Like poetry, the Bible often leaves out important information. Character and plot description are kept to a minimum, and emotions are often hinted at but rarely stated directly. And both sometimes contain what seem like disconnected fragments. The Bible’s narrative, Rashi wrote, is not necessarily chronological or linear.
It has been said that when Moses wrote down the text, he was taking notes and did not include all of the information he heard. Perhaps this is why it is the white spaces between the words that throb with meaning and provoke questions. It is these pregnant silences that hold the contradictory truths of the text. These gaps point to hidden stories and interpretations and are called by the contemporary scholar Avivah Zornberg, the Torah's unconscious.
What was the snake’s motive for tricking Eve? The text does not tell us directly. But answers are teased out, based on hints in the text. Rashi and others suggest that the snake was jealous of Eve’s erotic life with Adam. Why wasn’t he, the snake, chosen? He may not be human but he was close to human: he could talk, was very clever, and could walk standing up straight like a human.
He felt compelled by his jealousy to bring Eve to his level, to the animal level, where the dominant “I” is the driving force.
I argue that the snake pulled Eve out of the empowering poet’s trance of clarity, out of the imagination’s vision that truth is beauty. Instead of staying in that trance, she chose knowledge – a word in Hebrew that always means intimate association, intrinsic bonding – of the tree which merges good and evil so thoroughly that after its fruit is ingested the human becomes a tangled knot of both elements.
Eve chose to view things subjectively through the dominating “I” where truth and falsehood could no longer be distinguished easily.
Isn’t it dictatorial, fundamentalist, practically censorship, to condemn focusing on the “I”?
Sharon Olds’s poem “Take the I Out”, written in response to a critic of her work who suggested that she take the “I” out of her poems, rejects the opinion of the critic and celebrates the “I.” In fact, almost all of her work embraces the empowering subjective voice which laments and praises, complains and honors, observes, mourns, commemorates, and rejoices. She is implicitly celebrating Eve’s choice. The speaker in Olds’s poem begins the poem, as if in the middle of a conversation, “But I love the I.”
Now that we no longer live in a constant poet’s trance, we struggle to search for truths, and sometimes truths can be found through the “I.” Walt Whitman finds a truth in the individual’s declaration of independence and celebration of the senses in “Song of Myself,” which begins, “I celebrate myself and sing myself.”
Although allowing the “I” to dominate limited Eve, paradoxically, Eve’s sovereignty as an empowered and complete being, an independent “I,” is celebrated by the text. Her independence is also celebrated in the Talmud, which points out that she was created as a whole being, unlike Adam who was created with Eve as a part of him. She was taken from his “rib” and so Adam experiences a sense of lack without her. Eve does not experience that same masculine sense of lack within herself. She is full, she is complete. The rabbis compare her to rain – like the rain, she does not lack anything; she is life-giving, abundant.
Rabbi Bunim of P’shiskha said that a person should carry a piece of paper in each pocket. On one piece it should be written, “the world was created for me” (a line from the Talmud). This acknowledges the importance of the individual, the exalted status of the independent “I.” But what is on the piece of paper in the other pocket? A line from the Torah, spoken by Abraham: “I am but dust and ashes.” From time to time we must reach into one pocket, or the other. The secret lies in knowing when to reach into which pocket.
In order to more deeply understand who Eve was and who we are, what we lost (and might have gained) by allowing the “I” to dominate, we need to look carefully at the text. And I’ll do that tomorrow. For now, reach into your pocket. Which note did you reach for today?
Here is Sharon Olds's "Take the I Out":
But I love the I, steel I-beam that my father sold. They poured the pig iron into the mold, and it fed out slowly, a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened, Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream of Wheat, its curl of butter right in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning and sour in the evening. I love the I, frail between its flitches, its hard ground and hard sky, it soars between them like the soul that rushes, back and forth, between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other, how would it have felt to be the strut joining the floor and roof of the truss? I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled slope of her temperature rising, and on the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach the crest, the Roman numeral I-- I, I, I, I, girders of identity, head on, embedded in the poem. I love the I for its premise of existence--our I--when I was born, part gelid, I lay with you on the cooling table, we were all there, a forest of felled iron. The I is a pine, resinous, flammable root to crown, which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.
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