Rabbi David Fohrman: The first piece of the process is just a little thing that you notice. You’re looking at this text, and you're just tra-la-la, reading through this text. And then you just notice something. It could be something that’s incongruous. It could be a word that doesn’t quite make sense. Those are the beginning of opening up some windows. Windows which lead us to discover that, one second, this Book really is a Book like no other. This Book is designed to open up those layers. And all of a sudden, it’s like you’re swept away. And it’s like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t even realize! I’m talking about some of the acute issues that plague modern people in their lives, but I didn’t even expect that was going there.” The Torah’s ability to sweep you from something mundane into something grand is truly breathtaking. It’s coming from God, but it’s also coming in a way that almost feels Godly.

Imu Shalev: Welcome to A Book Like No Other. A podcast about reading the Torah on its own terms. 

Hi, I’m your host, Imu Shalev, and the voice you just heard belongs to my teacher, founder and lead scholar of Aleph Beta: my friend, Rabbi David Forhman. Each season on this podcast, Rabbi Fohrman and I will be exploring a Torah text of his choice. Our only goal? Taking the type of journey Rabbi Forhman just described. Noticing the Torah’s anomalies, unraveling its patterns, layers, and deep structures, and following wherever that leads. No agenda, no preset topic, no assumed conclusions. It’s just us, and the text — and you, if you want.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Imu, this may seem crazy to you, but I want to talk about the story with you from the perspective of setting only, rather than the characters. 

Imu: Interesting. So, that reminds me of like, you know, the Lord Of The Rings. Tolkien could spend many, many pages describing the beautiful trees and the mountains. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Confession at hand: when I read Lord Of The Rings, I skipped a lot of the setting

Imu: Thank God you said that, I found Lord of the Rings really boring.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, I did too.

Imu: I'll take the movie.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right. How many times can I read about these trees and the leaves?

So here's the thing. The reason why I think the Torah is different is, the Torah is actually telling a story in the setting, and that’s what I want to try to unearth with you today.

Imu: I'm intrigued enough to follow you. If you think there's a story in the setting, I'm with you.

Full disclosure: I was intrigued but I was not with him. How do you pull a story out of a setting? Well, over the next few weeks, Rabbi Fohrman would show me. And it turns out, my Tolkien analogy was right, just for the opposite reason I had in mind. Rabbi Forhman was about to take me on an epic adventure, one that would criss-cross Genesis, Deuteronomy, Exodus, Joshua, and would change how I understand the Garden, its role in the Torah, and, honestly, my own life. 

But we’ll get there. Because over the next six episodes of this podcast, I’ll be sharing that whole journey with you. This episode is just the first step, noticing and questioning all the strange things in the Garden we tend to overlook...and Rabbi Forhman had a lot of questions about those trees.

Rabbi Fohrman: Sometimes there are these basic questions, very obvious questions, in every Biblical story.

Imu: The “elephant in the room” questions.

Rabbi Fohrman: The “elephant in the room” questions. So, let me lay out for you a couple of these, sort of, “elephant in the room” questions that just have to do with the setting of the story, and the first one is this.

Imagine you’ve got this story, and you're like this eager seven-year-old child as Grandpa sits down on your bed and reads you your bedtime story. So Grandpa starts and says, “Well, once upon a time, there was the Almighty God and He created these human beings, and He made this special garden. It was wonderful, and there were all these trees. But Imu, my dear, there were two special trees in the garden, and one of them was a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the other was a Tree of Life. 

Now, if Imu is curious, even before Grandpa gets to the rest of the story, Imu probably has one of those “elephant in the room" questions percolating in his mind. So you might say, “Grandpa, these are very mysterious trees. I don't really associate trees with knowledge of good and evil. There's a whole shelf of philosophy books in your study, Grandpa, that deal with good and evil. If I wanted to learn about good and evil, I would go there. I wouldn't go look at a tree. And also, very strangely, you’re talking about “Trees of Life”. I know what a huckleberry tree is. I have a cherry tree that I heard George Washington once cut down. But a “Tree of Life” is a strange way of classifying a tree. So Grandpa might say, “Yes, Imu. Well, the trees are very mysterious,” and “just get used to it.” But it doesn't sound like Grandpa has a very good story going. And then, you know, imagine Imu complains to Mom, “I don't want Grandpa to come back tomorrow. He's a nice guy, but I don’t think he’s a very good storyteller.”

Imu: I love how the seven-year-old version of me is a literary critic.

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. And there's something unsatisfying about the story. You know, everything’s gotta hang together in a story. But there's a quality of randomness with these two trees. What in the world is the connection between a Tree of Knowledge and a Tree of Life? The thing that bothers Imu is not just that I've never met a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and a Tree of Life. That's true. The dissatisfying part is, what in the world does one have to do with the other?

Imu: Right. It's sort of like, I can see where this story’s going if you said that, you know, one was the Tree of Happiness and one was the Tree of Sadness.

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly

Imu: Those are opposites but the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil...Tree of Life...super random. I don't really see where this story is going, if that's the name of the trees.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right. I don't know, it feels to me like an important question to ask, but it's one of those questions I would have never asked.

Imu: So that was Rabbi Fohrman’s first question: Why a Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge? Those themes seem to have nothing to do with trees, or with each other. And that question prompted me to ask one of my own.

Can I say what the question makes me think of?

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah.

Imu: Now that you mention it. I think kind of growing up knowing this story, I almost forget about the Tree of Life, because the story ends up centering around the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil so much. It's making me even wonder, like, why is the Tree of Life in this story? 

Rabbi Forhman: And that's another good question: What is the function of the Tree of Life? And maybe we can even throw in: what is the function of each tree? What is the function of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, what is the function of the Tree of Life? As Chekhov once famously said, if there’s a rifle on the mantle in the beginning of Act I, it’s got to go off by the end of Act 3. You can’t just have a random rifle in the story that’s there without any meaning.

Imu: Meaning, even if we accept Grandpa’s premise that there just is a Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge in this garden, and even if we accept that maybe these trees aren’t all that connected to each other, at least we should be able to make sense of each tree’s individual role in the story. But we can’t even do that. 

Rabbi Forhman: Let's start with the Tree of Life that you mentioned. The Tree of Life seems to be the “odd man out” in this story, It’s seems to be —

Imu: Narratively irrelevant.

Rabbi Fohrman: Narratively irrelevant! You could eliminate that tree quite easily. Just have one special tree. It's the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. You're not supposed to eat from it, and we get tempted to eat from it. We get banished from the Garden. End of story. How is the story enriched by having this other tree there? It's just hanging around at the edges, not really doing anything,

Imu: To support this point, Rabbi Fohrman makes a surprising observation. At least, surprising to me.

Rabbi Fohrman: Adam and Eve are never told about the Tree of Life. It's interesting. You read the whole story and God never even reveals to them that the Tree is there. It's like, it was irrelevant, so why do I, the reader, need to know about it?

Imu: I didn't even realize that. It's the first time I've noticed they weren’t told that both trees are there.

Rabbi Fohrman: They were never told!

Imu: Interesting. So in their command, they're told, “Hey, don't eat from the Tree of Knowledge.”

Rabbi Fohrman: Let’s actually go to the command, and I'll just read it to you in case anybody doesn't trust me on this. This is verse 16, in chapter 2. וַיְצַו יְקוָה אֱלֹקים עַל־הָאָדָם לֵאמֹר, “And God commanded Man, saying,” מִכֹּל עֵץ־הַגָּן אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל, “from all the trees of the Garden you shall surely eat,” וּמֵעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע, “but this Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” לֹא תֹאכַל מִמֶּנּוּ, “you shall not eat from it,” כִּי בְּיוֹם אֲכׇלְךָ מִמֶּנּוּ מוֹת תָּמוּת, “from the day that you eat from it, you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17) That's the whole command!

Imu: No Tree of Life...

And right here, this is when I start to understand what Rabbi Fohrman meant earlier about the setting having its own story.

Rabbi Fohrman: The Torah is saying, pay attention to this Tree of Life, reader. It is visible to you; it's less visible to the protagonist of the story. But that's part of the story of this tree. 

Imu: Fascinating.

Just as that insight is sinking in, Rabbi Fohrman points out something else about the Tree of Life I’d never noticed before. 

Rabbi Fohrman: And just to complicate matters, what's God's attitude about Man eating from the Tree of Life?

Imu: The only tree He says you can't eat from is the Tree of Knowledge, and it's not just that. The introduction of that verse is מִכֹּל עֵץ־הַגָּן אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל, is “Eat, surely eat, from all the trees,” just not the Tree of Knowledge. So I think you’d have a slam-dunk defense in a court case if you got sued for this: “No no no, I actually got permission to eat from all the trees explicitly, except for the Tree of Knowledge,” which means you can eat from the Tree of Life. I never realized that.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, so it sounds like, totally fine to eat from the Tree of Life. Well, welcome to the end of the story. At the very end of the story, in chapter 3, we find that after Man disobeys, eats from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, he's kicked out of the Garden. I say to you, Imu, why is he kicked out of the Garden? The answer is not just because he did the wrong thing. He's kicked out of the Garden because of a fear that God expresses, in chapter 3, verse 22. And I'll read the verse for you: וַיֹּאמֶר  יְקוָה אֱלֹקים, “and the Lord God said,” הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע, “now Mankind has become just like one of us, knowing good and evil,” and here comes the concern. וְעַתָּה, “and now,” פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם, “lest he stretch forth his hand, eat from the Tree of Life, and he'll eat it, and he’ll live forever.” (Genesis 3:22)

Imu: So it seems like God doesn't want him to eat from the Tree of Life, even though He didn’t forbid him from eating from the Tree of Life.

Rabbi Fohrman: Which seems strangely contradictory. Not only did He not forbid him to eat from the Tree of Life, but as you said, God commanded him to eat from all the trees, save one. Which sounds like there was a command, at least implicitly, that includes eating from the Tree of Life, and that's a good thing. And all of the sudden, its a bad thing; So bad, that Man needs to be expelled from the Garden.

Now, there's maybe ways to deal with this question. I did struggle with this question in “The Beast That Crouches at The Door,” put out in 2007. I suggested then that perhaps God's attitude towards the Tree of Life changes. Maybe in the beginning, God’s like, “Sure, eat from the Tree of Life, but that's implicitly as long as you keep the rest of My commands. Once you eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, my attitude changes.” Could be, but it doesn't feel like a slam-dunk answer. If you read that verse in chapter 3:22, to me, the sense of that verse is, he's already done one thing wrong, what if he does this second, terrible thing wrong? In other words, Man has shown his propensity to rebel. What if he rebels further and eats from the Tree of Life? Which sounds like it was always a problem to eat from the Tree of Life. I just never imagined that Man would do it, which seems inconsistent with the beginning of the story. So the Tree of Life seems to make absolutely no sense.

Imu: The Tree of Life might have made no sense, but it was certainly no longer forgettable. We’re told about it; Adam and Chava aren’t. Humans can eat from it; No, they can’t. It’s like, after all this hullabaloo around the Tree of Knowledge, God perks up and goes, “Oh wait, this tree does matter.” The exile from Eden kind of hinges on it. So I still had my original question: why is this tree here? But now it wasn’t, “Why bother with this tree?” Now it was more like, “Tell me your secrets, Tree of Life.”  

Ok, so those were our questions on the Tree of Life. We’re going to move now to the Tree of Knowledge. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Let's come back to the second side of the question, which you asked. If I asked you, Imu, what's the function of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Why is it here in this story? 

Imu: I mean, it's the “forbidden” tree. 

Rabbi Fohrman: It's the “forbidden” tree, right? Every story needs a villain, every story needs an obstacle. So you could say that sort of from a storytelling perspective, but if I drilled down a little bit deeper, I sort of have a theological problem which nags at me. In teaching the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil many, many times over the last 20 years to many different audiences, it's a question that consistently comes up for me, and I never really had a completely wonderful answer to. Why would God put a tree that He doesn't want you to eat from in the middle of the Garden?

Imu: It’s a nisayon, it’s a test.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, and then you get to the problem, that: would I really want to worship a God who puts this delicious chocolate chip cookie right in the middle of the Garden and then waits at the edges of the kitchen to see if little Junior is going to sneak a crumb from it and then gets really mad at him? And especially because the name of the Tree doesn't make it sound like the kind of thing which should be off limits, right? In other words, if it was the “Tree of Villainy and Terror” — 

Imu: “The Knowledge of Raping and Pillaging.”

Rabbi Fohrman: If it was the “Tree of Incest and Murder,” right, so then sure. Like, don’t eat from the “Tree of Incest and Murder.” But for God’s sake, it's a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil! Sounds like a really good thing to have.

Imu: I always love the version of this question you asked a few years ago, which is, what do you call a person who lives next door to you — let's call him Bob, right. He's your neighbor, he’s a lawyer, comes home, grills on the barbecue. Only thing you need to know is that Bob doesn't have a knowledge of good and evil. What would you call a guy like that? The name for someone who doesn't have a knowledge of good and evil is a psychopath, right? Today he’s barbecuing, you know, hamburgers on the grill. Tomorrow it might be that he’ll barbecue you, who knows? He doesn’t have a knowledge of good and evil.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right, Bob is not a good neighbor. Absolutely true.

Imu: Yeah, so it's a good question. Why does God want to withhold knowledge of good and evil from his creations? And even if we grant that He does, why would He stick the source of that knowledge — which, let’s just remind ourselves, is very weirdly a tree — right there under Adam and Chava's noses? So not only do the trees seem random as a pair, but each one individually is also fraught. If you’re itching to start solving the problems we’ve raised, I get it, so was I. But Rabbi Fohrman had one last question to share, and this one was the most bewildering of all.

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay Imu, so here's my next question having to do with the relationship between these two trees. And the way I'm going to suggest this question to you is, we’re going to do a little roleplaying game, okay? We’re gonna actually go through this story, “The Temptation of Eve,” and I would like you to play “Snake” and I'm gonna play “Eve.” And I think you’re gonna see pretty quickly that this story goes off the rails in a remarkable way.

Imu: This is a role I was born for.

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay, so let's go to chapter 3 for a moment. The Snake, that’s you, Imu, was very sly, much more crafty than any of the beasts of the field. And he strikes up a conversation with Eve,  אַף כִּי־אָמַר אֱלֹקים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִכֹּל עֵץ הַגָּן, “Did God really say don’t eat from all the trees of the garden?” (Genesis 3:1) It’s patently untrue, but you're just trying to start a conversation. So Eve, I'll play Eve, Eve is taken off guard and says, “Oh no, no, no, Snake. You don't understand. מִפְּרִי עֵץ־הַגָּן נֹאכֵל, ‘We can totally eat from all the trees in the garden.’ (Genesis 3:2) There's just one tree we can’t eat from.” You, Snake, have been lying in wait for this point, right? You're waiting for her to say what words? “Oh no, Snake, it's just -” Which tree can’t we eat from?

Imu: The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Rabbi Fohrman: Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil! But what's fascinating is, if you look at verse 3, she refuses to identify the tree that way. Here’s what she says is, וּמִפְּרִי הָעֵץ אֲשֶׁר בְּתוֹךְ־הַגָּן,  “It's just the tree that's in the middle of the Garden,” (Genesis 3:3) It's that tree that God said don’t eat from. She does not name it by its qualities, which is how we have primarily come to know these trees. We’ve been introduced to them by God by their names. When God forbids the tree, He actually says “The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that's the tree that you must not eat from.” But here, when it actually comes time for her to eat from it, she chooses to identify it a different way. 

Imu: Oh, that's crazy. I never noticed that Eve doesn’t name the Tree of Knowledge as the “forbidden” tree. It just goes to show you how quickly we fill in the gaps for ourselves when reading Tanach. All these years, I read Eve telling the Snake she can’t eat from the tree in the middle of the Garden. I just jumped to the conclusion that that meant the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Makes sense, right? But is that really a safe assumption to make?

Rabbi Fohrman: Now here's the question. If you're the Snake, it's like, “One second, Eve, which tree are you talking about when you say ‘the tree that's in the middle of the Garden’?” So let's go back to your geography manual, where is our geography manual? For that, we actually have a verse; The verse that describes the placement of the special trees in the Garden. That's back in the last chapter, chapter 2, verse 9. And what does it say? Just read the text.

Imu: It says, וַיַּצְמַח יְקוָה אֱלֹקים מִן־הָאֲדָמָה כׇּל־עֵץ נֶחְמָד לְמַרְאֶה וְטוֹב לְמַאֲכָל וְעֵץ הַחַיִּים בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן,  “The Tree of Life is in the middle of the gan (Garden),” וְעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע. (Genesis 2:9)

Rabbi Fohrman: The Tree of Life in the middle of the Garden! And there's a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, don't quite know where that is, but...

Imu: It seems from verse 9, that it is ambiguous as to where the Tree of Knowledge is. Could be that it's in the middle of the Garden, could be that it’s not. But the one that's unambiguously in the middle of the Garden is the Tree of Life. So if she uses the word “בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן” to identify which Tree she can't eat from, it seems like she's saying she can't eat from the Tree of Life, or she doesn't know where the Tree of Knowledge is. It's very confusing.  

Rabbi Fohrman: It leaves open the question that maybe Eve doesn't know what she's talking about. 

Imu: So was Eve just confused? Was she mistaking the Tree of Knowledge for the Tree of Life? But here’s the even weirder thing: The text doesn’t portray her as confused. The Snake doesn’t respond to her as if she’s got the tree wrong.

Rabbi Fohrman: Maybe if Eve really is mistaken, then the Snake has a great opportunity. If his job is to get her to eat from a Tree of Knowledge, he could take an unsuspecting Eve, just walk her over to the Tree of Knowledge and say, “Here's this tree,” and she thinks she's allowed to eat from it. Or, if the Snake's job is to get her to wilfully transgress God's command, then the Snake's mission is imperiled by the fact that she thinks that the tree that she's not allowed to eat from is the Tree of Life. He should be telling her something like, “Oh, actually, you know, we're talking about a different tree. The tree that you’re not supposed to eat from — let me just give you a primer, Eve, on the tree you’re not supposed to eat from before I tell you why you’re supposed to eat from it. Come, let's eat from the tree over there.”

But the Snake never says, “Let’s eat from the tree over there.” They keep on having this conversation about the tree that’s בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן. If you wanted me to be clear that Eve was eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, then back when he gave the locations of the tree, the one unambiguous tree that was בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן should have been the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Imu: If I were the angelic editor of God, after he finishes the first draft of Genesis 1, 2, and 3, I would come back and say, “Hey God, there's an issue. You have Eve identifying the tree as ‘בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן’. But you use that word, ‘בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן’. Everyone's going to think that she thinks the tree that's forbidden is the Tree of Life, because that’s the one that is clearly referred to as ‘בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן’.”

Rabbi Fohrman: Eve is misidentifying the two trees, right?

Imu: Yup.

Rabbi Fohrman: So, you know, let's just take stock of our questions.  What's the deal with the Garden, with these two special trees in it, that seem to have nothing to do with each other? A Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? 

Imu: And Rabbi Forhman’s second question:

Rabbi Fohrman: What's the function of each tree? The Tree of Life seems superfluous. It just seems to get in the way. Tree of Life just confuses me. Tree of Knowledge also confuses me. Why should I not be allowed to eat from a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? It sounds like such a great thing to have,

Imu: And finally, last but not least:

Rabbi Fohrman:  Eve seems to misidentify the tree. It seems like the tree that's for sure in the middle of the Garden is the one that they can't eat from. When, back in chapter two, that's the Tree of Life. So we're quite confused, thoroughly confused, by the basic setting of this Garden. 

Imu: Indeed, confused.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, and confused we are.

Imu: I'm squirming uncomfortably in my seat. So you've taken from me the earliest and oldest of the stories in Tanach, and I need it back. So I’m excited for how you’re going to answer some of  these.

Rabbi Fohrman:  Hopefully, we’ll come back and find some comfort but I think all these maddening questions are leading up to a story that the setting is telling us about the two trees. 

Imu: I’m with you for the quest, wherever it may lead.

Rabbi Fohrman: Excellent.

Imu: After this session, I kept wondering how I’d missed all these glaring problems with the Garden all these years?  I got now why Rabbi Fohrman wanted us to focus on the setting. It’s so easy to get caught up in the drama of Biblical stories, but the details are where you find a lot of its treasures. And now I couldn’t stop thinking about those trees. Eden was our first home. Ground zero for the Torah and for Creation. But we barely got to look around. What would we find if we could go back? What would we learn about ourselves? I really wanted to know. Only now, there were all these big, giant question marks blocking the view. 

Next time on A Book Like No Other: We start getting some answers! Rabbi Forhman is going to introduce a single, elegant theory that will help solve these problems we’ve been grappling with, and, in the process, paint a very unexpected picture of what Eden actually looked like. And strangely, the big evidence for this theory on the beginning of the Torah lies all the way at the Torah’s end. You won’t want to miss it, so make sure to subscribe. And hey, while you’re at it, please share this podcast with a friend. If you liked it, maybe they will too. It really helps new people discover us.

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people fall in love with Torah. Visit alephbeta.org for hundreds of more deep-dive audios and beautifully animated videos on nearly every Biblical text. If you're enjoying this podcast, I hope you’ll find a lot there that speaks to you.

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.