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An apple? Maybe… but our tradition offers a whole orchard of possibilities! The rabbis of the Midrash, in Bereshit Rabbah 15, really sink their teeth into this question. Rabbi Meir...
The Torah gives us a tantalizing glimpse in the second chapter of Genesis: "A river emerged from Eden to water the garden; and from there it parted and became four headwaters" (Gen...
It's easy to just gloss over those descriptions of the Garden of Eden, but the Rabbis of the Midrash, those ancient interpreters of the Torah, saw so much more. to just a tiny piec...
"And the name of the second river is Giḥon; it is that which encircles the entire land of Kush" (Genesis 2:13). Okay, cool, rivers... but wait a minute. The problem is, Kush, as in...
And one powerful image used to describe this cycle is the idea of a "cup of terror." The Midrash, specifically Bereshit Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic teachings on the Book of Ge...
We all know the story: paradise, temptation, the apple, the fall. But before all that went down, there's this single verse in Genesis 2:15: "The Lord God took the man and placed hi...
It seems simple enough on the surface: "From every tree of the garden you may eat." But, like with so much in Torah, the rabbis saw layers upon layers of meaning hidden beneath the...
In fact, our sages wondered about that very thing way back in the book of Genesis! We find it in Genesis 2:18: "The Lord God said: It is not good that the man should be alone; I wi...
The ancient rabbis certainly did, and they found some pretty compelling answers hidden in the very first chapters of the Torah. to a fascinating passage from Bereshit Rabbah, a col...
