Eat, Drink, Man, Woman
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden . . .” Genesis 2:16 ESV
Surely eat – “It is primarily in the way in which we gratify physical needs that the seed of holiness is planted.”[1] Is Heschel right? Is holiness really about how we eat, how we dress, how we find shelter, how we make love? Is Torah really about food, homes and beds? Mircea Eliade’s research of ancient cultures demonstrates that the sacred is found in ordinary human acts interpreted as reflections of the divine. Eating, drinking, having sex, bearing children, building homes, planting, harvesting, dying—all of these are opportunities for experiencing the divine—or they are occasions for modern man to strip the world of its holy character. Choose what it shall be!
With Eliade’s work in mind, it is hardly surprising to discover that the first commandment is about eating. The Hebrew text uses the verb ‘akal twice in the phrase ‘akol to’kel. It is not “surely eat.” That’s the translator’s gloss. It is literally, “Eat, eat.” Of all the trees in the Garden you may eat eat. In other words, help yourself. Feast. Indulge. All eating is permissible from these trees. There is no non-kosher fruit here. Eating is the fulfillment of a commandment. It is a holy act.
An examination of further commandments, given long after the first couple desecrated the holiness of eating, demonstrates that sex, birth and death are also holy. Something more than human experience is involved in these events. Torah asks us to pay attention to this fact—to notice that the divine is part of these human acts and to live accordingly. When our cultures strip away the presence of the divine in these human actions, we all suffer loss. We become desensitized to His presence. We operate as if we were instinctual rather than volitional. We lose what it means to be human because what it means to be human is to be connected to the divine.
“Surely eat” is not a commandment about kashrut. It’s not about kosher either. “Surely eat” (‘akol to’kel) is about what is sacred. It is about the way we gratify physical needs as an act of worship. It’s not just about fruit trees. It’s about how we live, how we engage in ordinary human actions. If you and I don’t see the sacred in eating, it’s unlikely we will see the sacred in any ordinary human act. We will relegate the sacred to that artificial dimension encountered only in special places of genuflecting, in “religious” holidays disconnected from calorie counts or in repetitious words and songs that alter our emotional moods without altering our basic desires.
Perhaps the story in Genesis is about how we live, not what we believe.
Topical Index: kosher, eat, ‘akol, sacred, Genesis 2:16
[1] Abraham Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, p. 95.
