Eve's Wisdom, and Our Own

On October 24, 1992, Joan Alexander delivered the following words of Torah at the Second Texas Jewish Feminist Conference. It is reprinted in her memoir, A Wise Woman with a Dancing Girl Inside, and we are republishing it here to mark the beginning of a new cycle of reading the Torah.

There are two creation stories in Bereshit. The first one is trying to describe in grand brushstrokes that life is good, life is orderly, and human beings are the pinnacle of creation. It starts with the Bible. In the beginning God created the heaven and earth, the earth being unformed and void, with the darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

The second is more mythical. Myths are a way to impact some aspects of the story, shape attitudes, and order reality, in this case to talk about how man and woman became conscious human beings. As I studied with others and read the portion and other sources, what jumped out at me was the word wisdom in 3:6. Being an older woman, I wanted to see what the text meant to me today. It reads:

Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that the Lord God has made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say you shall not eat the fruit of the other trees of the garden?” 

The woman replied to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the other trees in the garden. It is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said: ‘You shall not eat of it or touch it, lest you die.’ 

The serpent said to the woman, “You are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad.” 

When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived they were naked. 

From time immemorial, these verses have been used to prove women’s immorality. Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit and giving it to Adam, and because of her act God kicked them out of Paradise. The beauty of our tradition is that as we evolve, we come back to the text and look at it in new ways. 

According to ancient Rabbinic and Kabalistic tradition, in the beginning, God hid the light because God realized people were unable as yet to cope with the enormous power of ultimate awareness and might use it to destroy creation. God solved the problem by hiding it in the material of creation, which we understand to be feminine. We speak of the land as Mother Earth. Just as God took the light of ultimate awareness and hid it in the matter of the world, the full truth of this portion has been hidden. Centuries of patriarchal thinking have scorned that matter, which they symbolized as a woman’s body and mind. I believe God gives us what we need when we are ready and, like other women, I am challenging and reinterpreting that thinking today and choosing to honor our bodies and minds.

What is this wisdom that Eve was the first ever to see, this gift she gave to Adam? A luminous flash in the mind and heart and soul that provides the essential insight of all knowing and being. In this case, as a rabbi pointed out to me, perhaps Eve was attracted to the fruit because it was wisdom. Eve heard the serpent say that her eyes would be opened and she would know good and bad. Centuries of reviling the messenger, the serpent, ensured that the message was lost, too. 

Eve’s wisdom was hearing truth and reality even from the lowly serpent (the Hebrew word describing the serpent is arum—naked and shrewd) and knowing that there must be good and evil and the ability to make choices to have a moral world. Imagine a world without Eve’s act—where we always romped in the Garden as innocent children. We were meant to grow up and leave the Garden. Our role from the beginning has been to perceive reality.

If there were no evil, why would we need God? How could She model mercy, compassion, and forgiveness for us? My knowledge of an imperfect world where I am dependent on a perfect source makes me humble and human.

Today, I reclaim the myth whose culturally accepted message embodied the old social order and has been kept alive to scapegoat women. Souls have no gender; women’s souls have the same desire and need to get close to God and Torah. Indeed we have God and Eden here in this world and a Tree of Life—the Torah. 

With that as a guide, we are cultivating our own Inner Garden to find and enhance the potential of the riches that were always there waiting for us. The silent pact of the past is being broken as we recapture our lost voices and speak out for what we know and believe and want. With our vision, we carry hope for the whole culture.

Bereshit started us on the path—Eve was the vehicle. Each of us has been created, like Eve, in God’s image to find our own purpose, our own wisdom as God’s partner. We are wise only in the process. Our very bodies have a God-given rhythm. As we become more holy, more of the hidden light of God’s presence is freed and our eyes are opened wider to new understanding and healing.

Like Eve, each of us has a chance and a choice every day to recreate ourselves and our world. After I say the “Modeh Ani” every morning, I ask my Creator, “What can I do to love your world today?” 

The answer always comes back, “First, love yourself and trust your inner knowing, your wisdom.”