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195 13 / SanctifyingTorah 1997 The story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2–3 is not really a story about sin and punishment. If we read the story from a perspective that cherishes human culture and that values moral agency over submission, the story relates humanity’s first step toward knowledge. But with knowledge comes loss of innocence, and without innocence there is no bliss of paradise. We all undergo this primordial experience when we leave the bliss of infancy and begin our first steps toward individual existence. Whole cultures relive this experience as they discover that “the emperor has no clothes” or that a tulip is, after all, just a flower. They now are wiser, but they have lost the trust that let them imagine great value and beauty. As individuals and as societies, every advance in knowledge or maturity entails a loss of the innocent pleasures we enjoyed before. Women, of course, share in the common experiences of all humankind, but women also may experience a form of knowledge and loss peculiar to women of our culture. At some point, many of us begin to sense that our experiences as women do not quite harmonize with our religious traditions. Sometimes our experiences complement what we are being taught, and sometimes they absolutely contradict it. In either event, our experiences never have been incorporated into the teachings of our tradition. With that first glimpse, our eyes were opened, and we saw that we were naked, for the tradition never provided clothes for us. For many of us, this destroyed forever our trust in the absolute wholeness and goodness of our religious traditions. This is the first moment of feminist consciousness . It is the end of our innocence, and we have left the Garden of Eden forever. We no longer can accept Scripture naïvely, uncritically, and submissively. For some, this excursion into the real world has been a profoundly alienating experience; many women in our time have left Judaism (as 196 Feminist Perspectives I many have left Christianity) in anger at the blindness of our religious texts and of their interpreters throughout the millennia. Many others have maintained their loyalty to a Jewish status quo, despite feelings of dis-ease and suspicion. And still others have determined to revise Judaism to incorporate spiritual experiences and teachings that bring into the center the previously marginalized women and their experiences. The past thirty years have witnessed an explosion in women’s participation in traditional education and ritual, as well as the creation of special “womenspaces” for women’s education and women-centered ritual. But this is only the beginning. All around us we are witnessing a great desire for spirituality and God-centering. While the myriad of new forms being developed satisfy many, they only create a greater need in others. Rituals, prayers, and practices which develop only from women ’s experiences seem like flowers suspended by gossamer threads from somewhere above and within—they are lovely but delicate, and they do not grow. They need to sink their roots into the densely textured soil of traditional religious language and teaching. We who have been alienated want to go back; we who have stayed, by drawing from our personal wells, want access to the source of living waters. But the way seems blocked by the fiery swords of suspicion and alienation. Some women manage to “unlearn” their knowledge of the truth in order to find their way back to the tree of life in the garden of naïve trust. These are “masters of return” (ba’a lot teshuvah) whose desire for the garden can suppress their knowledge. But most of us do not want to unlearn the precious lessons we have been teaching each other. We want to find the life-giving tree somewhere else, not in the safe, innocent space of suppression and submission. We want to find the tree of life whose fruits can be eaten with eyes opened by our hard-won feminist awareness. And this tree is the Torah: “A tree of life to those who hold fast to her.” Jewish women want a positive relationship with the Bible; alienation from it denies us its life-sustaining gifts. Of this living Torah we say, “All her paths are pleasant.” But can we who are aware of our absence in much of the Torah say this? Does our attraction to the gifts of the Torah demand that we suppress our evergrowing awareness that it presents problems...

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