Silent Partnership

Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; with ^[a]hard labor you shall eat from it all the days of your life.  Genesis 3:17  NASB

Listened to the voice of your wife – What was Adam’s sin?  It seems like a strange question to ask, doesn’t it?  Everyone knows what the sin was.  He ate from the Tree.  At least that’s what we’ve been taught.  We think the first sin was an act of disobedience.  But, surprisingly, the text doesn’t say that.  Avivah Zornberg pointed this out in her book on the unconscious in the Bible.  God blames Adam for lack of independent thought, for the failure to communicate, for silence.  Adam’s sin was listening to his wife, long before he ate anything at all.  Adam didn’t speak up.  He didn’t object or correct or resist.  He said nothing.  He just acted as if he/she were the same person.

Zornberg writes:

This silence crystallizes the condition known in the Zohar as the exile of the word (galut ha-dibbur).  Between husband and wife, this condition begins with Adam and Eve, who never, in fact, speak to each other.  According to one midrash, Eve originates not only in Adam’s body but, perhaps even more significantly, in his mind, his fantasy: he dreams of her and she appears.  As a figment of his imagination, she moves him to speak about her, not to her: ‘This one shall be called woman’ (Gen. 2:23).  She is part of himself, and then, surprisingly, awesomely, she is other.  But dialogue never develops between them.[1]

God diagnoses [Adam’s] failure: ‘Because you listened to your wife’s voice and ate of the tree that I commanded you not to eat’ (Gen. 3:17).  In this literal translation, Adam is faulted for listening to his wife’s voice, for being in some way fused with her, incapable of contesting her view.[2]

I have often made the point that the reason it was “not good for man to be alone” had nothing to do with social media.  Adam needed a counterpart, an “other,” that reflected himself but was not him in order to develop self-consciousness, and, in particular, the ability to act according to the yetzer ha’tov.  He needs the woman to present to him the opportunity to decide.  Of course, Adam’s initial sin was his deliberate miscommunication of the commandment (he added to it), but this results in the confrontation over the fruit of the Tree.  Adam knows what God commanded, but he does not oppose, remind, confront, exhort, or in any other way attempt to dissuade the woman from her intended act.  He is, as Zornberg points out, completely fused with her.  His silent partnership leads directly to communal disaster.

In Guardian Angel I make the point that the male (zakar) is intended to remember the commandments and communicate them exactly as they are given by God.  This, of course, is the meaning of the verbal form of zakar.  Adam does not do this.  Sort of reminds you of the often-misquoted statement, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Topical Index:  Adam, silence, listened to your wife, Genesis 3:17

[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, p. 56.

[2] Ibid., pp. 56-57.