It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I don’t need to visit the barber very often. Once every couple of months will do, I go to the same place every time, where a couple of Kosovan men, refugees originally from the war in the late 1990’s, cut hair all day. As normal we chat each time I go there for the ten minutes or so it takes for my haircut.
This time, which was just after Rosh Hashanah in the busiest and most intense period of the Rabbinic and Jewish year, our conversation turned to what we really wanted in life. I was feeling rather crushed by the volume of work here at Synagogue so I said ‘You know what I want, to go with my wife Nicola and buy a 100,000 euro cottage in rural Southern France, and spend my days reading the British papers in the town square café over a good cup of coffee and croissant.” It was my vision of Eden. My Kosovan barbers agreed that they would throw down their scissors, come with me and do the same. One crucial part of the vision, my wife Nicola, did not think it was such a great idea when I told her about it later in the day. She said, you’d be bored rigid and within a month have given up on the life and returned to where you are right now.
Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden Of Eden is an extraordinary way for our Torah to begin the narrative of the story of humanity. It’s about leaving perfection, leaving the easy life and finding ourselves cast into the world of work, of the strains of having children, bringing them up and the struggles between them. In Christianity, this is understood as the fall of humanity from which we must be redeemed.
In Judaism though leaving Eden is not a fall, rather it is the growth of humanity into reality and maturity. We don’t read the early chapters of the Bible as if they are a science book, they don’t describe material reality, the world was not created in seven days. In Rabbi Jonathan Sacks words, you don’t read the Torah to find out how things happened, you read Torah to find out why things happened.
The words of Torah do not describe material reality rather they describe spiritual reality – there is one humanity, represented in the story by Adam – we all bleed, we all struggle. Humanity truly does have a nurturing or devastating impact on the earth and its flora and fauna. All of these are the real choices of real humanity.
When we celebrate a Bar or Bat Mitzvah we celebrate the growth of a young person into reality and maturity, we don’t mourn it. If they were fortunate, their childhood was a little like the Garden of Eden. All was provided for them, they were able to be carefree and play and enjoy themselves without the worries of the adult world to vex them. Now of course this picture is certainly not shared by all children, but we aim for it. At Bar or Bat Mitzvah we celebrate their leaving this garden of Eden into the world of responsibility, the responsibilities of work to achieve something and participation in adult humanity.
We are not trying to get back into a Garden of Eden of simple existence with no choices to make, everything provided and to reverse our maturity into the state of the innocent children that Adam and Eve originally were in the Torah story before they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
There is a famous story contrasting Gan Eden, the garden of Eden, which became the Jewish word for heaven, and Gehinom, the cursed valley which became the Jewish word for hell. It was told by the Chasidic Rabbi Haim of Romishok, who lived in Lithuania at the turn of the 19th century. It is a story that appears in many cultures and faiths and this is the Jewish version, told by a rabbi experiencing huge change in the world in the industrial period:
One day a man said to God, “God, I would like to know what Gen Eden, Heaven, and Gehinom, Hell are like.”
G-d showed the man two doors. Inside the first one, in the middle of the room, was a large round table filled with every delicious food. It smelled delicious and made the man’s mouth water, but the people sitting around the table were thin and sickly. They appeared to be famished. Splinted to their arms were spoons with very long handles and each found it possible to reach into the food and take a spoonful, but because the handle was longer than their arms, they could not get the spoons back into their mouths.
The man shuddered at the sight of their misery and suffering. God said, “You have seen Gehinnom.”
Behind the second door, the room appeared exactly the same. There was the large round table filled with every delicious food that made the man’s mouth water. The people had the same long-handled spoons, but they were well nourished and plump, laughing and talking.
The man said, “I don’t understand.”
God smiled. “It is simple,” he said. “Love only requires one skill. These people learned early on to share and feed one another. While the others only think of themselves.”
The Jewish vision of the Garden of Eden today is not a place where we are responsibility free. Rather it is the place where we make the right choices so that all of us can live in happiness. It is a place where we choose to feed each other, not to be selfish, where we choose to share and not to dominate. It is a place with the same choices that we face every day in our lives.
The American Jewish artist Judy Chicago in the 1970’s painted a word vision of what the Garden of Eden really means to a responsible humanity. We use it in our creative parallel services here at EHRS in place of the prayer Al Keyn N’kaveh, at the very end of the service to remind ourselves of the choices that we are going to need to make when we leave this place of worship and go back out to the real world:
And then all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind
And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person will be subject to another’s will
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then all will cherish life’s creatures
And then all will live in harmony with one another and the Earth
And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.
Adam and Eve did not fall, our spiritual history says that they entered into the real world from which we cannot hide. When God says ‘where are you Adam’ we need to be able to look up and say ‘I am in a good place – making my contribution to humanity and the world as best I can, making good choices for all of our futures.’ The world cannot turn on us just sitting in a café watching it go by, however tempting that vision may be. Rather the Garden of Eden is this world with a humanity that truly cares for each other, as Psalm 95 says ‘Today if you would only hear God’s voice.’
