Paradise Outgrown

Rabbi Harold Kushner (not the Rabbi Lawrence Kushner about whom we wrote a month ago, but , rather, the Rabbi Kushner famous for When Bad Things Happen To Good People) has written half a dozen or so very helpful little books. In one of them, How Good Do We Have to Be? this Rabbi Kushner suggests a completely different kind of reading of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

You know the story itself without looking – God tells Adam and Eve that they can have anything in the garden, except that they are not allowed to eat fruit (Genesis never says “apple,” by the way) from one tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Well, this serpent seduces Eve, Eve eats some of the forbidden fruit, gets Adam to eat some, too, and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly, they both realize they are naked and create the first ever foliage-based fashion statement so they can cover their boy and girl parts. And then, that evening when God is taking God’s nighttime stroll in the garden, Adam and Eve hide. But God, being God and all, finds them, and they start spinning excuses and blaming each other and whatever else comes to mind. And then God punishes them and tosses them out of the garden, and burdens them with the hard realities of life – work, desire, pain, childbirth, aging, and the prospect of death.

And you know without thinking about it the classical response to this old story; all sorts of goofy stuff have become essentially articles of faith for entirely too many. A priori, women are to be regarded as sources of evil, vessels of sin and seduction. No matter what, this tradition says, disobedience and sin are carved into our genetic code (well, maybe not carved into our genetic code, because then they’d have to admit there was something to science and all that). God wants us to be perfect, but because of Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience, and because of what God does to Adam and Eve afterward, we can never be perfect. And when we are less than perfect, God will punish us. Talk about your “lose-lose” situation!

In How Good Do We Have to Be? Rabbi Kushner dismisses this traditional interpretation by first understanding the story as being “true” without being “historical.” And then he suggests that John Milton and others missed the point of the story. It is not about “Paradise Lost.” It is about “Paradise Outgrown.” “I see Eve,” he says, “as being terribly brave as she eats the fruit. She is not frivolous, disobedient or easily seduced, as later interpreters have insisted on describing her. She is boldly crossing the boundary into the unknown, venturing to discover what lies beyond the limits of animal existence, and reaching back to bring Adam after her…. Eve has given her descendants more than existence; she has given us life”

Rabbi Kushner argues in his very gentle, very sardonic way, that the act of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the commitment to the complexity of human existence and that, because of this complexity, God simply would never expect perfection from us. He says that may of the things we have traditionally called “punishment” – work, desire, pain, childbirth, aging, and even death – are actually gifts of being truly and completely who we are supposed to be: “Work, intimacy, parenthood, a sense of mortality, the knowledge of good and evil – aren’t those precisely the things that separate us from the animal kingdom? Those are the sources of creativity, the things that make us human. They may be painful, but it is the sort of pain that leads to growth.”

And then he goes on to say that religion should not be “the carping voice of condemnation telling us that the normal is sinful and the well-intentioned mistake is an unforgivable transgression that will damn us forever.” Instead he says that it should be something like “the voice that says, ‘ I will guide you through this minefield of difficult choices, sharing with you the insights and experiences of the greatest souls of the past, I will offer you comfort and forgiveness when you are troubled by the painful choices you made.’”

Two things. One, from John Dominic Crossan who says this about the importance of knowing the original context of the Gospels: “ I am convinced that when we get the first century (that is when Jesus lived and the Gospels were written), we will get the 21st century right." Two, from the remarkable professor of world religions Mircea Eliade, who always argued that the purpose of creation stories in any culture has to do with what he called regressus ad originem, or "returning to the origins" to remind the culture of who they were/are intended to be. How would it change how we see ourselves if we could embrace Rabbi Kushner’s notion that the stories of the Garden of Eden had more to do with moving from animal to human, from infantilism to adulthood, than the angry, wrathful, fear-laden interpretations many of us were taught were the “God’s honest truth?”