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Death, Sex, Experience and Loyalty: The Biblical Understanding of Knowledge

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There is an entire school of philosophy on knowledge called epistemology. While most of us go through our lives without thinking about the nature of knowledge (at least I do), there are geniuses around the world who spend their days trying to answer the question of what knowledge is, where it comes from, and if we can truly know knowledge at all!

The Hebrew Bible has an interesting take on this, and it all begins with death, sex, and ends with loyalty.

The first time we hear about knowledge in the bible is the Tree of Knowledge, more specifically, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We’re told in this story that if Adam (representing humanity) eats from this tree he will die (Genesis 2:17). So the narrator in this story is setting up an interesting problem for Adam: if you want to be fully human, that is, to be filled with knowledge, you will die. Adam is also very childlike in this story — and as anyone with children will tell you, saying to children that they can have anything they want except one thing will always drive them toward that one thing!

And that’s exactly what happens to Adam.

In the next scene, Eve is talking to the serpent, who says “God knows that in the day you eat [the fruit], your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). If a person becomes a god, they cease to be their mortal selves. In this way, a person dies when they have the kind of knowledge that a god would have.

But something odd happens. When Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they don’t become gods at all. It turns out that in Eden there is a tree of immortality, and if Adam and Eve had time, they could have eaten from it, but God stops them and drives out Adam and Eve from the garden just in case (Genesis 3:22).

From this we learn the Biblical author’s idea about godhood: what makes a god is the knowledge of good and evil combined with eternal life.

Adam and Eve pass on the knowledge, a god-like knowledge, to all of humankind. Their sin is ultimately our victory: being truly human instead of the child-like garden creatures Adam and Eve started their lives as. Human beings have knowledge of everything that makes life worthwhile, including sacred suffering, such as laboring for our basic needs, sexual tension, emotional dynamics and giving life to future generations (3:16-20). In this moment, God is telling the first human family that for all the suffering they will encounter, these sufferings will lead to great moments of rapture, and, in the end, while they are mortal, they will live on through the generations that will come.

Side note: isn’t it amazing that we take this story and only make it all about fruit and sin? It’s insane.

Anyway, I digress.

There was a tree of knowledge. God’s creation ate from it and gained knowledge, becoming fully human. And what did they do next? They had sex.

“And the man knew Eve his wife” (Genesis 4:1). The same word for knowledge, daat, flows through the entire text. Adam, humanity, knows Eve, whose name means life.

So this story connects the essence of being human, a creature that knows the whole of good and evil, with death and sexuality.

And it ends, sadly.

The next time that knowledge is brought up, the child that Eve conceives (Cain) has murdered his younger brother Abel. When God asks what has happened, Cain replies, “I know not” (4:9).

And the last time we hear of knowledge in this story is when Cain knows his wife, and together they have the child Enoch (4:17).

In summary: Humanity is human because of the experience of death, sex, creating life, more death and more life. Knowledge is more than intelligence, it’s about experiences. It took ‘earth people’ committing sins to become human. They needed the experience of being expelled, of experiencing sex, life, death and more life, in order to become what we are today.

We are a part of this story, as the children of Adam and Eve: of Earthling and Life-Giver. Why? Because the writers of the Genesis story want us to know that we are connected to the earth, to each other, and to life itself.

There are reclusive people in the world. There are people who are racked by emotional turmoil, fear, anger, resentment and the many other feelings which trap us in a prison of our own design. There are people who have turned their back on life, feeling like they have been punished too much to keep dealing with other people. Some people choose not to have friends and family. The world they live in is entirely of their own design. And even if they believe that world to be perfect just as it is, they secretly want something better, something real. In order to avoid suffering, they choose another kind of suffering.

So we learn that knowledge is about the fullness of life that comes from experience. But what of it? We can have all the experiences we want, but that doesn’t mean we truly know anything. Dumb people go through life all the time.

And that’s when the Bible introduces the second half of knowledge: loyalty.

Everything in the Bible is about relationships.

The Book of Hosea tells the story of a prophet who is married to a prostitute named Gomer.

Side note: Gomer?! Really?

Anyway.

Gomer sleeps with another man, but even so, Hosea loves her and forgives her. It is a story that is understood as a metaphor: Israel is the adulterous spouse and God is the forgiving, loving spouse. Adultery can ruin a relationship. The writer of the text new this and understood that this metaphor would resonate with its readers. The powerful connection between humanity and God is felt so strongly that the torturous feeling of two hearts being ripped apart in adultery was the closest way the writer could express what this covenant, this relationship, was between God and the Israelites.

From first-hand experience we know truth. The knowledge of that truth becomes so powerful that we cannot help but cleave to it. The poets of the Psalms understood this when they said:

Guide me in your truth and teach me; for you are the God of my salvation (25:5)
Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me (43:3)
Lord, teach me your way, that I may walk in your truth (86:11)

From experience we know the truth. And to fully have truth, we need loyalty.

If you are spiritual, but not religious, it can be hard to know what “capital T” Truth is. Fundamentalists often ask the irreligious the question, “if you don’t believe in the Bible, how do you know what the truth is? How do you know what morality is?” Often the answer is something vague like natural law, or the golden rule, or a counter argument like “if you need a book to tell you it’s wrong to kill, then something is wrong with you.”

But the honest truth is that without some kind of compass guiding you in the right direction. Without some kind of framework for understanding life, you are…well…lost.

Knowledge is possible. It doesn’t come from blindly accepting what some New Age guru says. It doesn’t come from the Law of Attraction or whatever pop-culture theology is hot today. It comes from experiences. And having fidelity to those experiences.

You are smart, and so were the people of the Biblical texts. They were human beings who lived in a depth of reality that for many of us seems impossible. These ancient peoples were connected to the cycle of nature, the rhythm of life and death and constant emotional connection to the universe in indescribable ways. And those very real moments of their lives, and a fidelity to those experiences, gave them the knowledge that they passed down to us generations later.

Not bad, huh?

Written by Rabbi Patrick

The Garden of Eden and Why Lotto Winners Go Bankrupt (With Something About Mike Rowe From Dirty Jobs)

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Dirty Jobs #150

Let’s talk about the Garden of Eden, why lotto winners almost always go bankrupt, the Near Eastern concept of heaven, and why Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs is an accidental theologian.

Heaven

In the book Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, author Lisa Miller writes:

Gardens…were the best kind of place a poor desert farmer could imagine. Indeed, a verdant and protected garden was almost beyond imagining. Garden walls are crucial to Biblical imagination.

The word paradise, in fact, comes from the Persian word pairidaeza, which means, “walled garden”. The famed psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung had a near death experience in which he found himself in such a garden, surrounded by pomegranates, which are rooted in Middle Eastern symbolism and in the Bible especially as a symbol of fertility.

Or he may have been high. Freud did a lot of coke. Who knows what Jung might have been into.

Regardless…

Edenic imagery has found its way into all kinds of creative expression. In films such as What Dreams May Come, Just Like Heaven, and the silent film Modern Times, visions of gardens where peace and love permeate all aspects of life envelop us in rapture.

So Eden equals Heaven. Got it.

Or maybe not.

Is the film interpretation of the Garden of Eden, a carefree world, really what Eden was like? I suggest no. While Eden was magnificent, it was not the spa-­like vacation that later artists and theologians made it out to be. It wasn’t like winning the lotto.

Let’s talk about that for a moment.

Lotto Bankruptcy

Most lotto winners end up declaring bankruptcy.

Odd, huh? How could winning a multimillion dollar jackpot put you in the poor house?

Marketwatch has a few theories, but the one that interests me the most is the idea of mental accounting, that lotto winners go broke through a process of “treating their winnings less cautiously than they would their earnings.” The money from the lotto is somehow less important, less valuable, less tangible, than money you earned from your work. Lotto winners take their money for granted until it’s gone, because it’s a different category of money than anything they had ever experienced before.

Bottom line: there is something profoundly important about a hard day’s work.

And it turns out, Adam and Eve knew something about that.

God, we are told, put Adam in the garden to “work it and to guard it” (Genesis 2:15). When God tells Adam, “I have given you all the herbage bearing seed” God is not saying that Adam will sit and relax as all the work of the garden is done for him. Rather, Adam is to work with what God has given him in order to feed himself and Eve, just as the animals are given the same herbage to eat. In fact, it could be argued that connecting “to every beast…to every bird…green herb is for food” (Genesis 2:18) is a way of telling mankind that their responsibility is to literally guard (shamrah) the land from the animals that will eat the same food as them!

All this begs the question: what kind of lazy place requires you to guard plants in a field, which you cultivate? How lazy of a life can one really have, while at the same time having dominion over everything on Earth (Genesis 1:26)?

The answer is simple: Eden is something created, not something consumed. And if we want to live in Eden, we have to actually make it happen.

Which brings me to the show Dirty Jobs and its host, Mike Rowe.

Dirty Jobs

Mike Rowe is on a mission to repair what he calls a profoundly disconnected economy. Millions of dollars in student loan debt, high unemployment, a crumbling infrastructure…all these things put together are an economic disaster.

For Rowe, the solution is oddly simple: reward honest, hard work.

Rowe’s non-profit, mikeroweWorks, gives scholarships to men and women who are interested in taking up trades that benefit our economy. His message of closing the skills gap in America resonates with people who have gone to four year universities, and come out unable to do anything productive.

But underlying Rowe’s charitable work is actually something spiritual; Mike Rowe’s outreach is about the peace that comes from separating what you are passionate about, from what earns you a living.

“When you put passion first, you erect a gigantic wall…don’t follow your passion, but bring it with you.”

I have had this discussion with many, many people. The theory is that if we work hard at preparing to be whatever it is that we are going to be, that the payday will come and we will be happy.

That may be true for many people. But not everyone. And I suspect a great amount of emotional turmoil comes from a crisis where the idealized self that we want to be never comes through. The world, we feel, conspires against us to prevent us from living the dream. So we suck it up and do something we are not passionate about, while feeling like a cog in some great machine.

What Rowe is saying is fantastic. Forget about the magical life you think you want, and instead focus on doing what it is that you’ve got to do to make a buck, and at the end of the day, relax and enjoy that other thing that truly matters to you.

Earning a Living vs. Earning a Life

Another way of putting all of this: there is a difference between earning a living, and earning a life.

Adam had to earn a living. That living was cultivating Eden. But the life that he would earn at the end of that hard workday was Heaven.

We all want Heaven. But we are not always willing to cultivate Eden.

God put Adam in Eden without asking him what his true passion was. God did not ask Adam if he had always wanted to be a priest, or a lute player, or whatever else one could do. God said, “this is it, pal. Go work this garden. And when you complete your work, have fun with Eve. Welcome to heaven.”

In case you think I’m being a hypocrite, because I love PunkTorah and being a rabbi is what I get to do, I’d just like to say that secretly, I still want to be a rockstar. I’ll never get to have that dream. It makes me profoundly sad.

But I get heaven instead. So I’m cool with that.

Written by Rabbi Patrick

Mashup: Parshah Bereishit, Honey Badger and Numa Numa

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It’s a new year and it’s time for new videos from PunkTorah. Circle Pit the Bimah set the bar really high (thanks Jeremiah!) and it’s tough to meet that challenge.

But this year at PunkTorah, we’re doing something different. This year, we’re using using your favorite viral videos from around the intertubes to tell the stories of the Torah. Videos will be narrated by Patrick Aleph, and anyone else who wants to volunteer!

In Bereishit, we learn that Adam and Eve were stuck in “the friend zone”, that the snake in the Garden of Eden really should have been a honey badger, and that being Jewish requires a higher attention span than the infamous Numa Numa video demands.

Watch and learn! And be sure to comment below.

True Blood and The Bible

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OK…what’s NOT Jewish about this? Four ways that True Blood is using images from the Torah to sell you vampire sex.

(1) They’re in the Garden of Eden. But obviously, if you look around, there’s some crazy stuff going down. The idea that human beings (I use the term ‘human’ loosely for some of the characters) can be in a state of perfection, and somehow screw it up, is about as Biblical as it gets. Humanity’s failure to be in co-existence with malevolent peace is a constant theme in the Hebrew Bible, whether you’re talking Adam and Eve, or even the Exodus, where G-d throws down miracle after miracle, but the Hebrews still won’t stop complaining.

(2) There’s a freakin’ snake. Enough said.

(3) The snake’s head is near Anna Paquin, who represents purity (hence the white dress). She’s in danger from all this, and is being sacrificed, hence the altar-like broken tree. But the snake’s tail is between the legs of Jessica Hamby/Deborah Ann Woll. This falls in line with “blame the victim”, that although the serpent is the tempter, the woman is the one that ate of the tree and is really the one to be at fault. The snake coming from her body shows that she, not the serpent, is at fault. Also, Anna Camp (Sara Newlin) is wearing red, like Woll. The two faces of the feminine are shown here. The woman who commits the sin (Eve) is shown in the submissive form (aka ‘spread eagle’), reflecting the idea that her curse is the pain of child birth. The woman with power, however, stands upright (Sara Newlin) and is the feminine power of Lilith, the woman who does not have pain because she did not submit in the first place.

(4) Two white characters, and two black characters. Notice the two guys standing together. Their legs are in the exact same position, one knee sticking out. But the legs are opposite: like the contrast of the color of their skin. The couple in the background are looking in the same direction, but their legs and arms are going in opposite ways. This is duality: another common theme in the Bible. Good versus evil, right versus wrong, G-d and Mankind, tree of knowledge and tree of life, the natural world and the supernatural world. Through their skin tones, the artist is making a nod to this overwhelmingly large issue.

Or maybe I’m over thinking this…

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