WELCOMING SHABBAT

Shabbat is more than a day of refraining from worldly activity.

When experienced to its spiritual fullest, its holiness enlightens all other days of the week.

We invite you to enhance your Shabbat with these words of Torah.

 

Gold tree reaching up to the heavens

Here’s What Nobody Told You About Adam and Eve

Here’s What Nobody Told You About Adam and Eve

Friedman, Rabbi Manis
December 2, 2020

“Eve said ‘God is asking us to choose: don’t eat from it and live or eat from it and die, it’s your choice.’ Adam said, ‘Well, that’s a pretty simple choice to make. Let’s not eat from it and live.’

 

Eve says, ‘God wants us to eat from it. He’s hoping we eat from it.’ And Adam said ‘How do you know that?’ She said ‘Because our job is in the lowest world and this is not the lowest world. There is a world in which people die, a world of mortality… and that is where our job is.’ … Adam said, ‘God put us here, it can’t be a mistake. If He puts us here He must want us here.’

 

Eve said ‘It’s not the way it works. God takes you to where your job is, but you have to volunteer to cross that border. God will take you to the threshold but whether you enter that door or not is up to you. He wants us to volunteer.’ Adam said, ‘You know, it makes a lot of sense, so they ate from the tree…

 

‘God comes to Adam and says ‘You ate from the tree I told you not to eat from’ …God is not angry, G-d is marveling! ‘How did you know? I told you not to eat from it but you understood that I was hoping you would. How did you know that?’ …Adam says, ‘I didn’t know, she knew.’ So God says to Eve, ‘How did you know?’ She said ‘… the snake told me and it sounded like that is where our job would be. The snake said when you eat from that tree you will…know good and evil… well, good and evil, that needs fixing’….

 

God says, ‘Let me tell you more about this world you are going down to. It’s a mortal world. It also has pain, struggle, disappointment, it’s an uphill battle, it’s the lowest world. Are you sure you want to try to fix it?’ They said ‘Yes, if that’s what you need done, that’s what we will do.'”