A saying in a popular section of the Mishnah called Pirkei Avot (”Ethics of the Fathers”), the first of a series of four rhyming Hebrew question-and-answer couplets in chapter 4, goes as follows: “Who is wise? The person who learns from everyone.”
This can mean different things to different people, but to me it means that a wise person is one who is open to enlightenment from improbable and even accidental sources as well as from likely ones. It means, too, that a cultivated knack for posing good questions is more valuable to a wise person than even a massive accumulation of true but often trivial answers. It means that humility is a most precious key to the treasure of wisdom, for it allows a person to learn from mistakes, his or her own as well as those of others. And it teaches young people that if a person wishes to become wise, he or she can because achieving wisdom is less a matter of raw intelligence than it is an acquired feature of character. Not much can be done about the former, alas; but plenty can be done about the latter, and that, all tolled, is very nice to know.
Even so, for as many years as I have credited this Mishnaic saying, I never expected to learn anything of value from the recent Barbie movie. Had I had my druthers, I probably would not have watched it. But living now temporarily with three elementary-school age granddaughters (and their parents) while their house is being prepped for sale, I was--shall we say?--doomed to watch it. I’m very glad I did, for a reason soon to be revealed…..but that is already foreshadowed to the discerning reader in my title and subtitle to this post.
The result is that this post flips back to again consider the interpretation of Biblical text, though not to the level of thick-descriptive detail that characterizes “The Incident at Marah” from January 26. So we will have gone from Biblical exegesis and the incidental mention of the minor Jewish seasonal holiday of Tu Bishvat to consideration of a kindred seasonal holiday from a different culture, Imbolc, last time, and now back to Biblical text en route eventually to the promised Age of Spectacle fare.
I say eventually because that route will first take us by several other topics tentatively titled “Explaining American Electoral Politics to Chinese Nationals,” “How to Tax Advertising,” and maybe a synoptic analysis, not yet even tentatively named, of how the Founders’ design for American government got distorted over time so that the relationship of democracy to the rule of law is now thrown quite far out of whack.
Last by way of introduction, I end this post with a poem about a child and a garden that ties nicely, I think, into what I learned from Barbie about the story of the Garden of Eden. Yes, you read me right: You and I both would have expected me to apply what I knew about a biblical text to my understanding of a Hollywood movie, but that’s not what happened. When Margot Robbie uttered the last line of the movie an electric shiver shot up my spine and suddenly I saw clearly what had previously been at best a vague preconscious muddle. As they say, go figure, and try to be wise.
There is also a happy personal commemorative purpose to showing you this poem. I wrote it more than a decade ago in anticipation of the birth of our first granddaughter (might have been a second grandson but she was not). My wife and I now anticipate the birth of our fifth granddaughter in just a few days—the first baby born to our youngest son and his wondrous wife—if it be the will of HQBH (eim yirtzah ha-shem, as we say traditionally at such moments, so as not to take anticipated blessings for granted[1]).
Now, as may be easily grasped, this first granddaughter—heading toward birthday number 11 in October (not counting the first one, which for some reason we hardly ever do)—is not all that slowly but very surely approaching the nerve-rattling tunnel of puberty. Her first cousin soon to be born now occupies a warmly excited place in my heart similar to that which granddaughter number one held ten and a half years ago. So I am rededicating the poem to the newbette, not yet named as of this February 9 writing, just as when I wrote it her predecessor had not yet been named. The elder cousin will not mind; when the muse arrives again she will have a new poem to ponder. So now to the main task at hand.
What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden
All sorts of people have been pouring over the first chapters of Genesis for many, many centuries; commentary of diverse kinds no doubt could fill entire libraries. We’re not going there, fear not. We’ll merely stick a big toe into a large ocean. But as with “The Incident at Marah,” where I advised readers to familiarize themselves with just six verses of text, here I advise you to re-familiarize yourself with Genesis chapters 1 through 3. See the Barbie movie, too, if you have somehow managed so far to evade it. You can come back to this essay later; it’s not going anywhere. If you’ve seen the movie already, by all means push on, for I’m about to show you an interpretation of chapters 2 and 3 that will knock your proverbial socks off just as mine were knocked a few weeks ago, after which you may say to yourself, as I did: “Well, that’s obvious now that I think about it, so how come I never thought about it this way before?”
The reason that neither you nor I likely thought about it like this before is that by the time we read these starting chapters in Genesis we have already been conditioned into expecting that we know what they mean. This is tragic in a way, since it guarantees that almost none of us read them with a fully clear and open mind. There are basically two templates for contexting and hence bending chapters 2 and 3 toward a pre-cooked meaning: the Christian way and the Jewish way.[2]
The classical Christian interpretation of chapter 2 is that of the fall from grace. To summarize curtly, though not I think unfairly, Adam and Eve’s disobedience was all about sex, and sex is intimately associated with the fallen, sinful nature of human beings. Since all human beings are born though sin, except of course Jesus what with the immaculate conception, all are tainted, “broken,” and so must be saved from without through belief in Jesus as Christ, as soul-savior. This way of reading chapters 2 and 3 fits with most, though not all, of Christian theology’s inclination toward doctrines of predestination and so either implies a flat denial of free will, as in Calvinism, or generates the equivalent of Ptolemaic epicycles to save free will in qualified, angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-pin, psycho-gymnastic form.
Educated Jews throughout the ages have thought that this way of reading chapters 2 and 3 is gratuitously licentious, possibly due to the apparently odd personality of Saul of Tarsus, generative of no end of sexual neuroses down across the centuries, and unconducive to a morality based on human freedom and agency. The text itself in chapters 1-3 says nothing whatsoever about sexual relations between Adam and Eve, and while it describes an awareness of their nudity after they disobey the order not to eat the fruit of a certain tree in the Garden of Eden, it never uses the word “sin” and only uses the word “shame”—in the very last verse of chapter 2—in the negative: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed of themselves.”[3]
So in the traditional Rabbinic view the Garden of Eden story is one of several set-up, launch-into-action passages in Genesis that gets us from Creation to the existence of a social life we recognize as more or less normal. “In a sense,” as James L. Kugel wrote on page 48 of his magnificent 2007 book How to Read the Hebrew Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, “all of reality as we know it was set into motion by the events addressed in these opening chapters.” Anything Kugel writes is better than par for the course; it is at the least a birdie.
To repeat from an earlier post, the traditional Jewish view of human nature is not that of an inevitably “fallen” species. Sure, no one is perfect, as Billy Wilder ordered written on his headstone in a standing gag beyond the grave—he was quoting himself from the last line of his script for “Some Like It Hot.”[4] But the Rabbinic sense is that human nature is essentially autogenic: We humans are, to re-quote Kenneth Burke from “The Phenomenological Factor” (Jan. 22) “the self-completing animal,” uniquely so among all the life forms on the planet, so we have it in our power to shape our individual and collective futures at least to some extent. Our sages advised us to imagine that the scale of justice in our lives, and even in the world at large, is teetering near an even balance and our very next deed will send it lurching to one side or the other.
Remember, too: The Abrahamic narrative is fundamentally covenantal, not fatalistic, hopefully open-ended, not tragically fixed. We see that premise clearly in the words of King David:
What is man that Thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man that Thou thinkest of him?
Yet Thou has made him but little lower than the angels,
And Thou has crowned him with glory and honor.
Psalms 8:5-6 hardly describes a darkly sinful and “broken” species, which is why this passage has challenged Christian theologians over the years and evoked some awkward efforts to get around the plain meaning of the text.
Further to the point, the Sages boldly took the matter a giant step forward, declaring that humankind is higher than the angels, for angels have no choice but to do the bidding of the Lord, but humans do have a choice and often do the right thing even when it appears to spite their immediate interests. This is not just a theological remark; it was and still is a goad to exercise our capacity for moral reasoning and a plea to embrace our own agency. By telling us that we have real choices, the Rabbis, deploying the self-completing premise, have tried to engineer better, less broken-like, human behavior. Whether this has actually worked out as intended remains a matter of perspective and debate; but at least they’ve tried.
How Many Creation Stories?
So you see the difference between the two theological set pieces for understanding Genesis chapters 2 and 3. Good; but now you are about to re-think these early strains of Scripture in a way that does not contrast Christian with Jewish, but that contrasts Jewish with an arguably pre-Rabbinic and even pre-Abrahamic story archetype. I think Genesis chapters 2-3 tells a story that, at least in its original oral form, is very old and that, in its preliterate origin, meant something deeply profound to ancient people that long preceded the overlays of both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.
To see this story archetype you need to study Genesis chapters 1-3 with new eyes that drag no preconceived theological conclusions along with the reading. To ready yourself for that, consider what scholars of the Hebrew Bible define as a work that may or may not be inspired by divine revelation, but that was clearly written, assembled, edited, reassembled, and finally canonized over at least a thousand years in the course of dozens of generations born and passed away. Again, we could spend weeks parsing particulars of the better mainstream scholarship here, but let just a few general observations set the stage for our re-reading.
First, contrary to common assumptions, it is possible to credit secular-method scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and still believe and live as a modern Orthodox Jew. If James Kugel can do it, others can, too. What’s the secret here? Merely to assume the cleverness of the Creator: If God wants to reveal his written word through means at the disposal of human beings, he needn’t do it all at once or even do it in ways that make too clear that this is in fact what he is doing. In other words, revelation can be progressive and be no less real for being a process instead of an all-at-once event.
True, this premise is inherently unfalsifiable. On the other hand, it might be true anyway, just as claiming, as Durkheim famously did, that God is a projection of the human imagination is logically separate from the question of the existence of God, including a canny God who can seed human imagination with an idea of Him. It comes down, as it always does, to a matter of faith—but in this case to a faith not necessarily at odds with knowledge arising from the application of secular hermeneutics. A marriage made in heaven, then? Maybe….
Second, Biblical scholarship agrees that chapter 1 and then chapters 2-3 of Genesis compose two separate creation stories that were stuck together seriatim sometime during the protracted period of assemblage and editing before the whole of the Five Books of the Torah text was canonized around 440-400 BCE. The first version of creation is contained in chapter 1, verse 1 through the end to verse 31. The second version starts with verse 1 of chapter 2—“These are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens”—and continues to the end of chapter 3.
Why do Bible scholars conclude this? Two reasons, basically. First, the deity’s name in chapter 1—creation story A, let’s call it—is “elohim,” a grammatically plural form of the word “el,” or god, while the name of the deity in chapters 2-3—creation story B—is “HQBH elohim,” usually translated as “the Lord God” and pronounced “adonai elohim”—adonai being a substitute placeholder for the Tetragammaton as explained in footnote 1 (now you realize why I made you wade through that). Chapter 2, verse 1, contains the Bible’s first mention of the Tetragrammaton; why it is mashed up with “elohim”—not a common elocution in the Torah as a whole—remains unclear. It may be an anonymous editor’s attempt to create a smoother flow between creation stories A and B.
The second reason for the scholarly conclusion that these are two different accounts of creation stapled together is that a plain reading of the text shows that the accounts are inconsistent. Maybe, some suggest, one account prevailed in the southern Kingdom of Judea after the post-Solomonic political split, the other in the northern Kingdom of Israel, and so to give each kingdom equal time and status both versions were included. Others argue that the first version was a favorite of the priesthood because it culminates with the Sabbath, and that the second had more to do, later on, with mapping arguments over the transition to an agricultural economy from an earlier hunter-gatherer/animal husbandry one. But whatever their origins, inconsistent they certainly seem to be.
In chapter 1 the order of creation is set forth, with plants and animals clearly preceding man—and man and woman are created at the same time.[5] Chapter 2 details a different order: first heaven and earth, then man, then the plants and then the animals, and then and only then woman.
Various Jewish and Christian commentators have been employed over the years with all sorts of logical stretching exercises to save the unitary postulate of the Bible’s authorship, so to refute the argument of biblical criticism on these first three chapters of Genesis. So the claim is made, for example, that the second version of the creation story is just a retelling, with details filled in, of the more general first. And never mind the seeming contradiction of the order of things being created, for we are warned that “there is no before and after” in the Torah. Rashi is one of many who made this case, for example. Is this a persuasive argument? Not to me.
That said, reconciling the two versions is nevertheless not only easy but lesson-bearing, to my way of thinking at least. Chapter 1 is the Hebrew Bible’s account of the clocklike material world’s creation, the how it happened account. Chapters 2-3 is its account of the creation of the cloud-like human world of symbolic meaning, the why it happened account attuned to the more pressing concerns of the Bible’s readers. The human meaning of chapter 1 is background for the fuller meaning of chapters 2-3, which tells us what we were made for--to cite the language used in song in Barbie.
But doesn’t the question still persist? Are the two versions really different in origin or not? Here is my answer: HQBH, we say, is merciful and compassionate….but also clever. If He wanted to arrange the Torah so that separate accounts of creation would one day come together as a complementary whole, and remain that way in canonized scripture for more than 2,500 years, he could have.
The Barbie Factor
Michael J. Miller has saved me the trouble of having to describe the key early scene in Greta Gerwig’s marvelous if somewhat muddled Barbie movie that sends the story spinning forward on its disconcerting journey. The genius of the movie’s way of creating the sharp break between toy world and real world unfolds as follows:
Barbie’s existential crisis begins with thoughts of death. Dancing with all the other Barbies at her Dreamhouse she says, “It is the best day ever! And so was yesterday and so is tomorrow and so is the day after tomorrow and even Wednesdays and every day from now until forever!” The other Barbies cheer and Barbie adds, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” The record literally scratches and the entire party freezes, looking at her in stunned, confused horror. The silence is deafening. Looking down she whispers to herself, “I don’t know why I just said that.” Then she course-corrects, “I’m just dying…to dance.” Everyone cheers and the dancing resumes. That night, tucked into her bed, Barbie calls out, “Goodnight Barbies! I’m definitely not thinking about death anymore!”[6]
But we know she is thinking about it, and that she will also soon be thinking about flat feet and cellulite as, meanwhile, stuff that has always worked perfectly in her world begins to go haywire.
I should not have to say this, but experience has taught me otherwise: Warning, the following double analogy is inexact. (All analogies are, just as metaphors must be literally wrong at least at the margin to work.[7]) What double analogy?
Part one is obvious: Ruth Handler—played brilliantly in the movie by Rhea Perlman—is to the creation of Barbie (no, not the doll and not the movie, but yes the doll in the movie[8]) what God is to the creation of Adam.
Consequently, most of the commentary on Barbie insists that it is generically about becoming human, and some of it is impressively thoughtful. Wrote Santiago Ramos in Commonweal, for example: “Stereotypical Barbie is everything, which is another way of saying that she is nothing. She must become something; she must choose one path.”[9] Ramos doesn’t put it just this way, but he implies that by choosing we become both free and self-constrained simultaneously, a paradox that is the very staff of life. Much of the commentary, too, is feminist in emphasis, arguing that it is mainly about the world and lot of womankind. Nearly all of it, also not unreasonably, notes that the movie is also very much about death.
It is in truth about all these things in part, but the parts add to a larger whole that, as far as I am aware, no one—possibly not even Greta Gerwig, the movie’s creator—has seen it for what it really is. Let’s cut to the chase: Barbie is a story about the passage from childhood innocence, with its characteristic fantasy-inflected nature, to adult realism. It is about puberty, in other words, in this case the puberty of a female. It’s not just about a doll; as the film shrewdly shows, it’s also a meta-commentary about every little girl who plays with a Barbie doll in hopes of growing up to become something like a sentient Barbie—and then, with any luck at all, she does. So the movie is not in its essence just about becoming human; it is about the partly blinding, partly illuminating process of becoming an adult human. It is therefore about recognizing and ultimately accepting the ineluctable twinning of sexuality and mortality, a twinning we ever strain to manage but can never finally separate or solve.
It was only at the very end of the movie, when Barbie informs the medical office receptionist that “I’m here to see my gynecologist,” that I realized that both the Barbie movie and chapters 2-3 of Genesis are about the universal and necessary human ordeal of puberty. And so part two, the more interesting part, of the analogy: Barbie’s movement from floating to falling, sparked by what she admits to be sudden unbidden thoughts of death and ending with the aforementioned jab-to-the-chin final line of the film, runs directly parallel to Adam and Eve in Eden before they eat forbidden fruit (floating), then eat, realize their nudity, and are expelled from the Garden, (falling) into a world where things break, where nature can be unfriendly, where one must toil to till, where women suffer pain in childbirth, and—most importantly—where, having been driven out of the Garden before they might have eaten from the tree of life, death ultimately awaits them and all their progeny.
Now, some readers have concluded in error that God played fast and loose with the truth in chapter 2, verse 17, virtually crediting the con job performed on Eve by the snake. God tells Adam not to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of good and bad, “for on the day that thou eatest of it thou shalt surely die.” But Eve eats the fruit, and gives the fruit to Adam (without, by the way, telling him what tree it is from) who also eats of it, yet neither one of them dies for a very long time. God did not make good on His threat then, right, and by so abjuring made the snake look prophetic?
Not right: Again, Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden before they can eat of the tree of life, so they do die. They become mortal, which is the key point here, whereas had they not disobeyed they at least might have escaped that fate—or they might have disobeyed later and/or differently and so become mortal anyway…..it’s a biblical counterfactual, so we’ll never know. One merely need read the phrase “on the day” as less than humanly literal, for in God’s eyes a hundred years of human life is but a day, the word used as an idiom for an insignificant piece of cosmic time. If this latter consequence were not already clear from earlier context, the text adds in God’s voice toward the end of chapter 3, in verse 19: “. . .in the sweat of thy face thou shall eat bread, till thou return to the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.”
Now think again what this may mean for our understanding of chapters 2-3. Are we told explicitly in the text that Adam and Eve are created as sexually active adults? No, we are not. Adam and Eve are referred to as man and wife, true; but that needn’t entail their acting as sexual intimates in the unspecified but seemingly quite short period between their creation and the portentous speech of the snake. Indeed, their not having engaged in sexual relations before their disobedience and expulsion would fit all the more snugly in Eden, a place where life was easy, dangers were few if any, and no awareness of sexuality or mortality existed because no such phenomena yet existed to be aware of. As the narrative builds in chapter 3, Eve’s getting tricked by a smooth forked-tongue talker, the two of them eating forbidden fruit and getting kicked out of Eden on account of it, can thus be construed as their personal puberty tunnel; only once exited did they truly become adults.
Evidence: The very first verse of chapter 4 records the first act of sexual intercourse mentioned in the Torah, presaging the birth of Cain: “And he man knew Eve his wife and she conceived. . .” The presumption that Adam and Eve had textually unmentioned sex while still in Eden, and that this, and not disobedience was the reason for their expulsion from the Garden, contradicts the entire nature of Edenic innocence.[10] Besides, if God had wished to prohibit any hanky-panky in the Garden, He could have banned it explicitly as he banned the eating of certain fruits--but He didn’t, did He? Because He didn’t need to; it was Eden, after all.
There was no going back either; God’s placement of the keruvim, they of the revolving swords, outside of Eden’s gates saw to that. The point is unmistakable: You can only be a child once, and leaving childhood behind is a bumpy and bittersweet ride. So if you are young, get ready for a testing. And if you are passed your own test, then be compassionate in helping those coming after you.
Puberty is a very big deal in humanity’s experience and always has been. It os not too much to say that it has been a civilizational organizer. So it is hardly surprising that summing up the essence of it in a colorful folktale storyline should occupy a place of pride near the very beginning of any culture’s origins narrative—in the case of the Hebrew Bible a multi-edited written one based on earlier oral versions. Indeed, given how universally important the social and individual experience of puberty is, it would be shocking if some account, even if delivered in roman à clef metaphorical form, were absent.
Puberty is not just a physiological process, though it is certainly that. After conception and birth itself, nothing alters the human endocrine system and body as a whole like the transformation that occurs with puberty. Of course, the outward appearance of human beings going through this transformation is not as spectacular as the metamorphosis of a butterfly or a moth from egg-laying to larval stage to cocoon spinning to chrysalis to flying adult; but on the inside the similarities are closer than the differences.
Not surprisingly, then, the physiological aspect of puberty is matched step for step by an ideational process. Before puberty begins children live in an ideational world bereft of any formed consciousness of either sexuality or mortality, the twinned psychic realities that align with who we are and must be as a living, surviving species. After puberty is complete the resultant young adult lives in a world where consciousness of both sexuality and mortality is unmistakable and irreversible. Once a person sees it for what it is, it cannot be unseen. In between the start and the completion of the process, wandering through the puberty tunnel—best thought of as a verb instead of a noun if you can manage it—entails experiences sometimes dim, sometimes vivid, sometimes pleasant, sometimes shocking, sometimes comforting, sometimes frightening, as glimpses of the discernment being gained steals gradually upon us as we acquire the language with which to assemble it into a conceptual whole.
Indeed, most of us can still remember how new but pleasurable bodily sensations may have mixed with confusion and even night terrors when we first realized what our personal, individual mortality meant. That intense experience is more than enough to account for the initiation rites, including often enough name changes and event-specific incantations, common to almost every ancient culture, and still preserved in most as ritual softened into ceremony. As I have suggested, it would be passing strange if the oldest stories in the Hebrew Bible ignored all this. My strong suggestion is that the Hebrew Bible doesn’t ignore it; only we, our heads having been turned by the sirens of subsequent theological sophistication and elaboration, fail typically to notice it.
Of Snakes, Walking Voices, and Opened Eyes
Just a few more specific interpretations of verse, if I may, out of a dozen or three that could occupy us beyond a passing hint, to make this clearer.
Now, chapter 3 starts off featuring a talking snake. We are used to reading this as though it’s no big deal; of course a snake spoke fluent Hebrew in the Garden of Eden. What other language would a snake speak? It also somehow strikes us as utterly normal that Adam and God converse with one another directly, that God’s voice “walks” in the Garden—whoever heard of a walking voice?—and that God the Creator has to ask Adam if he has disobeyed a direct order and enquire as to where he is….as if He doesn’t know the answers. But leave all that aside and just focus on the snake.
Look, folks, snakes don’t talk now and they never did. But this biblical snake tries to persuade Eve that God is jealous of the possibility that if she and Adam eat of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, then their “eyes will be opened” and they will be like gods, knowing the difference between good and bad (tov va-rah….evil is such a loaded word that I prefer to not use it). That seems, oddly enough if you think about it, to be the pre-eminent definition of a god here: a capacity for moral discernment, not the ability to create which would obviously align better with the story theme as a whole. So, argues the snake, God lied to them about dying from eating the fruit to protect his own prideful status. Sounds more like the behavior of a capricious, inveigling Greek god than it does of an almighty Jewish God, doesn’t it?
This is an oddly cynical interpretation of a divine command that offers no reason for cynicism but, having been denied the maturing benefits of a college education, Eve “falls” for it anyway. The text also waxes figurative with the verb “to see.” Eve “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes”—chapter 2, verse 6—so she munches away and then, in the same verse the text repeats the earlier idiom that her eyes and Adam’s would be “opened.” Obviously, Eve’s eyes were not closed when she saw that the tree was good for fruit and a delight to the eyes. So the opening of her eyes, and Adam’s with hers, must be a metaphor lest it be a blatant contradiction. But a metaphor for what?
Here again, a close reading of the original language is suggestive. Verse 6, as already noted, says that Eve “saw that the tree was good for food, and a delight to the eyes,” but she goes on, “and a tree to be desired to make one wise.” “Wise” is misleading as a common translation here. The Hebrew is “l’haskiel”--root sin-kaf-lamed--which is better translated not as an adjective but again as a verb: to discern, in this case to be discerning or to enable discernment. The Yiddishized noun saykhel comes from the same root, a word usually translated as “common sense” but which is better rendered in our current context as street smarts or savvy, in other words, an ability to see beneath superficial appearances to get to the gist of a thing.
So what does this mean, this cynicism of a talking snake coupled with an opening of eyes that already see quite well, coupled further with this reference to discernment? And how does it reflect back on puberty being the core theme of the story?
The simplest way to answer is just to say that the purpose of discernment here is to be able to distinguish what is real from what isn’t—and a talking snake, as well as eyes that are opened but that saw fine before they were opened, are not fully real. Point taken: But if this story is about the inevitable twinning of sexuality and mortality in adult human life and the development of a consciousness of that twinning, as I contend, then there is more to parse.
What, for example, must the snake represent? Let me ask the question another way: In how many cultures is a snake a metaphor for a penis? Dozens? Maybe hundreds? Call it in American slang a “one-eyed snake” or in other vernaculars something a bit different but, to understate the matter, this metaphor is ubiquitous. So the Christian hunch, let’s call it, that the action in the story is about sexuality is almost on point, but not quite. Sex is not inherently sinful, but it’s no stretch to characterize it as a challenge to understand and control, especially in the civilizationally necessary context of love, parenthood, and the long drawn out task of nurturing children. It demands a variety of moral reasoning modes and talents, and it needs serious capacities for discernment to apply that reasoning to an ever-shifting reality.
I would be remiss if I did not mention here in passing that again—as in the incident at Marah—a tree plays an important symbolic role in the story. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of discernment, let’s now call it, thereby gaining a sense of right and wrong and so are fitted out well for the exercise of moral reasoning in the world beyond Eden. As adults now they are really going to need that sense of moral reasoning, and no God a Jew could recognize as worthy of the term would push them out into that world without it.
But what about that other tree, the tree of life that Adam and Eve did not eat from because they were expelled from Eden before they had the chance? At Marah I interpreted the tree that Moshe cast into the bitter water to sweeten it as a first reference in the Torah to the Torah, for Torah is called a “tree of life to those who hold fast to it.” (Proverbs 3:18) That tree in the Garden of Eden might well have symbolized the Torah too, for surely it deserved a place in a paradisiacal setting. But here is why that tree remained untouched: No one in the pure innocence of childhood, in a paradisiacal world without any consciousness of sexuality or mortality, really needs the Torah. What use is a tree of life when death is absent both in fact and in imagination? Only human adults in the world past the exit of the puberty tunnel need the Torah, and in his mercy God perhaps provided it when it turned out that a generic human capacity for moral reasoning was no longer enough to get humanity through safely to where it needed to go.
Moreover, finally, let’s be honest: Sexual attraction is truly beguiling, and being beguiled implicates a woman’s burden in life more than it does a man’s, for she is the one who mainly ends up bearing the consequences. So she needs to be keen in suspecting ruses from clever snakes--or whatever guys are calling their “members” on any given day--and she needs to arm herself with discernment if she is to hold her own, if she is to successfully defend her dignity and her honor as is both her right and her obligation to others.
So the core feminist interpretation of Barbie is spot on; it’s just that its truth is but a partial one. Puberty furnishes the quintessential steep learning curve for men and women, but for women particularly. Somewhere in the midst of the puberty tunnel all of the complex situational awareness demands that loom over a girl-becoming-a-woman need to join together, before it’s too late. If they do not come together, she may be rendered more fragile than reality may forgive. That, in turn, means coming to grips, one way or another and sooner better than later, both with what brings death—aging, disease, depression, and violence—and with what brings life—intimacy, passion, patience, and courage.
Anyone, male or female, who thinks this is ever easy, is toying with delusion. It borders on the miraculous that most of us make it through the tunnel pretty much intact and ready for what comes next. If a better description of a woman entered into the puberty tunnel exists than that gifted to us in the simple but powerful beginning lyric to Billie Eilish’s recording of “What Was I Made For?”--the marquee song of Barbie--I don’t know what it could be:
I used to float, now I just fall down
I used to know, but I’m not sure now
What I was made for,
What was I made for?
So now from poem to poem:
A Garden Waits for _____, Unborn
You see
The soft strength of the new morning sun
Drying the tarrying dew in the silence unsung
A hummingbird kissing a trumpet vine bloom
From a distance mute as babe still in womb
Swallowtails tap dancing on old joe pye
A crow taking wing for to climb on the sky
No sound bids fly o’er this concert of the eye.
Then you hear
Chattering crickets joyously applauding
Wrens raising a fuss in heartfelt lauding
Breezes ruffling oak leaves, sparrows sporting in dust
Chipmunks skittering, bees buzzing as they must
A cicada keeps time clicking his heels
Hens cackle lyrics to the old chicken reel
Hills away a muffled church bell peels.
Then you sense
The day’s heat gathering its power
Smell pollen erupting from dazzled new flowers--
Taste the basil just pinched near the scent of a rose
Feel buttercups and grasses tickling your toes.
Then you really see
How wakes a garden, raring to grow
Drawing water to herb beds just yesterday hoed
Honest and true, free of all guile
Summoning an autumn show, awaiting a child.
[1] Some readers might suppose that I have exhausted in earlier posts all there is to say about how pious Jews use substitute words for the Tetragrammaton so as not to violate the third commandment. Far from it, I’m afraid. Some readers may wish that I had never started down this crooked road, but maybe a few others have by now had their curiosity piqued, as in “hey, does this ever end?” Yes, but not yet. So, in addition to HQBH—the Holy One, Blessed be he—as a safe placeholder against uttering the Tetragrammaton, there are two common others, one that is usually spoken and one that is written. The one that is spoken and is very common to the point of ubiquitous in some circles, and that is exemplified in the text above, is simply HaShem (spelled varyingly), which just means “the name.” The written placeholder is the insertion of a pairing of yuds—the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet—wherever the Tetragrammaton appears in a text. This is unpronounceable, like my HQBH, so it’s clever in that same way, but we are taught to pronounce it when we see it as adonai, which just means “my Lord.” OK, so is that it? Is this pedantic stuff finally over? No, but it’s enough for now….
[2] As I understand it, the Muslim way is more like the Jewish way but Islamic interpretation is more concerned with distinguishing between the nature of earthly as opposed to heavenly paradises, so it doesn’t fit the mold discussed here—notwithstanding the fact that Quran mentions the word “eden” eleven times.
[3] Most translations into English render this phrase as “and they felt no shame.” That’s not wrong but by being grammatically inexact it misses an importance nuance. Shame is a noun, but the Hebrew phrase uses a conjugated reflexive verb: “v’lo yitboshashu.” Hence, “they were not ashamed of themselves” is a closer rendering. Why does this matter? Speaking of shame as a noun, as if it were like a thing, raises the idea of a substance being somehow magically polluting. A reflexive verb, contrarily, puts the focus on an internal accounting of one’s own behavior, i.e.: I have made myself feel this way because I did or did not do this or that. Not only is there no hint of magical efficacy here but the language itself reflects and aligns with the basic assumption of moral agency.
[4] The exact quote is, “I’m a writer, but then nobody’s perfect.”
[5] It is true that light is created on the first day in chapter 1 but the sun and moon only on the fourth day, leading some in earlier times to suggest that the story made no sense, since where did the first day’s light come from if there was as of yet no sun? Now we can answer that the first day’s light was the light of the Big Bang--astrophysics, not Sheldon…..--which bears a special name in both Jewish and Islamic (Hebrew and Arabic) tradition: zohar and noor, respectively, both meaning primordial radiance.
[6] Miller, “’Achy….but Good’: Barbie and What It Means to Be Human,” My Comic Relief, July 31, 2023.
[7] See Walker Percy, “The Metaphor as Mistake,” Sewanee Review 66:1 (1958).
[8] Recalling Erving Goffman’s frame-analysis vocabulary discussed in “The Phenomenological Factor,” the doll would be the artifact of a keying based on the lebenswelt, and the movie based on the doll would be a further lamination that was very real, to me at least, whilst it was attended to. My interpretation here of the movie would constitute a downkeying, for I seek to break the spell of the lamination and bring it back closer to the lebenswelt.
[9] Ramos, “Barbie the Existentialist,” Commonweal, August 25, 2023.
[10] Rashi claims on the basis of the grammatical construction used in the text that Adam’s “knowing” his wife happened earlier, before the expulsion from Eden. He does not claim that this or any prior sexual encounter with his wife is the sin that brought about the expulsion, and that the disobedience regarding forbidden fruit is just a thinly veiled metaphor for it. With all respect, for Rashi is usually strict about seeking the plain meaning of the text and rarely conflates midrash and agada with Torah, I do not agree since, again, his interpretation contradicts the very nature of Edenic innocence.