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About Me
- Monica
- I am a writer, storyteller, and former professor (UCLA, Pepperdine, LMU, Purdue) with expertise in representations of trauma, multi-ethnic literatures, Christianity and Judaism, immigrant narratives, and Critical Theory (I'm a graduate of the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory). I love to create stories. I adore books, wine, traveling, and shoes. I wrote a book called THE MIDRASHIC IMPULSE AND THE CONTEMPORARY LITERARY RESPONSE TO TRAUMA and have published pieces in Newsweek, The New Republic, The Jewish Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Forward, and other places.
2 comments:
I think it's an interesting distinction that was made between looking at the explusion from the Garden of Eden as a falling vs. an in-out movement. Again, I think that this shows how society thinks. It seems that the Jewish just looked at it as a movement to something else. It seems less dramatic, whereas, a falling to us is thought of more as a failure. It has a very negative connotation. I think it's a more harsh way of looking at the situation than just an in-out movement.
Kiernan, I agree that the expulsion was a relationship issue. Relationship seems to me to be at the heart of this whole passage. When I read God's question to Adam, "Where are you?" I thought of the time that one of my daughters, who was about four years old at the time, came out of the bathroom naked, covered head-to-toe in my perfumed bath powder. So much powder, in fact, that she left a trail of white footprints all the way down the blue-carpeted hallway. My question to her was, "Have you been in my powder?" Of course, I already knew the answer to that question just like I believe God already knew the answer to His question. I asked the question to give her a chance to account for her actions and to get us to the teaching moment so forgiveness could be granted and the peace between us could be restored. Maybe God was doing the same with His question?
My daughter looked up at me with her big brown eyes, and as innocently as you can ever imagine, replied, "No." Her tone of voice asked, "Why, Mother! How could you ever think such a thing of me?" While Adam and Eve didn't deny their actions, they did try to blame-shift away their responsibility for them. Adam blamed Eve and, in a really dumb move on his part, also blamed God for giving her to him in the first place. Eve blamed the snake. Neither Adam nor Eve were willing to own what they'd done so their relationship with God couldn't be immediately restored. To consider one of the Bible's silences, I have to wonder how the story might have gone if Adam and Eve had each hung their heads and said, "Yup, I did it. It was my fault."
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