****Jax’s Tuesday’s DT****
Bereishis
Creation of the World, and Adventures of the First Humans
“THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE”
The first negative commandment to mankind (the first positive command is “be fruitful and multiply” – Genesis 1:28) is surprisingly a dietary law. (“Why is Hashem concerned over what I put in my stomach?”)
When the serpent, a manifestation of evil in its external form, tried to get Chava to sin, she replied that we are “forbidden to eat from that tree or even touch it.” Since she was not created at the time of the prohibition, she obviously heard from Adam that it was forbidden to do so.
This is the first example of the transmission of an oral law. We can assume that when Adam told her not to “touch” the tree, he was enacting a rabbinical stringency in order to avoid coming to the transgression that Hashem had commanded not to “eat” from the tree. Unfortunately, by not differentiating between the pure prohibition and the rabbinical fence, Adam made a mistake. The serpent pushed Chava and she touched the tree. “See, nothing happened, you can eat from it, too.” (Rashi) Thus we find, right in the beginning of the Torah, a dietary law, an oral tradition and a rabbinical decree.
Question: What’s wrong with “the knowledge of good and evil” that it should be harmful to pursue it?
Answer: Good and evil are potentially subjective: e.g., “Was it a good meal, or not?” Before the sin, Adam would make decisions based on the objective criteria of true and false. Something can be objectively true but subjectively bad. E.g., The smoker, upon reading that smoking is dangerous to his health, decided to give up reading!
Have a great one!