On Struggle and Productivity

Parshat Bereishit:

Rabba Sara Hurwitz

President and Co-Founder, Maharat

Imagine a world without famine and war, without stress and work. This is the Paradise—the Garden of Eden before Adam and Chava ate from the eitz hada’at, the tree of knowledge. Yet, although the Garden of Eden seems ideal, is it a state to which we strive to return?

As glorious as the Garden of Eden sounds, it was not a place of human productivity and creativity. Like everything created in the world thus far, this was God’s special creation. First God fashions Adam, and then the Torah tells us that God created the Garden of Eden:

When the Torah says Adam must work and guard the land, we understand that he performed physical labor, tilling the ground. Pirkei D’rebbi Eliezer (12) cannot fathom that Adam actually worked; “working and guarding,” he explains must not mean physical labor, but rather that Adam guarded and protected the land through Torah study and good deeds. Adam was simply maintaining God’s perfection. The Midrash in Kohelet Rabbah 9 explains that God showed Adam all of Gan Eden and told him: “See how beautiful my creation is; all of it is for you.” God is the only creator in the Garden of Eden. Eden is not a place suitable for innovative human growth and not a place where Adam and Chava could create their own life.

There is one active task that Adam performs; he names all the animals:

In doing so, he realizes that all animals are paired and he becomes acutely aware of his own loneliness and boredom. Through classifying and naming the animals, he was awakened to his own creative potential. He becomes a dreamer, yearning for more meaning in his life. And yet, his life is static, unchanging. So, he falls asleep. But, as Rav Soleveitchik writes in Family Redeemed Adam “wants to accomplish more and more (p. 10).”

Adam and Chava needed more than the Garden of Eden had to offer. Chizkuni notices that God created Adam outside of the Garden of Eden and then placed him there (Bereishit 2:7-8). He suggests that before being placed there, Adam saw the alternative to Gan Eden—“the thorn and thistles, of the outside world.” Perhaps, what Adam saw was not a scary and daunting wilderness, but rather a place full of opportunity. Perhaps, his creative juices awakened in him a yearning to impact the world and to turn the thistles and thorns into roses.

Seen in this light, the punishment Adam received for his sin is fitting. Before they are banished from the garden, God says:

For Adam and Chava there was no sense of struggle in the garden. Their own creativity was stifled. That is not to say that struggle is ideal either. But, as Viktor Frankl, a psychologist who survived the Holocaust writes in his postscript, The Case for a Tragic Optimism, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, struggle is inevitable. And in the face of struggle, “if one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude (p.172).”

It cannot be coincidental that right after Adam and Chava left the garden, Chava conceived. The continuation of peoplehood occurs outside of the garden. God alone is the creator of the world, however, once outside the Gan Eden, humanity can play an active role in perpetuating creation.

Paradise as first conceived by God was not ideal. Paradise must be re-defined as a place where we have to work to achieve our goals, where we have to struggle to find satisfaction, where we can truly feel a sense of accomplishment. Perhaps, one day we will merit returning to the paradise of Gan Eden, but when we do, we must take with us the lesson of Adam and Chava—that struggle, leads to productivity, which in turn creates meaning in our lives.