. And at times my first impulse is to take a Tree of Knowledge approach. To assess the situation – what’s the best outcome here? And then jump into action to get that. But when I choose nechmad l'mar'eh, to take a  Tree of Life approach first, meaning just to listen and appreciate the other person, it inevitably leads to richer connections. 

Imu: So anyway, It really does seem like a key to living a good life is, can you approach nechmad l'mar'eh and then tov l'ma'achal? Okay. I'll stop here. But mostly what I want to communicate is that it matters to me a great deal. It's very moving.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Hey, Imu?

Imu:  Hey. What's up? Hi.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yeah. I agree. One of the ways I would put it is that essence always has to come before fruits. The fruits themselves are the product of the trunk.. The trunk needs to be related to before you can relate to the fruits, So at some level, that's what it is. To put it another way, there's something unapproachable about God or about this tree that requires me to hold back, I can't have it for a while. So to me, what happens is that when you take yirah (fear) and you combine it together with ahavah (love), then you get something really mind-blowing.

Imu: Here’s what I heard Rabbi Fohrman saying: in our relationship with God, as in all relationships, some restraint is a good thing. It forces you to behold first before tasting, as it were, meaning before you benefit more directly from the relationship. And ultimately this restraint enriches the tasting. But Rabbi Fohrman was actually saying something a little more than this. Because the way I just described it, that still has a utilitarian bent to it – wait now and the experience will be more enjoyable later. For Rabbi Fohrman, beholding before eating, wasn’t just about the joys of delayed gratification. It was a value in and of itself. A way of honoring the other person, regardless of what you ended up getting from them. 

Rabbi Fohrman: The fact that I am beholding without tasting you, why am I doing that? I'm not doing that just to enhance my own pleasure. It does --

Imu:  It's sort of beholding its integrity, to some extent. It's no longer in service of you.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right, but why am I doing that? Because I respect the thing, and therefore respect demands that I appreciate it as in and of itself before taking from it. Now, why do I respect it? I respect it because of power, because it has --

Imu:  Because it's deserving of respect, and that you're calling power.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yes.

Imu:  Okay. That changes, right? Not everything has the same power. Like, respecting a chicken and the fact that a chicken is a life is very different than respecting a woman, which is very different than respecting God.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right.

Imu:  But each of those things have their own kind of integrity.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yeah. In each case, at some level you're respecting the power of the thing. You're respecting its demand on you that you just behold it. I'm not just a thing that can be taken at will and even united in love with you. 

Imu:  It's very interesting. You have orlah, when you plant a new tree, you can't eat. You have to respect, then you can eat. When you have an animal, you can't just eat. You have to slaughter, pour the blood on the earth, and then you can eat. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right.. So what's happening, ironically, is that there's lots of different values here. Unless you play it in slow motion, you don't get to see them all unfold. In other words, I might start by saying, well, I'm a Tree of Knowledge kind of guy. I'm just interested in tachlis (practicalities). I want to know the difference between good and evil, because I want to do, I want to do in the world. So then we say, well hold on one second, hold on. There's something else. There's a tree. You have to love the Torah. The Torah is not just something that practically helps you do, you have to fall in love with the Torah first. So you say, okay, you're right. Sorry, sorry, sorry. 

Imu:  What you're saying is so profound. It's so good.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yeah. It's not about doing..  I'm in love with the Torah. But what I don't understand is that my holding back on the doing, and my willingness to love the Torah in a non-consumptive way actually brings another value, a third value into it which even is before love, which is respect. I've respected you enough not to just go for your fruits, not to see you as a thing, a commodity. But now I've respected you, so now when I join with you in love, the love itself is more powerful. It's this merger of love-respect. Now, once I love-respect you enough, now I can have your fruits. That's a whole different thing.

Imu:  Really profound. I think this point about intuition is really interesting, because I do think the way I was raised and the way I think religion is often taught, is actually run to do mitzvot. Run to do mitzvot. It's good, just do, do, do. But if you ever stopped me to say, like, Do you really love God? It's just a whole other lens.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right.

Imu:  To me, the energy of doing and focusing on outcomes is a very different energy than withholding and respecting. They're different energies, they feel like. One is very fruit focused and very doing focused and trying to accomplish things, and respect is the beginning of a demand to behold. First behold. Behold, then love. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  And once you get your being-ness correct, that beholding in respectful loving, then you can bring in the doing of asei’as mitzvoth (performing commandments). But before that, it's toxic, which is why the Tree of Knowledge alone is toxic.

Imu:  Crazy.

Rabbi Fohrman was adding such a layer of nuance to my observations about nachmad l’ma’areh and tov l’ma’achal. Why did God want us to hang out with the Tree of Life first, before eating its fruits? The simple answer is building a loving relationship always has to come before just benefiting from what someone or something else has to offer. 

But Rabbi Fohrman was answering a deeper question than that. I think, implicitly, he knew that if love was all the first step was about, God wouldn’t have had the Tree of Knowledge there in the garden at all. Why tempt us? He’d have just made a one hundred percent  Tree of Life paradise and we’d have developed all the love in the world for Him. So there has to be a reason why the Tree of Knowledge was there and we knowingly had to behold it and wait to eat from it. And that reason, Rabbi Fohrman was saying, is that that’s how you develop respect, in addition to love, which is the real foundation of a solid relationship. The kind of relationship God wanted to build with us in the garden. Beautiful, right?

But here was another layer of nuance to this argument that I found fascinating as well  – it doesn’t take a genius to know you shouldn’t use someone without caring for them. But the temptation of tov l’ma’achal is much more subtle than that. When we’re in utilitarian mode, Tree of Knowledge mode, we aren’t necessarily just out for ourselves. We could be taking action for noble reasons. But even then, these actions are hollow without a strong personal connection grounding them. Even more than hollow, Rabbi Fohrman had called the Tree of Knowledge toxic on its own. Which are strong words, but I think what Rabbi Fohrman meant by them will become clear if we jump back into the conversation. Having laid out how our relationship with the tree was supposed to develop, Rabbi Fohrman now turned to how it all went wrong:

Rabbi Fohrman:  I also think it pays to tease out what happens -- how things go wrong when you don't have those first two stages. I think the snake's temptation is already several things down the road. The snake said, don't you want to be like God, having good and evil? That's a very blatant power grab. But let's even go before that. Let's say my real sin is that I'm passing over the Tree of Life, and I'm going straight for doing. So let's say I'm Eve and I have a lishma thing. I say, no, there's this wonderful tree in the world and it's God's words. God's words are meant to guide me in my life, So I'd sure love to know what God thinks about good and evil. That's my first mistake, that I want to know what God thinks about good and evil so that I can live my life before I appreciate the magic of the fact that God is even just talking to me.

Imu:  Yeah. That, to me, already feels tragic because it's so outcome oriented. Like, you want from me my fruits?

Rabbi Fohrman:  What's also really interesting about it is, notice that the other trees are nechmad l'mar'eh. With this tree, it's ta'avah l'einayim.

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman is referring back to Eve’s description of the tree right before she eats the fruit: “וַתֵּ֣רֶא הָֽאִשָּׁ֡ה כִּ֣י טוֹב֩ הָעֵ֨ץ לְמַאֲכָ֜ל וְכִ֧י תַֽאֲוָה־ה֣וּא לָעֵינַ֗יִם,” The woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a desire for the eyes (Genesis 3:6).  Eve switches the order of descriptors, but Rabbi Fohrman was noticing another difference.  Eve and the earlier verse both call the tree tov lma’achal, good to eat. But in chapter 2, the trees are called nechmad l’mar’eh, pleasant to behold, and Eve calls them “ta’avahu l’einayim” desirable for the eyes. Similar concepts, but not a perfect match. 

Rabbi Fohrman:   So, it’s interesting, you have to ask yourself, how did it become ta'avah l'einayim, just not nechmad l'mar'eh? So I don't know how to interpret that. One way to --

Imu:  Why? That makes a lot of sense to me, So the etz is tov l'ma'achal which is inappropriate, that's supposed to come later. Then the einayim (eyes) now get involved. Oh great, eyes are here? That's the beholding one. Maybe they'll get us back on track. But no, now the eyes can no longer even behold in a nechmad kind of way, which is complexity. So tov becomes ta'avah. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Phonologically, tov almost plays off of -- ta'avah. 

Imu:  Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's a total corruption. Tov is theoretically a word that means good, although here it's utilitarian. Then ta'avah is almost like this lie you tell yourself.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Lusting after it with my eyes.

Imu:  Yeah. I'll be satiated if I get this.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right. Lusting after it -- yeah, it's interesting. Anyway, so 

I was just saying, you start with Chava and you say, okay, Chava, why do you want that tree? And she says, well, I really want to know God's value system. Why? Well, it would really be useful for me in my life to be able to make decisions, to have this objective value system of good and evil. I'd really like to do that. But if I'm doing that without loving God through the -- my only way that I can love God, again, the idea is that God isn't in the world. But if I'm not loving God in this tree, I'm just consuming what God has to give me in this tree, so then what happens is, in the absence of love, really all I'm left with is the utility. Once I start realizing how big that utility is, I realize how powerful this thing that the tree gives me is. So it's like, wow, I'm really much better off having these concepts of good and evil. That's a really powerful thing to have. So in other words, when you marry love and fear together, that becomes a loving awe. But when you separate them, so it's just straight-out fear and admiration of power, but nothing really more than that.  That's when the snake comes in and the snake says, oh, but you know what? God doesn't really want you to have that tree. Oh, so is God keeping that power to Himself? 

Imu: Rabbi Forhman was describing a really dark slippery slope from desire for knowledge of good and evil to becoming power hungry. But I think it’s a really wise insight – pursuing anything with a coldhearted singularity becomes a kind of power grab. And from there, being so obsessed with power, leaves you vulnerable to being manipulated by someone like the snake, who will try to convince you everyone, even God, is just out for power themselves. By the way, Rabbi Fohrman has some support for this idea about the snake that he didn’t happen to mention in this conversation. Remember in creation story number two God is always Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei -  Elokim? The one exception is when the snake talks to Eve. “ אַ֚ף כִּֽי־אָמַ֣ר אֱלֹהִ֔ים” – Did Elokim really say you can eat from all the trees of the garden? 

Just Elokim. No Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei. It’s like the snake's saying, don’t be fooled. God is just Elokim. And this whole exercise with not eating the fruit? That’s just so He can keep all this power for Himself. That’s the deep lie that the snake tells. And it sends Eve into a tailspin. Which I’ll let Rabbi Fohrman continue to describe: 

Rabbi Fohrman: Well, if what I admire about God is His incredible power, and I am teaching myself to be powerful in that way, it's a very short step to say, a very powerful person who admires power. Wouldn't God admire me even more if I was hyper-competitive for that power, if I wanted a little bit more of it? Before you know it, I want to be the one who makes these distinctions. I want to be the ultimate sayer of good and evil. I want to displace God and be the owner of the tree. It's kind of why power corrupts. It doesn't start corrupting you. It starts with just, like, I'm admiring God, and God is powerful. That's true, but unless you tell yourself the whole truth, you'll be corrupted by that.

Imu:  Really interesting. Do you think that's why -- she does this thing that I just don't understand her motivation for. "וַתִּקַּח מִפִּרְיוֹ וַתֹּאכַל וַתִּתֵּן גַּם־לְאִישָׁהּ עִמָּהּ וַיֹּאכַל" (Genesis 3: 6). Why does she turn around and give it to Adam? I always thought that it was shame, that she actually felt like, if I'm going down, I'm bringing down someone else with me. But You seem to paint an Eve that is really interested in knowing good and evil because she thinks that's the right thing to do. The very first thing she does is actually pronounce good and evil. She actually undoes the only good and evil decree that there ever was, don't eat from this. She's like, oh, I can decide this. This is actually good to eat. So she commands man, almost. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right. Like, if I was Eve, I would say wow, I feel newly empowered in a good, spiritual way. I understand God's values from the inside. I understand these new concepts of good and evil. God has opinions on all of this stuff, and I feel hooked into some of His opinions. It's amazing. Then I see Adam ambling along and I think, like, ugh, I'm supposed to be his mate? He's a yokel.  He's naïve. He's all lovey-dovey. He has no sense of what we could achieve, what we could do, of this incredible power that I have. I'm supposed to love him. I want him to be like me. So I hand him the fruit. But in essence, even though there's some love in what she's doing, kind of, because she wants to love an equal, but the problem is that what she was meant to do --

Imu:  Is nechmad l'mar'eh. She's supposed to appreciate his integrity.

Rabbi Fohrman: What she was supposed to do was, She was supposed to be another human being who could do what only humans could do with Adam, and love him for his humanity and have them both be humans in relationship with God.

Imu:  Instead, she gave him a list of his flaws.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right. So instead, gives him a list of his flaws. and she says, you know, I think I'd respect you a little bit more if you were more than human, if you had these incredible, Godly powers which God doesn't quite want us to have yet, but look how amazing they are. So I'm actually shooting ezer k'negdo (helpmate) in the foot because the whole idea of ezer k'negdo is what real love is, is to love the humanity in your significant other. She's actually loving him for a rejection of humanity and wanting to be something more than that.

Imu:  I think that's profound already. 

Imu:  It's actually one of the hardest things to do in a marriage, is nechmad l'mar'eh, is actually stop trying to change the other person.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yes, right, to be only human and to be able to love someone who's only human. Yeah, that's true.

Imu:  Nice.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Anyway, so those were good points about nechmad l'mar'eh. I think it's beautiful that seeing so much in nechmad l'mar'eh coming before tov l'ma'achal. In her subtle inversion of tov l'ma'achal and then seeing it, as we've done, that tov l'ma'achal corrupts nechmad l'mar'eh to make it into ta'avah l'einayim, which is more of a self-serving thing, is what happens when you really take love out of the picture and don't relate to the tree as it is.

Imu: In episode one, I told Rabbi Fohrman he’d taken the story of Gan Eden from me. After this conversation, I felt like he’d given it back – a richer, fuller version of it. I had a sense of God’s original plan. For the tree. For us. But also how that plan, tragically, got derailed. But there was still that one question I keep mentioning that we hadn’t answered. I could understand why someone might want to eat the fruit, but why in the world would they want to eat the tree itself? Absurd as this may sound, Rabbi Fohrman saw it as the natural outgrowth of everything we’d been saying: 

Motivations to Eat from the tree

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay. Now, Imu, what if I was someone who was obsessed with the fruits? I was obsessed with what I could get from the tree. So now let's play this little game. What do I get from the tree? So I start with knowledge of good and evil. 

Okay, that's great, but if I don't think God loves me, if I don't care about connecting to God, all I care about is rules, there is something hollow at the heart of my relationship with God. I'm not willing to worship Him because I love Him. I'm only willing to worship Him because He's got these rules and I'm enamored with these rules. 

and if I'm the knower of all these rules and other people don't know the rules, I can actually start telling them what to do and I'm the one who's looked at. I'm the one who's admired because I know what to do.  How do you feel, Imu, when everybody admires you because you're the one who knows what to do? 

Imu:  Powerful.

Rabbi Fohrman:  That's a bit of a power trip. You like that power. A powerful person, one who admired only the powerful side of God, might be tempted to think well, maybe I should have a little bit more of that power. He might become power obsessed, right?

Imu: You’d want to eat all the fruit, have all the knowledge. But then… you might want even more power than that…

Rabbi Fohrman:  Then because you hang around the tree, you began to intuit that the tree had another power too. and it wasn't in the fruits. It was in the trunk. It was in the tree itself. The power was immortality itself. If I could only have that if I could only consume not just the fruit, but take in the same way I took in the fruit the tree itself, then I could be immortal just like the tree is immortal. 

Imu:  You sound like a Silicon Valley tech guy. Originally they get into it to try and make the world a better place, and then the tech investor or the tech entrepreneur gets more and more powerful. People give them more and more resources to back their next ventures and build their…By the way, I'm a capitalist. I think capitalism is wonderful, but there is this thing that happens when you become more and more powerful and you solve more and more problems, that some of the Silicon Valley elite start thinking about the last great horizon. and it's sort of spoken hushed at parties in Silicon Valley, but how do we cheat death?

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yes.

Imu:  How do we upload our minds into a cloud?

Rabbi Fohrman:The problem, the tragedy is that God doesn't want you to look at the  Tree of Life that way.

It's true that it's a  Tree of Life because it's an expression of God, the source of all life, but God's not interested in you eating from the tree and actually becoming immortal. That's not the point of the  Tree of Life. The point is while you're alive, you should breathe in from the tree. You should have a taste of eternity while you live in this world. You should enrich your life by connection with God, the source of all life.  but if somebody wasn't interested in love and they were only interested in power, they wouldn't relate to the Tree of Life that way. They wouldn't relate to it by breathing it in. The tragedy is they would begin to destroy the tree in an effort to take the last gift that the tree has to give.  

And therefore God has to protect the tree. That's why He banishes us from Eden.  We think He banishes us from Eden because He can't stand us living forever. I think He's trying to preserve the integrity of the tree.  Later, there will be a time for this tree. I have to keep this integrity of the tree so it will have something to give later.

Imu: To paraphrase the musical Rent, how do you measure a life? Is it quality or quantity? The Tree of Life was supposed to enhance Adam and Chava’s quality of life. But what if they just cared about quantity? They might consume the tree to steal its most essential power. And lose the real gift it could give them. And so  they had to go. With that, the story of the garden truly felt like it had fallen into place. But as I sat back, something Rabbi Fohrman had just said peaked my interest:

Rabbi Forhman:  Later, there will be a time for this tree. I have to keep this integrity of the tree so it will have something to give later.

Imu: Later when? We get kicked out of the garden. Game over. We never see the tree again. Or so I thought.  

Rabbi Forhman: What I want to explore with you next time is the possibility that this isn't the last time we've seen the  Tree of Life. I don't mean metaphorically. That's not seeing the  Tree of Life. Seeing the  Tree of Life is actually beholding this vision. It reappears. The story of the  Tree of Life isn't over.  And once we begin to understand that the two trees are really one, it opens up to us not just the story of the Garden of Eden in a new way, but the rest of the Torah in a new way too.

Imu:  I'm super excited. I can't wait. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Okey-doke. We'll see you then.

Imu: After this session, I turned my tanach inside out looking for the return of the tree. But I got nothing. Give it a try, see what you find. The one thing I kept coming back to was the connection between the tree and the Torah. If the tree was a precursor to the Torah, as Rabbi Fohrman had been arguing, then was revelation the return of the tree? I knew that alone couldn’t be what Rabbi Fohrman meant. He said the tree itself was coming back. That meant trunk, leaves, fruit, the works. But I felt like getting the Torah, tree 2.0, had to be a part of that story. Somehow. And that made me wonder. I thought I knew what happened at revelation. But then again, go back a few weeks, and I thought I knew what had happened in the garden. 

Next time on A Book Like No Other: The tree returns. It really does. And, yes, it changes the whole story. Again. This time, the story of our beloved book, this incredible book like no other. 

But don’t go yet, because there is a mini epilogue to this episode waiting in your podcast feed. Rabbi Fohrman and I explore some amazing implications of the idea that the Tree of Life was meant to extend quality, not quantity of life. 

Credits

This episode was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and Imu Shalev. It was edited by Tikva Hecht, with additional edits by Evan Weiner. Audio editing was done by Hillary Guttman. A Book Like No Other’s senior editor is Tikva hecht. Adina Blaustein keeps all the parts moving. 

BONUS

Imu:  Hey, That was amazing. That was crazy. I didn't think you were going to be able to tie it up like that. but this is really compelling. Really compelling. What's it called? Chava touching the tree now makes sense.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yeah.

Imu:  Is she not allowed to touch it? Possibly. If you approach it --

Rabbi Fohrman:  Well, first of all, it could be that she exaggerated with lo tigu bo. It could be that that would be an embrace and that would be okay and tragically she was like no, we can't even touch it. 

Imu:  I'm not sure. Maybe it's lo tochlu mimenu v'lo tigu bo is --

Rabbi Fohrman:  Just watch it.

Imu:  Yeah. You're really supposed to --

Rabbi Fohrman:  Just watch it.

Imu:  Tigu bo you may not need to take it literally, especially -- don't eat from it, don't --

Rabbi Fohrman:  Don't invade it.

Imu:  Don't invade it.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Right. Lo tigu bo would be don't take off its bark. Don't just be so enamored that you start taking things from it. It has to just be there.

Imu:  All right. Farewell. Excited for the next session.