Reading Anew

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 23 October 2022

One of my favourite TV shows from a couple of years ago was ‘The Secret Life of 4, 5 and 6 Year Olds’ – in which small children were filled going about their lives and their behaviour analysed by psychologists.

In one episode, the programme-makers tested the ability of these small children by leaving them without adult supervision in a room with a gumball machine that had a sign on it saying ‘Don’t touch, for later’.

Of course, in all age groups the kids ended up turning the handle on the machine, causing the smarties to spill onto the floor.

A lesson, perhaps, for God in the Torah portion that Sacha will read for us tomorrow morning: just because you tell a child not to do something, just because there is a sign saying not to do it – doesn’t mean very much. In the same way, God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden, and yet still they do.

And that gumball machine full of smarties is effectively the same as the fruit of the tree that we read about. Usually it is pictured as an apple – in its most famous depictions. But it only became an apple in the medieval European context.

The Midrash doesn’t mention apples, and in fact it is not clear whether apples were even a fruit known to the biblical authors. Instead, the midrash suggests wildly different ideas: wheat, grapes, etrog, and fig.

So, why does it become the apple?

Well, one explanation that is often given is that in Latin, the words for ‘evil’ and for ‘apple’ are the same: mallum means both apple and evil. And as Adam and Eve are eating from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it makes sense.

But, as scholars have since pointed out, the word for ‘fruit’ that is used in the Latin is fructus or pomum – the later became shortened to pom. And although originally that meant all fruit, in a process known as linguistic narrowing, it came to mean just one type of fruit – the apple. The same happened in English and Germany, in which the word apple (apfel) became narrowed from fruit in general to apple in particular.

Another is that European (primarily Christian) artistic traditions started using apples – because, unlike the etrog and the fig it was apples that they could most easily reach for when trying to depict a fruit that was most easily recognised by their audiences. And in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the printing press solidified the apple as the visual representation of the fruit that Adam and Eve take from the tree.

Each new generation reads these texts differently and if you asked our kids today what would be the most tempting thing to eat if you told not to they would possibly choose smarties over an apple.

So, while our biblical texts often appear to be static – encased in the ancient scrolls that we have to roll back each year because we have not transitioned to reading from books with spines – each new generation of Jews will understand and reimagine the stories. And as we begin our cycle again, and read stories that on the surface are the same as last year, let us remember that they these re-imaginings are there for the taking. And that is how our Judiasm remains alive.