Well, that went pretty well. I was still making up my mind as I got to the shul, but I settled on Adam and Eve. As I was afraid, the conversation mostly went to the usual general topics (was the expulsion a good thing or a bad one, did the Lord want Adam and Eve to disobey, what do we mean by ‘knowledge of good and evil’, etc) rather than the meaning of the moment of decision. Still, it was pretty interesting.\n
One of the things that I had noticed beforehand was that when the Lord announces Adam’s punishment, he begins by saying “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree...” The first thing is listening to your wife. I was reminded, I said, of the Lord telling Abraham (Gen 21:12<\/a>) to listen to Sarah when Sarah tells him to throw Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert. The Rabbi then pointed out that the verb rendered ‘hearken’ is in fact the verb Sh’ma<\/I>. For them’s as aren’t hip to the Jewish liturgy, the word Sh’ma<\/I> is the first word in the verse ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our Gd, the Lord is One’ (Deu 6:4<\/a>); this verse is one of the central moments of the prayer service and is besides by tradition the last thing a Jew says before death (if possible). The verse is usually called the Sh’ma; any mention of the verb Sh’ma is redolent, if you will, with its sanctity.\n So, what this tells us is that it is very important who you listen to. OK, whom. And it isn’t obvious—Eve and Sarah both advised something obviously wrong, but the Lord advised hearkening in one case, and punished for hearkening in the other. I think, this time through the Torah, I’ll keep an eye on that word Sh’ma<\/I>.\n