Imu Shalev: I’m Imu Shalev, and this is A Book Like No Other. 

If you boil our last five episodes down, here’s what you get: If you want to relate to God’s words, first embrace them as a Tree of Life. Then, serve them as a Tree of Knowledge. We’ve unpacked that idea through the story of Gan Eden, the Burning Bush, Sinai, and finally entering the Land of Israel. But I’m guessing something still feels off. I know I had two major questions left. First, I just couldn’t fully wrap my head around the trippy, shape-shifting nature of the tree. It’s in the garden, it’s in the desert, now it’s in the land of Israel. How does it keep moving through space and time? And here's the second question: More than the shift in location, what’s the deal with the shift in medium? First God gives us a tree, then we get a text, the Torah. It’s a beautiful metaphor, but is that all the tree is? A fancy metaphor for Torah? In the world of the text, it doesn’t seem to be. The tree is presented as an actual tree. That’s what’s in the garden — a green, fruit-laden tree. It’s only centuries later that the Torah shows up. And what if Adam and Eve hadn’t jumped to eat the fruit and we’d stayed in Eden? Would they have been given the Torah text at all? So how do we understand the tree on its own terms? Or is asking that still taking this whole thing too literally? Was the tree really always the Torah? The Torah, somehow, always the tree? 

So let’s start with question one, how the tree shifts in location. To address that one, I actually want to jump back into our last episode. There was a little more to that conversation than we shared in this podcast, and I want to play some of that for you now that directly answers this question. Let me set up the tape for you. Right at the end of last episode, Rabbi Fohrman had been arguing that the Tree of Knowledge returns when we get to the land of Israel. And now, he was showing how there’s even a revelation moment at Jericho that parallels what happened at Mt. Sinai. Or, rather, what might have happened at Mt. Sinai if we’d accepted God’s invitation to go up the mountain. 

Rabbi David Fohrman: Remember we talked about how we were supposed to go up the mountain? The moment we were supposed to go up the mountain was when there was a shofar blast, a blast of the yovel?

Imu:  Yes.

Rabbi Fohrman:  It turns out that there's another shofar blast. If you just read a little bit more, then you’ll see it. Famously we go around Jericho seven times, and then, take a look at verse 5.

Imu:  וְהָיָה בִּמְשֹׁךְ בְּקֶרֶן הַיּוֹבֵל, “And it shall be in the blowing of the horn of jubilee, of the yovel,” כְּשׇׁמְעֲכֶם אֶת־קוֹל הַשּׁוֹפָר, “when you hear the voice of the shofar,” יָרִיעוּ כׇל־הָעָם תְּרוּעָה גְדוֹלָה, “all the people shall make a great cry,” וְנָפְלָה חוֹמַת הָעִיר, “and the walls of the city shall fall,” תַּחְתֶּיהָ וְעָלוּ הָעָם אִישׁ נֶגְדּוֹ, “and the people should go up.” (Joshua 6:5) Right, so just like at Sinai, where there's בִּמְשֹׁךְ הַיֹּבֵל הֵמָּה יַעֲלוּ בָהָר (Exodus 19:13), here there's a בִּמְשֹׁךְ הַיּוֹבֵל. People are going to “עָלוּ” on the city, which is crazy.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Isn't it?

Imu:  Because that seems to say that the mountain of God, which we're saying is Eden, is now going to become Jericho.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Exactly.

Imu:  Somehow, that's what the algebra suggests. When you blow the horn, then the people can ascend the mountain of God. So here, when you blow the horn, you can ascend to the city.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, it's almost like, with the falling of those walls, you're getting this elevator transport up to the top of the city. Because it's like, “You're at the top of the walls now, you go up.”

Imu: You go up, fascinating.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, and somehow, we're hearing these resonances, and it's as if there's another revelation of the Torah. It's the revelation of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It's the revelation of the practical side of Torah. 

Imu: And to actually just add a piece here, I wonder whether you think this is relevant. There's a methodological tool you once taught me, which is “mechanism.” What is the mechanism by which something happens? So, for instance, what is the mechanism by which the walls fall down, or what is the mechanism by which the city becomes the Garden of Eden? I wonder, if you look here in the verses, the real leader of the seven circuits around Jericho is the Ark of God, and right in the Ark are those Ten Commandments.

I’m harping on the Ten Commandments because that’s the physical object we get at Mt. Sinai. It’s the physical manifestation we have of God’s words. So, again, following the algebra, it’s the object which comes to replace or represent the tree during Revelation 2.0. 

So it's almost like there's this transition moment. At one moment, Jericho is not the Mountain of God. Jericho is not Eden. And when the Ark goes around it seven times, it's looking for a new home, and then, all of a sudden, it becomes Eden. Maybe that's sort of the beginning of the conquest of Israel, is sort of the new transplanting of the tree.

Rabbi Fohrman:  That is a beautiful way of thinking about it, a transplanting of the tree. What an interesting way to think of the Mishkan (Tabernacle). It’s that the tree has been like a nomad, but now it's got some ground for it to be planted in.

Imu:  It can put down roots again.

Rabbi Fohrman:  You can start serving it again. It can be more than a bush.

Imu:  It's actually crazy because, if you're right about this, how do we know where Eden is? The answer is, it's wherever the tree is. And then, now, in the 21st century, where the tree has evolved back into Torah, maybe we build Eden. I don't know. I'm speculating here, but the implication of this is really remarkable.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yeah, it sounds like Eden goes where the tree goes, and that once the tree is there, the garden reassembles itself. 

Imu: “Eden goes where the tree goes.” That’s pretty cool. But Rabbi Fohrman was about to take this idea one step further. What if it even applies to the very first Eden?

Rabbi Fohrman: By the way, remember how we talked about the Tree of Life being in the middle of the garden, how it was the one pre-existing tree? All the other trees got planted, but this was a tree that was just there.  

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman is referring back to Genesis 2:9. Remember that verse begins by describing the other trees in the garden: וַיַּצְמַח יְקוָה אֱלֹקים מִן־הָאֲדָמָה כׇּל־עֵץ, “And God caused to grow, from the ground, every tree.” Then we get introduced to the Tree of Life, and all we’re told is, וְעֵץ הַחַיִּים בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן, “The Tree of Life was in the middle of the garden.” (Genesis 2:9) No “growing.” No “from the ground”. It was just there. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Maybe the reason why it's the central tree is because, if there's one tree that's first, all the other trees, by definition, grow up around it. That means that even the first garden was a garden because the tree was there.

Imu:  It was a transplant.

Rabbi Fohrman: It’s like a transplant came from Heaven. And isn't it interesting that you almost have a revelation story there. The tree was preexisting, because it came from Heaven. And then at Sinai, what do you have? The tree, again, is coming from Heaven. God's word is coming from heaven. Moses goes up, brings it down. It goes on a journey. It gets transplanted into the ground again. And then there's all this vegetation that grows around, and man is called upon to serve and to work the land again. And it's like, we're back.

Imu: Crazy. This is mind-blowing. Beautiful stuff.

Rabbi Fohrman: Which means, really, that the end of the Torah really does mirror its beginning, but as we're on the cusp of coming into the land —

Imu:  “New Eden.”

Rabbi Fohrman:  — all this stuff is saying it's a new Eden.

Imu: Naming the tree as a “transplant” was the first time I felt I really had a coherent understanding of what we’d been seeing. The tree wasn’t just magically popping up in different places. That was its nature from the very beginning. It’s kind of like in Great Expectations, when you find out that Pip’s benefactor is the criminal he helped way back at the beginning of the novel, and suddenly the whole story fits together. Sorry, spoiler alert, but Great Expectations has really been out for a while. Anyway, I felt like I had the full picture of the tree now. How it connects us to God, and how that connection can occur across space and time. 

But even more importantly, calling the tree a transplant made the connection between the tree and Torah click. It’s nice thinking of Torah as a big, rooted oak. But it’s a stretch of the imagination. Torah, on a simple, visual level, isn’t very tree-like.  But the minute we described the tree as a transplant, I could see the Torah that way. From the Tablets within the Ark to modern Torah scrolls. It really wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to imagine them as scraggly, uprooted trees, in need of planting and tending.  And, of course, the image is doubly inspiring when you add that, by tending to these trees, we’re growing Eden around us. 

So, like I said, at this point, I thought I had a coherent picture of the tree, and even thought I had a grasp on the relationship between the Torah and the tree. They were really one in the same, down to the details. Both were forms of revelation. Both were sources of God’s breath. Remember, Rabbi Fohrman suggested that God’s breath was like the oxygen the tree released, and Torah was originally revealed by God’s kol, His voice, which is essentially modified breath. Both the tree and the Torah were also sources of knowledge., and both were primordial transplants. Whether you want to call the tree an early prototype of Torah or you want to see it as a metaphor, there was a perfect, elegant, one-to-one correspondence between the Torah and the tree. Now, I know I’m hitting you over the head with this, but it’s because Rabbi Fohrman is about to call it out as the great flaw of his whole theory. 

So, let me set up this next conversation for you. Rabbi Fohrman and I had just finished our learning. It had been eye opening and life changing, and...not quite satisfying. For everything I just said about having a coherent picture of the tree and its relationship to Torah, I still had the second big question I opened this episode with. Especially if the Torah and the tree were so similar, essentially one and the same, why not reveal the Torah in the garden? Was the tree just an elaborate metaphor for Torah, or was there something more going on? But, hey, lingering questions are all part of learning, and we just moved on to other projects. Until, weeks later, we had an editorial meeting for this very podcast. Suddenly, we were rehashing and re-examining everything we’d done. And, almost as if we’d picked up right where we left off, I noticed something that once again had to do with the tree just seeming to be there, pre-existing, in the garden.

I need to say something that's been on the tip of my tongue. I don't know whether you find this resonant, I just need to get it off my chest. The tree here is btoch hagan (within the garden). It's sort of preexisting, preexists the world. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep.

Imu: So I'm wondering if, perhaps, if we’re right that the kol and the tree are sort of synonymous, that if kol preexists the world in some way. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be interesting if there was evidence of that? By “kol”, I mean God’s voice. Remember, at Sinai, before God’s words are carved into the tablets, revelation occurs through this voice. So, when we say Torah is synonymous with the tree, we mean the text, the tablets, but we also mean this voice. And that’s why I was wondering if this kol was primordial, just like the tree. But before I could offer my evidence for this, Rabbi Fohrman was already thinking of some. This famous verse: וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹקים יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר, “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3) This verse tells us that God created the universe through speech. Speaking implies a voice, a connection Rabbi Fohrman quickly made. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Interesting. What you're saying is, the world comes into formation with words, but the preexisting thing before that is kol. That's very interesting. It's very deep and beautiful. Because what it leads to is the idea that, just as, for God, there was a preexisting kol which had no utility, it just was, because it needed to be, and then God decided to make something of the kol and formed it into words. That gets redone at Sinai when we hear the kol of the shofar, which has no meaning other than, it just needs to be there. But then becomes words in the Aseres HaDibros (Ten Commandments), just as the world was created that way. Fascinating.

Imu: So there might even be more. I was just looking at Genesis 1 and seeing if there's even more evidence for that. I was looking at the very first verses of Genesis 1, where we get a short description of  things pre-creation. You have, וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם, what else is there? There's וְרוּחַ אֱלֹקים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם. “The earth was unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and the wind of God hovering over the water.” (Genesis 1:2). So if I take you there to that world, and you can't really see anything because it's dark, but if you're listening to something, what do you hear?

Rabbi Fohrman: The sound of the ruach (wind).

Imu: Right, it sounds almost like a howl, right? A howling wind.

Rabbi Fohrman: Or the sound that ruach makes. And what is the call of the shofar other than the sound that ruach makes?

Imu: It's almost primordial kol. It’s wind before it gets focused through a shofar or through a larynx, whatever it is.

Rabbi Fohrman: Before it gets focused through a voice box. What kol really is, is just ruach. And what's also fascinating is, the רוּחַ אֱלֹקים also preexists creation in the world, along with the water. So there it is, the kol. The kol along the water.

Imu: Of course, it’s not radical to say God’s voice pre-existed us all, but it was cool to see another one of these correspondences between Torah and the tree hinted to in the text. “‘Hinted’ is right!” – is that what you’re thinking? It’s a bit of a leap from ruach to kol? Hold on, there’s more. Now that you know that, come with me to Genesis 3.

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay, yeah.

Imu: Genesis 3:8, to be exact. This is right after Adam and Eve ate the fruit, and we’re told they hear God’s kol walking in the garden, which is the first time the word kol is used in the Torah. But there’s another word in this verse I wanted Rabbi Fohrman to notice. 

Imu: You remember where kol shows up?

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, קוֹל יְקוָה אֱלֹקים מִתְהַלֵּךְ בַּגָּן לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם. (Genesis 3:8)

Imu: Say that again in your head. What do you make of that?

Rabbi Fohrman: Oh, “לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם,” that's what you're pointing out?

Imu: Mhm

Rabbi Fohrman: Oh, that's interesting. 

Imu: In Genesis 3:8, Adam and Eve hid because they hear the sound of God moving about in the garden at “רוּחַ הַיּוֹם”, which, for now, we’ll translate as “the breezy time of day.” It’s the very first kol, and we have ruach there too. Only, here, it’s ”רוּחַ הַיּוֹם”, the ruach of days. Not “רוּחַ אֱלֹקים,” like in Genesis, chapter 1. So the connection was growing stronger. Now, the trouble was, what do we make of it? I had nothing, but Rabbi Fohrman was already way ahead of me. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Oh, here's an interesting, pretty psychedelic way of thinking about it. Let's play this little game. If ruach is preexisting, and goes all the way back to creation, as you're suggesting, does “yom” (day)? Where does “yom” take you back, in creation?

Imu: There's the sun, moon, and stars...

Rabbi Fohrman: No, “yom.” The first day, the days of creation. And when was there “רוּחַ ,אֱלֹקים” in terms of the days?

Imu: Before.

Rabbi Fohrman: Before the days. So what does “רוּחַ הַיּוֹם” mean?

Imu: Preexisting?

Rabbi Fohrman: No. The original ruach, you just told me, was before “days”. Which means that “רוּחַ הַיּוֹם” is which kind of ruach?

Imu: After the days?

Rabbi Fohrman: Ruach after a few days. In other words, the original ruach, as you are suggesting, is the primordial ruach that was always there, God's own primordial ruach. What ruach is this, the “רוּחַ הַיּוֹם?” It's a version of that within creation. There's a version of that in precreation, and a version of it in creation. The version of it in precreation is so primordial that it’s the stuff out of which the Big Bang itself emerges. That doesn’t exist in creation. If it did, it would destroy the world in another explosion. But a version of it exists. 

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman was suggesting that the “רוּחַ הַיּוֹם” is like a domesticated, “this-world” version of the primordial רוּחַ אֱלֹקים. A fascinating idea, but for Rabbi Fohrman, it also became a reason to re-evaluate everything we’d been saying in this podcast. 

Rabbi Fohrman: If you think about it, Imu — and this is something which I was struggling with this morning — I listened to the first episode, and then, reflecting on it with the benefit of hindsight after many months, I think there's a subtle flaw in the theory that we suggested throughout our entire seven-week episode of this whole thing. And it was a flaw which, frankly, you were trying to point out to me, and I completely ignored you, but you were correctly pointing out a flaw. And the flaw is this: Once you start saying there's one tree — and what's the tree? It's Torah, and the Torah is God's voice. You now have a problem, which is, why are these trees back in Eden? Are you telling me the Torah was back in Eden? And if you’re telling me that — so what are you telling me? That it's some sort of symbol of God's voice? So let it just be God’s voice! I don't quite get it. You're telling me God’s commands are the trees? So, what is this? What were the trees originally?

And what you were saying, what you kept on trying to push me towards was: I get it, Fohrman, that, later on, the trees are identified as Torah. But that's later on, that's not in the beginning. You're being anachronistic when you take Devarim 30 from the end of the Torah and reading it all the way back to the beginning, and saying, “Oh, it’s Torah. The trees are Torah.” But if the trees aren’t Torah, what are they? And what do I make of that connection? I think the issues which we’re touching on now help us focus on this. The answers are quite mysterious, and I don't know quite how to put them in words, but all I'll say for now is this: They are iterations.

What are trees? It goes back to what we said earlier. A tree is something which nurtures you, which comes from the world of the Creator into your world. So there's trees that come from the ground, come into the man's world, and modulate nutrition. There's trees that come from the sky, the Tree of Life, and modulates nutrition from the sky. Now, what I want to suggest is that in the beginning, that wasn't the Torah — those were actually trees. In other words, there was something weird, which was that the way we were going to understand knowledge of good and evil was not the way we understand it now. That's an iteration too, that we have the Torah, and there's a voice that comes to our ears, and we modulate that with our brain, and we start to cognize good and evil. The Torah is saying that, in Plan A originally, there was a different route to that nutrition. There were these trees, and if you ate from the tree, that's how you got good and evil. It's almost like, in a weird kind of way, inasmuch as “Eden” can mean “not yet,” from the word adayin, it evokes the womb. There's something womb-like about Eden. And in the womb, how does a kid get his nutrition?

Imu: Umbilical cord

Rabbi Fohrman: And it's so weird to us, because we get nutrition by eating. We can't imagine getting nutrition any other way, other than eating. But a child does. But how does a child get oxygen?

Imu: Umbilical cord

Rabbi Fohrman: We can't imagine getting oxygen through an umbilical cord. We can only imagine breathing with our mouth. So in Eden, in this womb-like existence, there was a different way you got your nutrition. You didn't get your nutrition from God the way you get it in a post Eden world, through your ears and through your brain. You get your nutrition through an umbilical cord, through trees. And there's this tree that modulates Divine energy, and if you eat from it, that's how you come to your understanding of good and evil, completely bypassing your brain. Then there's this Tree of Life, out of energy, that is a tree that gives you connection to God. What happens is, the minute that we spurn the trees, God immediately goes into a second iteration, and that, I think, is God's voice. God says, “Okay, fine, here's another way that I come into your world, and another way that you can relate to Me. Forget the trees. Here's My voice. What do you think of My voice?”

It's almost like God’s trying to recapture the original way that we’re supposed to relate to the Tree of Life, which is, just enjoy it. “Can you just enjoy My voice? Can you just go strolling with Me? Can we do that, maybe?” And what is this voice? It is a version of something primordial still, and that is the original voice that God uses to create the world, a version of which is these trees. But when those trees go, there's another voice. What kind of voice? A voice of “רוּחַ הַיּוֹם.” It's not a shattering voice that would catalyze the Big Bang and bring into the world creation itself once those become words. It's a version of that voice, it's a pale shadow of that voice. It's a voice that exists within the created world. Because, think about it, the whole notion of hearing God's voice in this world is crazy. God's voice from beyond space and time is going to come into this world? 

It's a version of God's voice, tailor-made for creation. But it was God's attempt to say, “Let's do it over. Here's another chance at ruach. Can you hang out with Me?” And then, when we spurn that and said, “No, we’re really not interested in that,” God is like, “Okay, this really isn't going to end well. The whole thing is going to change.” And we get kicked out of the garden, and, in a way, we remain starved of God’s voice. And things don't go well. Humanity corrupts itself, and is destroyed time after time. First in a flood, then migdal Bavel (the Tower of Babel). What you have with Avraham is the reconstruction of God's voice in the world, with what eventually becomes the Torah, and finally we can breathe again.

Imu: Beautiful. Here’s what I heard Rabbi Fohrman saying: The question isn’t whether the tree is the Torah, or the Torah is the tree. Both the tree and the Torah – God’s voice in all of its forms – are iterations of something much much bigger and far more primordial: the original ruach of God. At different times, this ruach manifests differently.

Rabbi Fohrman: The voice of God appears in ways that are appropriate for the environment in which it appears. When the environment changes, the nature of the kol has to change. 

Imu: To really break this down, Rabbi Fohrman was identifying four iterations, or stages, to how God manifested Himself. 

Rabbi Fohrman: So, Stage 1 is pre-creation, the רוּחַ אֱלֹקים, the same way that Torah isn't the most primal form of God's voice. A more primal form is trees. A more primal form even than trees is a preexisting voice that existed before the world was created. Everything becomes just a version of that. So, in precreation, you have the least adulterated form of that. You have something closest to its original form. You have the voice, even before words. 

Imu: Stage 2 is the trees. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Once you have a world and you have a garden, the voice takes on the form of an iteration that works for the garden, and that iteration is the trees. And the closest analogy for that is, it’s an umbilical cord from mother to child.

Imu: On to Stage 3, רוּחַ הַיּוֹם.

Rabbi Fohrman: Then, as we spurn one of those umbilical cords, the Tree of Life, and we reach for another, God says, “Scratch the umbilical cords. Let Me create a third iteration of this thing, a version of My voice that can work within the world.” And that is the קוֹל אֱלֹקים that's מִתְהַלֵּךְ בַּגָּן לְרוּחַ הַיּוֹם. A kol that is a kind of version of the ruach but is a רוּחַ הַיּוֹם version of it. 

Imu: But we hide from the רוּחַ הַיּוֹם, we don’t exactly embrace it. So, enter Stage 4. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Which is, “Okay, I'm going to have to show up again with My voice, and I'm going to have to write it down.” People are going to have to be able to listen to that voice in ways that approximate what they were supposed to do back in the garden. And the revelation of the Torah is a further, fourth version of this voice. 

Imu: Can I just tell you what this makes me think of? Why are there different iterations? Why are you changing so drastically from a tree to a voice with words? It seems like, when Man becomes a knower of good and evil, when Man’s daas (intellect) comes alive, it's almost like he can't hear the ruach of the trees, or he can't absorb the Torah of the trees. Instead, God uses ruach now to speak to Man's mind. It's sort of like Man's mind needs to hear the ruach, and, strangely, the vehicle for that is voice and words. And now, God can appear in his brain, rather than appearing in his reality where he's actually eating from some trees, and appreciating and recognizing where things derive from. Now, God has to talk to his really thick student.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, it's fascinating. I think what Imu’s suggesting — I think what you're saying is that there was a point in Man’s history where Man began to prioritize his brain and use it to shape the world. Once man becomes a brain-heavy being that defines himself through his brain, to make things and do things in the world, God is forced to relate to him that way, and says, “Okay, that's the way you need My voice? Relating to your brain? Okay, so here's the Torah that relates to your brain, but don't get too focused on the brain part of Torah. There's something in there that's pre-brain, that you still need to relate to in those words. You're going to get that even when you think all you're doing is brain stuff. What you don't realize is, you're being nourished by something inside those words which you can't really parse with your brain. It's just the connection with Me. I'm going to give you that ‘being’ thing to spite yourself, even if I have to feed it to you through your brain.”

But the natural way to feed it to you would be in your totally “being” state of just taking it as an umbilical cord. The same way that you would, sort of by osmosis, eventually come to know good and evil in a non-cognitive way, but just in an intuitive way, as a function of the umbilical cord influencing your being. And then, once we really develop that cognitive part, it's like, “Okay, fine, I'm going to have to teach it to you. So here's this Torah, but don't forget about the voice that underlies it.”

Imu: If God’s telling you to read the Torah, what's the verb that’s used for “read?”

Rabbi Fohrman: L’kroh.

Imu: Good. What does that word mean?

Rabbi Fohrman: “To call.” Oh, very interesting.

Imu: It's almost as if the Torah is telling you: When you read, you're supposed to read it out loud. If you read with your mind, maybe you're depriving yourself —

Rabbi Fohrman: Or, perhaps, to read is to respond to a call. When you read, you're not just reading. The author is calling to you in the words. 

Imu: What the Torah is emphasizing is not the mentality of reading, it's not just the thing that's going on in your brain. It's actually the “listening” to the voice. It's funny, in English, you don't have it. But in Hebrew, the word “to read” and the word “to call” are the same. As if your “reading” is reading out loud.

Rabbi Fohrman: Or to respond to the voice that's coming to you from the words with your own voice when you read. Almost as if, in the act of reading, you're engaging in conversation. 

Imu: I don’t know if you can hear in my voice, or Rabbi Fohrman’s, how revelatory this conversation felt to us. Here's why: Up until now, everything we saw kept pointing to a kind of fundamental tension between “being” and “doing”, between יְ-ק-וָ-ה and אֱלֹקים. And we’d seen how that tension plays out in the tree, between the tree itself and its fruit. And now, it plays out in the Torah, between listening to God’s voice versus following His commands. But now, we were seeing that the Torah and the trees were not just two different expressions of the very same thing. There are significant differences between them. It seems that the tree, as a total iteration, both the Tree of Life side and Tree of Knowledge side, is all a little more...I don't know, “Tree of Life”-y. More a pure “being” way to soak up God’s nourishment. And the Torah text as a whole is more “Tree of Knowledge”-y, more cognitive. So the iterations themselves, as whole units — they exist on this range between “doing” and “being.” That’s wild.

And here’s why I think so: I think that a lot of us treat thinking as our highest purpose. And we defend that by pointing to Torah. “Look, God wants us to study this Book! Study is what it’s all about.” And I’m not knocking that. But the Torah, maybe in some small way, might be. It’s like it’s saying about itself, “Hey, I’m not the ideal form. I’m the consolation prize. Halevai (Were it only so), you still had that tree! Maybe transcendence is found when you come back down to earth. In your intuitions and voice, not just your thoughts. But was this really what the Torah was saying, or were we letting our speculation get the best of us? 

So, actually, Rabbi Fohrman and I weren’t the only ones on this call. Our editor was there too, and what we were saying reminded her of something strange in the verses. Remember when God first describes the trees he calls them נֶחְמָד לְמַרְאֶה וְטוֹב לְמַאֲכָל — how could I forget? — “Pleasant to behold and good to eat.” (Genesis 2:9) And then, when Eve describes the tree, she seems to flip and pervert that description: וַתֵּרֶא הָאִשָּׁה כִּי טוֹב הָעֵץ לְמַאֲכָל וְכִי תַאֲוָה־הוּא לָעֵינַיִם, “The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and desirable for the eyes.” Well, Eve also adds a third descriptor that doesn’t have a parallel in chapter 2: וְנֶחְמָד הָעֵץ לְהַשְׂכִּיל, “The tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, or thought.” (Genesis 3:6) Isn’t it interesting that Eve is the one who identifies and calls out the way the tree may feed the intellect? It seemed to support the trend from “being” to cognition that we’d been seeing. 

Rabbi Fohrman: That is interesting. That's fascinating actually. Yeah, notice that she's the one who comes up with נֶחְמָד הָעֵץ לְהַשְׂכִּיל. Almost as if, in that moment, she's prioritizing her brain and saying, “I just don't want the umbilical cord anymore, I can't have it that way. This tree tickles my brain. I want to relate to it that way.” And God says, “Okay, we don't have to do the tree anymore. I can just talk to you.” If you understand the implications of that, what it means is that it was Chava (Eve) who really decided to see it that way. And just seeing it that way was the beginning of the rejection of the tree as “tree.” “I can't take the tree, I need to relate to it with ‘mind.’”

Imu: It’s a very Buddhist point, which is the idea of: The moment you begin to contemplate the tree, you've stopped seeing it. You've actually turned it into an idea rather than appreciating it for what it is. 

Rabbi Fohrman: It's almost as if the mind, in some crazy way, muddles the clarity of tov and ra. Because it's almost like a secondary way that human beings can apprehend it, but not primary. The primary way is through this umbilical cord, through trees, and we just can't understand what that means because we’re not in the womb anymore. The same way that we can logically see that there's this umbilical cord that the child gets from, that it works, but we have no intuitive understanding anymore

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman was painting a stark division between the tree iteration and the iteration that we experience — Torah. A division that I wasn’t fully comfortable with. This may be radical, but I'm not sure that I agree that it's as stark, and as understandable as you're saying, in terms of the umbilical cord analogy, although I love the analogy. I do think that this style of Torah learning has taught me that maybe the second iteration nudges you back to the first iteration.

Rabbi Fohrman: Oh, sure it does. No, it definitely does. In other words, the whole idea that there's a voice to be found in the words is telling you, is helping you recapture a little bit — helping you see past the illusion that the brain is the only way that you can get this. Saying there’s something “unbrain-like” about this. There's a way, a mode of connecting. The deepest way of connecting would have been even not to listen with your ears, but just to experience with your eyes, this tree.

Imu: I forgot where it was was, but I think we saw that, coming in from the land, that which was stilted and static becomes organic again. The Torah’s mitzvot force you back into an organic and symbiotic relationship with nature itself. Strangely, if you keep the commands and live in your just ways, then the world becomes alive for you again. The rain falls at the right time, and justice sprouts from the earth, and so does food. The mitzvot themselves really do, agriculturally, force you into symbiotic relationships with land and plants. Like the chametz stuff, and shmittah stuff, and yovel, and kilayim, and shaatnez — they're all versions, I think, of this idea.

Our meeting was over and we had to run, but that final thought stayed with me. When the tree fails, we go from a more organic iteration to a more cognitive one – Torah. And in some ways, that’s like the umbilical cord being cut. There’s no going back. But maybe it’s not so final. For one, God’s voice is still there in the words, nudging you back towards the Tree of Life. And even if you miss that, even if you’re such a diehard, “Tree of Knowledge” person that the bottom line, practical commandments are the only way you connect, the mitzvot themselves will nudge you back. In its fully actualized form, Torah is deeply intertwined with agriculture. Shmitta, yovel, kilayim, these are all mitzvot that have to do with our relationship to farming and not over-processing the land. They compel us to recognize our symbiotic relationship with the earth. And so, in some way, through them, Torah itself fosters a more organic way of being, and brings us closer to that earlier iteration found in the garden. It’s like the Torah interjects itself into nature. You can’t get away from it! Torah is actualized through our relationship with produce, harvests, and trees. It’s almost like the Torah evolves back into organic material, back into the tree.

After this conversation, that was the image in my mind — the Torah evolving back into the tree, and the space around the tree evolving back into Eden. Eden, where the two trees were one. And where, maybe – not to be too idealistic –  the cognitive and the intuitive parts of ourselves could find some unity, too. It reminded me of the transplant idea from earlier. Only now, the figurative and the literal meaning of that were merging. In a very visceral way, Torah is uprooted, and it’s our job to replant it. 

You know, way back in that earlier recording when we first discussed the transplant idea, Rabbi Fohrman actually had a little more to say on it. The idea of transplanting the tree sparked a connection for him with a seemingly unrelated verse in Exodus, chapter 15, verse 17, which is a line from the song the Israelites sing after being saved at the Red Sea. I want to play that for you now. I’ve been saving this bit because I think when you hear it through the lens of everything we’ve come to, it’s going to mean that much more.

Rabbi Fohrman: Isn't that fascinating that, if you look at the Shirat Hayam, which is the Song at the Sea, and you actually parse the poetry, you have this really interesting moment. Read verse 17 and 18.

Imu:  Yeah, verse 17 and 18 have bothered me for many years. תְּבִאֵמוֹ וְתִטָּעֵמוֹ בְּהַר נַחֲלָתְךָ, “You will bring them and plant them...” Cool.

Rabbi Fohrman: “Plant them,” בְּהַר נַחֲלָתְךָ!

Imu:  “In the mountain of Your inheritance.”

Rabbi Fohrman:  “In the mountain of Your inheritance.” Think about what that means.

Imu: To me, this always felt like some later editor stuck this in, because we didn't learn about this yet. There's no הַר נַחֲלָתְךָ, there’s no “mountain of Your inheritance.” They're not in the land yet.  מָכוֹן לְשִׁבְתְּךָ פָּעַלְתָּ, “You're going to establish some dwelling place for You, God.” He doesn't talk about that yet. מִקְּדָשׁ אֲדֹקי כּוֹנְנוּ יָדֶיךָ, “A mikdash, a Beit HaMikdash, a sanctuary, Your hands will establish for Yourself.” (Exodus 15:17)

Rabbi Fohrman: And now we understand what this verse means. This is the mission statement. This journey is, we're going somewhere. We're going to bring you, but not just to bring you. וְתִטָּעֵמוֹ...

Imu:  Yeah, there's that word, “to plant.”

Rabbi Fohrman: “To be planted.”

Imu: That word was back in Genesis 2 when God planted the garden.

Rabbi Fohrman:  That's right, all the trees. This is a transplanting mission for the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Where are you going to plant it, Imu? בְּהַר נַחֲלָתְךָ. Where was that neglected garden? What did it look like, that neglected garden that was only watched over and wasn't worked?

Imu: It was the garden on the barren mountain.

Rabbi Fohrman: The barren mountain of Har Chorev. By the way, Chorev can also mean charev, which means barren. In 1948, you came to the land, it wasn't so pretty.

Imu: Right.

Rabbi Fohrman: Well, you came into the land there, and it wasn't so pretty in a spiritual way. It was just a little bush. It wasn't taken care of. All it was is a barren mountain, but it was the barren mountain of God's inheritance. An inheritance, Imu, is what? Something that comes to you from another world. Well, God's word comes to you from another world. God didn't die, but He lives in another world, and He gave it to you in this world. So we've got an inheritance.

Imu:  It's actually — that word is quite powerful. It evokes, almost like, seed. Like when you give someone seed capital, so that they can then plant it and then make something of it. Like here it's very literal. It's the seedling. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep, exactly. But as it is with any inheritance, take this little thing and see what you can make of it. You're carrying the torch in a new generation. What are you going to make of this?

Imu: Are you going to allow it to flourish, or is it going to shrivel into a bush?

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, and that's the challenge. Here's this inheritance, can you plant it? Can you make it more than a mountain? Can you make it a garden? It's all about the vision — is there to be, finally, this place when it can rest. And when it can rest, the transplanting of וְתִטָּעֵמוֹ, to be planted, is complete. Then you know that you've been planted. And what you've really done in Israel is, you've made a place for yourself, which is up to us to build. And, if we can build it, then we've transplanted the tree. We've built a new Eden, which is the whole point of the Torah. To somehow — the Man who was banished from the last garden, and the garden has shriveled because he wasn't there to be oved it, has to fix that. He has to come into the garden and re-transplant that tree.

Imu:  Amazing, beautiful. I like to joke with Rabbi Fohrman that the plants in my house increased tenfold since we did this learning together. But what’s also increased is the time I take to behold them. The walks I take, listening to the wind in the trees. The time I spend with my kids, just to play. And to my wife, just to see her. These simple moments have always been meaningful to me, but now I appreciate and hold on to that meaning with such an expansive sense of awe. Just to be, just to live, is a Divine mission. And, of course, the meaning of what Torah is, that has expanded for me too. I love this Book Like No Other. I love its ideas and its coyness, its structure and its wisdom. But now, when I read its words, I sometimes read them out loud. Appreciating the sound, and wondering if maybe, somewhere in there, we can still hear the echo of God’s primordial ruach. 

Rabbi Fohrman: I want to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for spending the time going through this with me. This material is very special to me. I feel it's been so meaningful to me, really meaningful. I don't want to feel like I'm letting it go. So I want to thank you for doing it with me, and I want to thank you listeners out there for taking the time to make this a part of your lives, too. I hope it's been resonant with you and gives you some new ways of thinking that can enrich not just the “doings” of your life, but the “beings” of your life, too.

Imu: I think I speak for all of us when I say, thank you, Rabbi Fohrman. 

And that’s a wrap! Psst, guess what? There’s more! In case you’re not sick of us just yet, there’s an epilogue coming next week. We just the last few weeks looking at how the tree returns in the Torah text, but what about in our lives? When we feel far from Eden, how do we get back there? Rabbi Fohrman and I tackle these questions through a close reading of the source that inspired the “One-Tree” theory in the first place: Deuteronomy 30, otherwise known as Parshat HaTeshuvah, the Passage on Repentance. Come repent with us. I promise, it will be fun. And keep an eye out for a whole new season of A Book Like No Other coming soon. Or, don’t keep an eye out. This is the 21st century, just subscribe. Seriously, this is the moment to subscribe, so as soon as we’re back, you’ll know. And if you’re excited for many more seasons of this podcast, please, please rate us. Write a review, share with your friends. This series, like the Tree of Life, needs your love to grow. 

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta, a nonprofit media company dedicated to helping people fall in love with Torah. If you like what you’re listening to, I’m going to ask you to please consider joining the ranks of our paid members at alephbeta.org. Aleph Beta is a little bit of a weird nonprofit. We’re almost entirely crowdfunded by people like you. So I just want to make this plea: That if this Torah meant something to you, it’s up to individuals like you, who actually vote with their contributions, with their small donations, to say, “Hey, I believe in this. I like what you’re doing.” Your contributions go towards teaching and spreading high-quality Torah to as many people as we possibly can. If that mission matters to you, and if you want to support it, it means the world to us. Thank you for partnering with us, and enabling us to do this really meaningful work.

This episode was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and me, Imu Shalev. It was edited by Tikva Hecht, with additional edits by Evan Weiner. Audio editing was done by Hillary Guttman. A Book Like No Other’s senior editor is Tikva Hecht. Adina Blaustein keeps all the parts moving.