Dan Ornstein
From the beginning, we and the trees have been an uneasy, restless family, all of us born in different eras, yet fashioned from the same soil of the earth.
God formed the earth-person (Adam)
from the dust of the earth (adamah),
blowing into his nostrils the breath of life:
the earth-person became a living being.
God planted a garden in Eden, in the east,
and placed there the earth-person who had been fashioned.
And from the earth God caused to grow every tree
that was pleasing to the sight and good for food,
with the Tree of Life in the middle of the garden…
and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. (Genesis 2:7-8)[1]
The ground is our womb from which we both emerged and the place to which we will both return at death, but beyond this we appear to have nothing in common. Perhaps we earth-people were destined to exercise mastery, our intellects and powers soaring, it seems, far above the massive crowns of the tallest trees:
God settled the earth-person in the garden of Eden,
to work it and protect it. (Genesis 2:15)
But let’s look again at the story of our extended first family. Distinct from all of Eden’s trees and from humans are:
…the Tree of Life in the middle of the garden…
and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad.
In the middle of the garden stands the Tree of (Eternal) Life. Perhaps in the middle of the garden, or perhaps elsewhere, stands the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. From the very beginning, apart from and a part of all the other trees, these two stand out with extraordinary powers that we lack: providing to those who eat their fruits immortality and “the knowledge of good and bad,” the Torah’s way of saying, “everything from A-Z.” It appears that these two trees are our equals, maybe our superiors:
… the Tree of Life in the middle of the garden…
and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad.
Yet, where exactly is the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden? Had the Torah wanted to be clear that it, too, is in the middle of the Garden, it would have written:
With the Tree of Life
and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad
in the middle of the garden.
Separating the clause about the Tree of Knowledge from this central locale excites great curiosity. Is the Tree in the middle of the Garden, singled out like the Tree of Life? Or is it elsewhere? Everywhere? Everywhere that the other trees are?
The Torah complicates this mystery when it makes not only the Tree’s locale, but also its identity, ambiguous. God tells Adam and Eve, our First Parents:
Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat;
but as for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad,
you must not eat of it;
for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die. (Genesis 2:16-17)
How strange that God forbids eating from the Tree of Knowledge and not from the Tree of Life, but at least God is clear that this is the Tree God means. Yet, as the story moves forward, even this becomes murky. The serpent shrewdly approaches Eve, First Woman, to tempt her into eating from God’s forbidden tree. She answers the serpent:
We may eat of the fruit of the other trees of the Garden.
It is only about 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.’’ (Genesis 3:2-3)
Her ambiguous words beg the questions: Which tree in the middle of the Garden? The Tree of Life? The Tree of Knowledge? The former is the only tree mentioned explicitly as having been placed in the middle. The latter is the only tree mentioned explicitly whose fruit is forbidden to eat. What is happening in this passage?
More of this later. First, we witness the First Woman’s dangerous adventure. Knowing that she lacks what “the Tree” possesses, she gives into her temptations…or, perhaps, she forcefully moves her life forward:
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. (Genesis 3:6)
These words describe her perception of the Tree of Knowledge; yet they also echo with some variation the earlier words about all the trees of the Garden that God planted, as if no difference exists between them and the Tree of Knowledge:
And from the earth God caused to grow every tree
that was pleasing to the sight and good for food… (Genesis 2:9)
We leave the First Woman for a moment to wonder if perhaps the Tree of Knowledge is both apart from and a part of the rest of the Garden’s trees: first among equals, but an intimate member of Eden’s Arboretum, nonetheless.
Now, back to her. For all its obscurity, the Torah suggests that the woman is standing in front of the Tree of Knowledge. She could chop It down, cut up Its limbs, burn It in a fireplace, turn It into logs, planks, chips, sawdust. The Tree would still have as much, if not more, power than her, for It possesses what she lacks: potential limitless knowledge. She knows this, so she calculates the benefit from her actions against the repercussions from violating God’s command. The First Woman comes from the same place as the Tree: the soil. When she and the First Man, (we met him as the earth-person) ingest its fruit and the knowledge it offers, they become, as it were, one with the Tree, distinct from all other life forms, and perilously like God. In heaven, a wary and threatened Creator decrees the first humans’ exile:
Then the eyes of both of them were opened…
And God said, “Now that the earth-people have become like any of us,
knowing good and bad,
what if they should stretch out a hand
and take also from the Tree of Life and eat,
and live forever!” (Genesis 3:7, 22)
An ancient aggadah[2] (rabbinic legend) teaches that the length of time from which our First Parents were created until God expelled them from Eden was no more than half a day. It is bitterly ironic that all of that arboreal wisdom sits in their bellies, blood and brains, with no place to use it except out in ruthless reality, beyond the walls of Paradise, where mortality rules and they will die. Robert Frost captures brilliantly this primordial tragedy:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.[3]
Eden sinks to grief as our First Parents are packed up and expelled, never to savor the possibility of eternal life, as God tells them on the day of the expulsion:
For dust you are,
and to dust you shall return. (Genesis 3:19)
From the moment they leave, Eden becomes eerily quieter and noisier. With the earth-people gone, the other living things reclaim the spaces and the voices they had relinquished when the humans sprung up from the ground. Is this the moment when God takes the Tree of Life, the source of human “immortality impending,” chops It down and uses It to make the scrolls on which the eternal words of scripture would be written?
It is a Tree of Life to those who hold fast to it… (Proverbs 3:18)
Will immortality become something to achieve with words, even as we continue to be mortal like wood?
Equally important, what is the fate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad? Strange indeed that we can’t seem to locate exactly where it was before “Eden sank to grief.” After our First Parents leave, the Torah says nothing more about it. Where has It gone? Looking back at the ambiguities and mysteries with which the Torah tantalizes and tortures us, perhaps we can catch a fleeting glimmer of an answer. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad hasn’t gone anywhere because It has gone everywhere.
Science teaches us that trees spread their seeds with the help of the wind that blows them and with the help of animals that eat and excrete them in forest corners near and far. Science also teaches us that in healthy forests there are Mother trees, massive old growth wonders that coordinate nourishment and communication among entire groves of mixed tree species.[4] Their functions have been compared to those of animals’ (far more rapid) central nervous systems, the seats of animal intelligence and wisdom. Finally, science teaches us that trees survive changes in the environment by ever-so-gradually migrating to more hospitable climes as those seeds come to rest, take root and grow in those places.
Science and biblical narrative are not the same. The stories of the trees of Eden have no scientific validity; yet their metaphors and poetry provide us with deeper spiritual insight into the magnificent, God-given wisdom of the trees that scientific research highlights. So, let’s imagine another part of the Eden story, our Biblical ancestors, the earth-people, as the wind, but more, as the animals. Once they eat from the Tree’s wisdom fruit, it becomes part of them, and, like anything eaten, it is expelled from them: the Tree and its wisdom digested and put back into the soil, well beyond the mythic Eden, distributed throughout the planet we know.
Let’s also consider the following. The Torah is clear that eating from the Tree of Knowledge is forbidden to the First People. Yet, perhaps the Torah is ambiguous about the exact location of the Tree of Knowledge in Eden (in the center or everywhere?) because eating from its fruit is also part of God’s survival strategy for the Tree and for us. The Tree might survive in Eden, but it could not thrive in that Fantasy Forest that provides no outlet for its many gifts and secrets to be revealed. Already in the Garden, the Tree of Knowledge is “on the move,” preparing for its slow migration into reality, a Tree apart from, and a part of, all the other trees. Consuming Its fruit, our First Parents can no longer remain entirely of the earth, one with Nature’s soil from which we and the trees were born. A part of and apart from Nature, no longer citizens of Eden’s Fantasy Forest, they leave and take Knowledge with them into the world as we know it. Along with them, as they too find homes on the earth, the descendants of the Tree of Knowledge grow into more than eighty thousand species of trees, all different, all the same, rooted in the original Trees of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad especially. They include Mother trees that hold in their mycorrhiza (intertwined roots and fungi), trunks, branches, and leaves, unparalleled wisdom with which they “parent” widespread communities of diverse trees: so that they can live, so that we can all live. They include individual saplings and full-grown trees masterfully defying gravity to draw water up into their chlorophyll-washed leaves; with the sun’s brilliant light, they produce food for them to eat along with oxygen for the rest of us to breathe.
Reading Eden’s tree story this way, I think about these things:
Every tree on the planet is the distant offspring of the Tree of Knowledge, the founding Parent of Eden’s Grove.
Every tree among the three trillion worldwide you and I encounter possesses the tiniest bit of wisdom and generosity of the original Tree. Each one provides oxygen, food, shade, medicine, animals’ homes, a place of peace, inspiration, and revival for us, a place of respite.
Everywhere any tree creates its own food from sunlight, cooperates with other trees through its roots and fungi, figures out how to live longer than all animals, the Tree of Knowledge is giving us a taste of the insights we have yet to consume.
Every time we, our First Parents’ descendants, encounter and learn from a tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad – everything from A to Z – is with us.
Increasingly, I can see each tree with its rooted feet, its trunk torso, its branches and branchlets spreading out in fractal glory like the fingers of my hand, its leaves nourishing me with oxygen while my lungs and blood nourish it with carbon dioxide. I recognize that, evolutionarily, we are completely different, but we are each other’s family at the same time. From the beginning, we and the trees have been an uneasy, restless family, all of us born in different eras, yet fashioned from the same soil of the earth. Our older family preceded us by nearly four hundred million years. We, their younger kin, have at times treated them with grace and wisdom, at too many other times with abuse.
I imagine each tree, as it were, calling out with the ancestral words, Tzei u-lemad, “No talking about us without us. Get up, go outside to listen to us, to talk with us, to learn.” I leave the sterile comfort of indoor space, walk outside to speak with and learn from each of them. Each one stands, like me, crown to roots, head to feet, waiting to be heard, demanding to hear from me. We are more alike than I have admitted. I listen to my human ancestors call out the Torah’s words:
A human is a tree of the field!
A tree of the field is human! (Deuteronomy 20:19)[5]
[1] Biblical translations in this essay are taken from the New Jewish Publication Society Tanakh (1999), with some significant modifications.
[2] Sanhedrin 38b.
[3] Edward Connery Lathem, ed., The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1969), 222.
[4] See Suzanne Simard, Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering The Wisdom Of The Forest (New York: Penguin Random House, 2022).
[5] These are two hyper-literal translations of Deuteronomy’s Hebrew rendering, ki ha-adam eitz ha-sadeh, which is commonly translated in its immediate context as a rhetorical question: “Is a tree of the field human?” This hyper-literal reading can be found in sources as diverse as Taanit 7a, Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer 21:1, implicitly in Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer 34:4, and the Torah commentary of Rabbi Menahem Recanati on Deuteronomy 20:17. J.D. Eisenstein, Otzar Ha-Midrashim, records this interpretation of our verse in his version of “Midrash Tehiyyat Ha-Meitim, She’eilot Rabbi Eliezer al Ha-Tehiyyah,” #13. See Eisenstein’s note there for earlier midrashic versions of this passage.
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