I’ve been re-reading Arthur Waskow’s Down-to-Earth Judaism. He’s a bit of a renegade—was talking about food twenty years ago before anyone else was; now his big thing is our “oiloholic” society, and what Jews are going to do about that. Radical social justice, hemp-wearing, refers to God as Breath of Life, etc.

Whether you’re into that sort of thing or not – the beauty of what his writing is that he simultaneously teaches the “facts” of Jewish tradition and interprets/explains them in his own way, so that the whole thing reads like a book of midrash: you think it sounds too good to be true, and you wonder why you never read the story that way before, you love it, and you might or might not be able to capture the bits of the argument to explain it to someone else.

In particular, he offers a new way to see the episode in the Garden of Eden, in light of other religious/cultural traditions, and in terms of the spiral of Jewish history, and basically posits that food is the beginning, middle and, potentially, end of our history and our struggle.

“God said there was one fruit in Eden that should not be eaten. Was not what lat later generations would call “kosher.” Eve and Adam ate it anyway—and thereby shattered the primordial Garden of Delight.

What followed? Conflict and struggle in two crucial spheres of life. …The fruitful earth has become a sphere of conflict, and so has the fruitfulness of human beings. The shattering of Eden shatters the flowing relationships of women and men into rigid gender roles, subjugates women, and tangles sexuality and childbirth into painful, not simply joyful, aspects of life.

As I read this story, I find myself wearing an ironic smile. Many cultures, I realize, have a tale of the first rebellion, the first painful crossover into making painful history. In some mythic tales it is an act of murder. Or sex. Or stealing fire. Or creating knowledge. Now, of all possibilities, what did Jewish culture choose as the symbol for beginning history, making trouble?

Eating.”

Hrm. Jews and food, it seems, go way back. But how in every age we tell the story over again, and how we tell it and interpret it reflects a constant process of making and remaking history. It is not simply that things happened in the past, and we retell them in the future—in fact, the things we are interested in right now affect which stories we tell, and how we describe the past, which in turn affects what stories get passed on to the future. Waskow writes: “So the past shapes the present, and then the present not only shapes the future but also reshapes the past.”

I think this statement helps explain why combining Torah study and contemporary issues is so interesting. We pull out the things in our history that help us understand the present. Of course, this ‘history’ was written or formulated in much the same way—so that what we are able to learn in the future depends on what people in the past wanted to learn (much as Leonard in Memento (2000) decides what to write on his arm, sometimes consciously changing the truth, in terms of what he wants to be able to remember later).

Where this leaves us: the eating transgression in the Garden of Eden can be read in terms of where we’re at these days with food & the earth:

“The crisis of Biblical Eden appears in our own day with more sharpness than ever before. For Eden is an archetype: Its crisis was, is, that we become fully knowledgeable humans only in the process of splitting ourselves off from the earth, eating from the earth in split-off way. The tragedy is that we are in truth both split off from the earth and not split off from it. We are the one species that is able to rise “above” the earth, see it as a whole, and therefore choose to act as if we were not really embedded within it. Since as biological beings we are in fact still embedded in the earth biology, when we act as if we are “beyond” earth, we ourselves are shattered.”

Eating the apple – a food transgression – relationship between people and the earth – follow the stories round and round. Even if you already cared about Jewish history, or about human’s relationship to the earth, it does neat things to your passion for each of these interests to see them overlap like this. And maybe neat things to the future history of Jewish thought, too.