Breishet — Yana Kozukhin

Shabbat Shalom.

Breishit. In the beginning. This Shabbat, we find ourselves beginning a brand new cycle of Torah. And, as contemporary Jews, we also find ourselves facing one of the most challenging theological and intellectual questions posed by our tradition — the creation of the world. According to the most sacred text in our people’s history, a seven-day process comprised mostly of an all-powerful being somehow willing things to exist. And it was good. According to our textbooks, our teachers, and 159 years of scientific discovery and logical reasoning, a 13.8 billion-year process of random trial and error in which the most environmentally fit organisms passed their DNA on to their offspring, resulting in more and more complex life forms, including highly intelligent primates which developed language and agriculture and, hey, religion.

Coming from a very liberal congregation in the highly-educated suburbs of Boston, I have heard a lot of half-hearted explanations. When the Torah says “day”, what it really means is a couple million years. Evolution happened, but G-d was the one who made it happen. G-d didn’t make life, He just kind of watched on while life did its thing. It’s just a metaphor, don’t think about it too hard. To me, these have always felt like cop-outs. If evolution occurs the way that Darwin described it, and the way that fossil evidence indicates it does, no deity is really required. By definition, natural selection functions on its own, nothing needs to will it to happen, it just happens. And if G-d does exist, why would he or she or they or it create the world in such a haphazard way? Why make organisms suffer and die when they aren’t suited to their environment when you could just create them perfect in the first place? Why create creatures with vestigial traits, goosebumps and appendixes and male nipples, features that clearly serve no real purpose and waste valuable caloric intake to maintain? And if creation really did take place in those simple seven days, why litter the world with evidence that proves otherwise, why give us brains with the capacity to piece that evidence together into a cohesive story that precludes a creator? The tale of creation is a tale that pleases our souls, it is straightforward and neat and features tests and rewards and punishments, it gives us a cosmic parent who lovingly created us separate from all the other creatures of the earth, and who would have given us easy and perfect lives if not for our own mistakes and shortcomings. The tale of evolution is one that is harder to swallow, painful, even, but which provides answers to every foreseeable question regarding the shape and nature of the observable world around us. It makes sense in the modern world, and it speaks to our higher nature, as logical beings who are capable of deduction and critical thought. Why continue to believe in a Higher Power when it is clear that the world could have come to be without one?

The more I examine it, the more counterintuitive it seems to believe both in G-d and in evolution. Shouldn’t I pick one?

So I looked back to the parsha for answers. This week, we witness what Christians refer to as the “original sin”, but what I like to think of as the “original experiment”. Chiva, the walking, talking serpent, starts chatting it up with Chava, the first woman, asking her why she won’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And so she does it, and learns about right and wrong, and gets kicked out of her divine garden. But, why would Chava want knowledge in the first place? Isn’t ignorance supposed to be bliss? She lives in a beautiful garden, she has favor with G-d, she is literally the only woman in the world to her husband, and according to the Midrash they’re having great sex. Why throw all that away for a little knowledge? What gives?

Wouldn’t it be easier to not know? To not have questions? To be shielded from contradictions and nuances and dissenting opinions? To be told the truth, even if it’s not the whole truth, rather than be forced to put together a puzzle out of pieces that clearly don’t fit?

And yet. That’s not what human beings truly want, is it? We couldn’t even last a day on this earth without poking our noses where they didn’t belong. We’re inherently curious, often to a fault. After all, G-d punished Chava and Adam for their curiosity quite severely. But, wasn’t G-d the one who put the tree there in the first place? And wasn’t it G-d who formed the first humans, who instilled in them an insatiable hunger — literally — for knowledge?

Surely, if G-d had wanted us to remain creatures of innocence and purity, G-d would never have distilled divine knowledge into a consumable fruit and hung it from a tree, arms’ reach from humankind.

Surely, if G-d did not want us to question, to grapple, to dig up million-year-old fossils and examine them, He would have let us stay there, in that garden of ignorance. Instead, G-d, like a fed up parent to their 30-year old son, tells humanity to move the hell out. If you don’t want to take my advice, fine, take your knowledge and try to make it on your own.

This is the human condition. We ate the fruit. We asked ourselves the questions. We moved out. Yet we still yearn for our parent. Perhaps if we had not eaten of the fruit, we would be ignorant, and our lives would be long and painless and simple. Perhaps if we had never been put in the Garden in the first place, we would feel no tug towards the Divine, no need to believe in anything that we cannot see with our senses. But we have both. The Garden, and the fruit, at once. The truth of our minds, and the truth of our souls. Neither exists without the other.

I wonder what Adam and Chava felt, walking out of that garden. They must have been devastated, having been cursed by their creator and banished from their home. But I wonder, as they wandered away from that sweet, fruitful garden, if perhaps Chava jumped into the Euphrates river and learned how to swim. If Adam dug his fingers into the sand of the Mediterranean beaches and laughed at the funny little crabs. I wonder if Chava cried when she stepped on a thistle and experienced pain for the first time, if Adam learned empathy in that moment. I wonder if the two of them ever lay beneath the night sky together, just talking, and wondered aloud if their creator could still hear them. I wonder if, in the end, they were glad for their curiosity, happy that they had taken that first bite and released all the pain and the joy and the strangeness of the world into their lives. I wonder if, when Chava gave birth to Cain and Abel, if she was glad to have brought them into such a bright and wide and mysterious world that they would discover on their own terms. I wonder if humankind is better for not having all the answers.

Yana Kozukhin is a sophomore in Steinhardt studying Childhood Education and Special Education in Steinhardt and Hebrew and Judaic Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.