During the Yamim Noraim we take stock of the year that has just passed.  We revisit our roots, we take the courage to face the adversities of life, upright like the trunk of a tree, we raise our arms and our faces to the sky, as if they were branches in the wind, and we look forward to a better year, one in which we can harvest the fruits of our labors.

    During the High Holidays, we are like trees.

    During these Yamim Noraim we would like to learn from the Tamar of the judge Deborah, from the Eshel of Abraham Avinu, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, from the tree of Gopher wood with which Noah built his ark, from the Kikaion of Jonah, from the bush of Moses which burned and did not turn to ashes, and from the Tree of Life.

    This second night of Rosh Ha-Shanah, I want to speak to you about the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  The tree grew in the middle of Gan ha-Eden, Paradise, next to the Tree of Life of which we will speak on Yom Kippur.

    I do not know about you, but just hearing its name, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a lot of marvelous thoughts come to mind.  What would it be like?  What feelings would it engender?  What does it symbolize?  Why did G-d prohibit Adam to eat from its fruit?

    The biblical text has left all of these questions open to a treasure of interpretation to which our people have dedicated study and discussion to understand till today.  So much has been written about the tree of good and evil and so much has been debated and discussed.  It might be possible that it is the tree closest to the mythical heart of Western culture.

    Of all of the ideas and teachings of life that are elicited from this passage of the Torah, today I will refer to only one aspect, which is that of individual responsibility, the central idea to the Judaic cosmic vision of man.  G-d prohibits Adam, and according to some scholars, Eve is also included in this prohibition, from eating of the fruit of the tree of good and evil.

    The punishment for transgressing this prohibition was capital punishment.  In spite of such a terrible punishment, the snake seduces Eve and she concedes to eat of it, as does Adam.

    G-d realizes that the first man and woman have transgressed and disobeyed the prohibition and so he questions Adam as to why he did it.   Adam responds, “… the woman that you put at my side, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate it” (Genesis 3:12).  So G-d asks Eve what she has done and she answers, “... the serpent provoked me and I ate it” (Genesis 3:13).

    As you well know, both are punished.  The punishment is not collective, but rather levied on each one of them individually, and it is the reasoning behind the expulsion that brings us the profound moral behind this narrative.

    Adam designs to escape his responsibility by signaling Eve as the guilty party, responsible for his act of eating of the fruit.  Eve also escapes her responsibility fingering the serpent as guilty for her actions.  However, in the end, each one of them was responsible for their own actions.

    It is clear that the serpent instigated Eve to eat, and that the fruit was very tempting, and through Eve’s impetus she instigated her husband to transgress.  But, even more conspicuous is that each one of them at that last moment decided individually to act as they did.   In Jewish thought, each one of us is responsible for his or her own actions.  Of course there are pressures and situations that at times push us to act in such and such a way, but in the end, each one of us is responsible for our decisions and actions.

    Rosh Ha-Shanah invites us to live our lives responsibly, and to recognize ourselves as its artisan, and to desist from assigning responsibility to others or certain circumstances, as if it were not us who decides what we do in our own lives.

    The tree of knowledge of good and evil reminds us that we should decide how we want to live our lives and we are the only ones who can make that determination. We need to cease from looking outside of ourselves and rather grab the reigns of our lives, taking responsibility for it.

    The midrash explains that the fact that G-d was driven to expel Adam from Paradise was not due to Adam’s physical eating of the forbidden fruit, but rather the fact that he shirked his responsibility and signaled his wife as responsible for his error, when what G-d hoped for was that he would recognize his transgression and repent.

    In this New Year that begins, I invite you to learn from the experience of the first man and woman and not to repeat the same error, and to be sincere with ourselves and stop signaling those that surround us, or blame certain circumstances, as responsible for our own behavior.  We are the responsible party.  Let us choose with prudence and wisdom.

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