Parashat Bereshit | BJ Rabbinic Fellow Iliana Brodsky | October 10, 2026

The question I am most frequently asked these days is

what made you decide to go to rabbinical school?

And there are so many things I cherish about this work of becoming a rabbi

community building, pastoral care,

life cycle and ritual facilitation.

But my real love is learning.

I am a learner.

I carry with me a constant sense of gratitude

that I was born into a tradition that prioritizes learning so fiercely,

that sees knowledge acquisition

as a holy act.

For me, pursuing the rabbinate

is my way of following that sense of gratitude.

And we can point to the primacy of learning in Jewish community

through cultural indicators, like the disproportionately high

percentage of Jews who receive higher education

or who hold Nobel Prizes.

But perhaps the most powerful indicator is in our door

the first supplicant of prayer in our private weekday.

Amit is one for knowledge economy, each day

being of a high scale baroque attire underneath her name, the hugger

at grace us with knowledge,

understanding and wisdom which comes from you.

Blessed are you, God gracious.

Bestowal of knowledge.

Before we pray for health,

for rain, or for redemption, we pray for knowledge.

It is the foundation of our spiritual desire,

which makes it then, all the more puzzling

that the very first human sin depicted in our Torah.

In this inaugural parsha, Beresheet,

is brought about by a desire for knowledge.

God places

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and instructs them that they may eat

from any of its trees, save the tree of Knowledge of Good and evil.

When Hava encounters the tree, she is met by a serpent,

who explains that the fruit is not as harmful as she might have assumed.

You will surely not die, he tells her,

for God knows that on the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened

and you will be Elohim, like divine beings, knowing good and evil.

Once he realizes that the fruit is edible,

she becomes enticed by its beauty and its promise of knowledge,

deeming it Narmada, its last skill, desirable as a source of understanding.

She eats the fruit and gives them to Adam.

And lo and behold, the serpent was right.

The humans do not die.

Instead, their eyes are opened to that knowledge of good and evil,

resulting in an instantaneous awareness of their own nakedness.

God curses Adam and Java for going against God's will

and ascertaining this knowledge of good and evil.

But it's not clear exactly what makes the knowledge

that Adam and Java acquire through the fruit

so dangerous.

How is it different from the knowledge they otherwise possessed,

or from the knowledge that we ourselves desire, that we pray to?

That we pray to God for every day?

Urbain in Bahia

maintains that the first human beings were created with intellect.

He understands their capacity for knowledge as part of what it means

to be created by them.

Elohim in God's likeness.

And it's what distinguishes them from the rest of creation.

However, remaining Bahia differentiates between the knowledge

that Adam and Hava, possessed by virtue of their creation

and the knowledge they acquire later from the tree.

He says that their innate knowledge

was entirely spiritually oriented

knowledge of the esoteric knowledge of the Holy.

In his theory, Adam and Haba were created

with the knowledge of good.

The new knowledge they encountered through

the forbidden fruit was carnal bodily knowledge,

the kind of knowledge that drives us towards lust and materiality.

Knowledge of evil.

I have to admit that

I find this interpretation unsatisfying.

Why would the language of Torah specifically refer to the fruit

coming from that tree of knowledge as good and evil?

If from it Hava and Adam only glean evil?

Why not just call it the Tree of Knowledge?

What information does the descriptor

good and evil, especially good, add

to the information we have about this forbidden tree?

Instead, I suggest we read the description of the knowledge

the tree holds good and evil as a mechanism.

Does anyone know what a mayor ism is?

Okay, good.

I get to teach.

I'm a mechanism.

Is a figure of speech in which two contrasting parts

or extremes are used to describe a complete whole.

For example, we might say the phrase everything from A to Z,

not simply to describe letters, but to convey a sense of totality.

We got the idea.

Awesome.

Using this rhetorical approach, we can understand the tree of knowledge

of good and evil to mean a tree of complete knowledge.

When Adam and Cover ate from it, they became fully aware.

They knew all instantaneously.

The danger

then, isn't that there are certain genres of intelligence

that are inherently bad for humans to have.

The danger is the immediacy

of the complete download

The Villains Own and the native in their respective 19th century commentaries.

Note that whatever the knowledge granted by the fruit, the danger of it

was, in fact, that they would make these humans

Elohim like divine beings.

Drawing on the warning given by the serpent.

Your eyes will be opened and you will be Elohim.

The to go on explains that the divine beings.

God does not want us to become like our angels,

who know good and evil intrinsically.

He writes that, without the investigations of time

and the toil of the body,

they know good and evil intrinsically.

God did not intend to withhold knowledge from human beings forever.

Rather, God wanted us to attain it incrementally

through worldly experience.

God wanted us to work, to toil, to encounter the world,

and to figure things out ourselves.

The native adds another important layer.

Angels, he explains, become nullified once they have completed their tasks.

Knowing all about the world, they have no other drive for existence

beyond the fulfillment of certain moral objectives.

And this may be appropriate

for an angelic existence,

but it's completely incompatible with human life.

God here wants us to drive for all parts of life, to gain knowledge

through the passage of time, friction, growth, uncertainty, conflict.

God wants us to develop not only knowledge, but a desire to search for it.

And perhaps this is why,

after Hava and Adam eat from the tree, God expels them from the lushness

of the Garden of Eden into a world of labor, difficulty and uncertainty.

Perhaps humanity's exile from the garden reinstates

some of the friction that we lost when we acquired all knowledge to effortlessly.

Perhaps it slows us down in our seeking, and reminds us that the human experience

is a lifelong project, and not a task

to be completed.

Today, the forbidden fruit looms large.

We are living in the great age of information

and with artificial intelligence progressing at a relentless pace.

Anyone with a Wi-Fi connection can access

vast amounts of information at speeds

that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

The technology is everywhere, whether you know it or not.

It's in our advertisements and customer service calls in corporate infrastructure

and policing technologies, in our classrooms and in our homes.

Its promise is optimization.

Its promise is convenience.

Its promise is to make everything faster and easier.

I have many concerns

about AI's impact on our ecological and societal systems,

but that Beresheet raises a more fundamental concern for me,

a concern for our humanity.

I don't mean to say that AI has the capacity to offer us a perfect

or complete knowledge, although sometimes it might purport to,

but it does offer a shortcut to a trove of information,

of information similar to the fruit of the garden.

It tempts us with the promise of knowing more, more quickly,

without having to seek it out by natural means.

According to our Torah, we were designed to acquire knowledge through experience

and engagement in the world, through searching and failing and trying again.

We were

not designed to know everything all at once.

We must resist the lure of becoming Elohim,

efficient beings with perfect knowledge.

Resist a culture that tells us that more information

faster is better.

I hope in this resistance, my prayer

is that we become ever more enamored

by the learning process and less attached to having the right answers,

or the more optimized solutions.

May we seek every opportunity to wade in the questions that compel us.

May we be graced by knowledge

attained through messy, triumphant,

heartbreaking, frustrating and life affirming processes.

The processes of being human.

Shabbat shalom.