Breishit: Reaching for knowledge

Breishit: Reaching for knowledge
Erev Shabbat, October 12, 2012
Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg

As far as I know, Malala Yousafzai is still alive. You may have heard about this 14-year old Pakistani girl who has devoted her life to advocating for girls in her remote region of Pakistan to have equal access to education[1]. Despite repeated death threats and intimidation by the Taliban, she refused to rest in her efforts, and she has even established a fund to help poor Pakistani girls go to school.

On Tuesday, masked gunmen approached her school bus and asked for her by name. Then they shot her in the head and neck. “Let this be a lesson,” a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said afterward. He added that if she survives, the Taliban would again try to kill her.

Surgeons have successfully removed a bullet from Malala, and she was airlifted to a better-equipped hospital yesterday. She has a good chance of surviving, and, according to her father, if she does survive, she will continue going to school and campaigning for other girls to have the same opportunity.
And even if, God forbid, she doesn’t survive, she has started a movement. Other young women in her region of Pakistan will carry her banner forward, because they understand the transformative power of education. In Malala’s words, “I want an access to the world of knowledge.” Especially for girls in developing countries, that world of knowledge is the key to health, economic growth, and empowerment for themselves and for entire communities.

Education for girls is so powerful that the Taliban see it as a threat. They know that once women are literate and are able to lift themselves and their families out of poverty, mothers and fathers are no longer so desperate as to hand their young men over to extremist madrassas and training programs. The Taliban know that to empower women is to transform their world in ways that do not fit their worldview, and in ways that diminish their power. And so they shoot this 14-year old girl.

This week we begin the Torah again with the story of Creation, which includes within it the story of Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God has told Adam and Eve that they must not touch the fruit of this tree. But Eve takes it and eats it and gives some to Adam, and he eats as well. One of her motives in taking the fruit is that it is “tov,” which can be translated as “good.” This word can also be understood as “healthful.” Another motive is that it is “nechmad l’haskil,” which can be translated “desirable for the insight or wisdom that it brings.”

Once Adam and Eve eat the fruit, their eyes are opened, and ultimately, God banishes them from the Garden of Eden because of it, forcing them to confront a world where one has to work hard to grow food and where there is suffering of all kinds.

Over the millennia, our tradition and others have interpreted this text in many ways. A familiar interpretation is that the eating of the fruit represents a sin, perhaps a sexual sin, and a fall from grace. We can easily read the text as saying that the first humans are punished for eating of the tree of knowledge.

But there are some clear alternatives to this interpretation. This story can be seen as an explanation of how human beings came to have free will and knowledge of right and wrong. It is a story of human beings desiring to have power over their own lives.

I don’t think that the story is here to say that we never should have eaten the fruit. If we never had eaten it, there wouldn’t be much more of a story to tell! If we didn’t have the freedom and the knowledge to choose between right and wrong, if we didn’t have the capacity to make mistakes and learn from them, and to grow, what would the purpose be of a covenantal relationship with God, or a Torah to guide us in making choices? If we still lived in the Garden with all of our needs taken care of, our eyes veiled to reality, and with no hard choices to make, with no power to transform our world, what would give life meaning?

The Women’s Torah Commentary understands that in taking the fruit, the first woman takes the “first step toward . . . consciousness-raising.” “If the tree entails ‘knowing all things,’”, says the commentary, “then the woman is bringer of civilization, not death.”

This is what Malala understands her role to be – to reach out and grasp the fruit of knowledge, and through this to raise consciousness in her society as to how they might improve their lives. The Taliban fear that she is bringing heretical Western ideas into their communities, when she is advocating opening peoples’ eyes, girls’ eyes, to the power of that fruit – it’s capacity to bring health and wholeness, wisdom and insight.

The NYTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof writes that this shooting incident represents a larger struggle around the globe over the question of “whether girls deserve human rights,” whether it is the right to an education or right to protect their own bodies and well-being.

In his article about Malala, Kristof also mentions the world-wide, and local problem of sex trafficking. In our own country, teenage victims of sex trafficking, many of whom are lured by pimps on Facebook and on the Internet, are too often arrested and treated like criminals by our police and by our schools. This is happening in our own back yard. I’m just beginning to learn that Route 95 in Connecticut is a trade route for such trafficking, and we will be holding a learning session about this issue on Human Rights Shabbat, in December.

Our Torah makes it very clear that girls – and all people – deserve to be treated humanely. We read that on the sixth day of Creation, “God created the human beings in the divine image, creating them in the image of God, creating them male and female.”[2] Our Rabbis in the Midrash imagine that God is like one who mints coins. God stamps God’s image on each and every human being that God creates. But what makes God different is that, even though God always uses the same stamp, each coin is absolutely unique. This is to teach us that all human beings are of inestimable and of equal value, and that each human being is absolutely unique.

Boys, girls, men, women, gay, transgender, black, white, old, young. We are each stamped with the image of God, we are all of equal and unquanitifiable value, and we are each unique.

Whether we live in the Lower CT River Valley or the Pakistani Swat Valley, we all deserve to have the spark of the divine protected and nurtured within us. Each comes into being with his or her own unique gifts, and each has the potential to reach for knowledge, to open his or her eyes, and to transform the world.