Ginsberg’s Legends of the ]ews, he states that “God madenseveral worlds before ours, but he destroyed them all,nbecause he was pleased with none until he created ours.”nAt this point there must be some query into the forbiddennmystery of the Creator’s mind. Simply what limits had thenAll-powerful One put upon Himself when He creatednHimself Creator? Without pause he split the void with hisnlightning stroke. After the explosion he must have seen thatnhe had not done away with the dark. He had merelynscattered it. And furthermore this startiing discovery: Henwho had only known Eternity found Himself in Time. Thenmoment there are opposites, there is motion; there is Time.nPerhaps at this moment we can conjecture that he made thenGarden of Innocence, outside Time, into which he couldnwithdraw as landlord and, without being rushed, decidenwhat to do next.nObviously he had intended to restore a small fragment ofnEternity in this place. He entered the garden royally, onlynto discover he was no longer a free agent. He had becomenan actor; a creator, but now a prejudiced creator. He foundnit pleasant to walk there in the cool of the day. He wasnperfectiy satisfied at first with the flora and fauna. All thenartifacts in the garden had one thing in common. Each wasnperfect in its seasonal way. But since there was no Time,nthere could be no aging or seasonal change. Each plantnstood in the perfection of its moment of creation, but didnnot grow. And so it was with the fauna. Indeed there couldnbe no action. Although they seemed to move, their motionsnwere the motions of angels, visible but without body.nWhen the Creator-now-turned-landlord saw that hisnartifacts were good, the more he looked the more he felt thenpower of possession. Herein lies the drama of the Garden.nAccording to the Haggadah, the legendary part of thenTalmud, the landlord saw that Adam, unlike the otherncreatures, was alone like Himself He had not yet begun tonsay the Lord thy God is a jealous god, but lest the otherncreatures should take Adam for a god, too, he told him tonpick a wife. Adam by nature was biddable, but he could findnno female he could claim kin with. Most were four-legged,nor they had tails. Some crawled, some flew out of range.nNot for an instant did he consider the fish, but he lookednlong and hard at the sheep.nNow the plot thickens. It concerns Adam’s first wife,nLilith. It is not said where she came from, but she broughtnone thing the garden did not have. She was full of flesh.nThe dictionary of angels counts her as one of the fournguardian angels of whorehouses. She ate children. She hadnother uncomplimentary habits. But she was no threat. Shentook one look at the creature who seemed painted air andnfled. Three angels pursued and caught her, but they couldnnot drag her back to the garden. The landlord was relieved.nHe wondered why he had not seen the solution before.nThere was Adam, a hermaphrodite, a whole creature, malenand female in one form—as Plato would later say, lookingnlike two people embracing. The solution was simple. Henhad done it once on a larger scale. He would do it again.nHe put Adam to sleep, and we know the rest. Adamncalled her Eve. She was two-legged and a great hand atngiving advice. The landlord was not entirely pleased. Shenalmost looked as if she was made of matter. She had the airnof disobedience, and that was a certain threat to power. InnHis angelic garden, hidden at its very center, stood two treesnof a greater density, the same kind of density the female Evenhad. They had appeared, unordered, in his emanations.nWhen power is uncertain, it threatens. He called the mannand woman to him but addressed Adam as the head of thenhouse. “At the center of the garden is a tree. It grows a fruitnonly the gods can digest; good and evil. If you eat of it, younwill surely die.”nNot yet brought to full life, to die meant nothing tonAdam. It was like telling a child, “Don’t go near the fire,nyou will burn.” All the while Eve was listening with herneyes demurely to the ground. At first she thought it anbeautiful tree trunk—maybe the very tree Adam was toldnnot to touch. But nobody told her not to touch it.nIts golden scales shimmered in a round undulation as itngrew out of itself, coiling upwards. Her eyes were dazzled,nand there leaning towards her was a head with lapis lazulineyes. They winked. How strange, to wink without a lid. Shenwaited enraptured, bewildered before the tree’s lusciousnfruit, the mandala swollen into a sphere, dirt come to itsnmiracle. At the very topmost bough, now russet, nowngolden, hung the most tempting object of all. Salivanmoistened her mouth. She reached to touch it but metninstead the flickering tongue, gliding towards the shell-likenear, saying softly, “sicut eritis dei” (“you will be as thengods”). She bit: Her five senses throbbed with appetite. Herneyes opened, and there was the world, and she and Adamnwere in it. She offered him the fruit. He bit and they rushedntogether. And he bit again.nNot disobedience, then, but the sorrows of knowledge, ofngood and evil whose end is death, that is the lesson the mythnof the garden has for mankind. The loss of innocence is nonfall. You cannot fall from innocence. You quicken. Younenter the motion of life. In spite of himself, the landlordnand his creatures, now carnal, must reckon with Time.nAdam and Eve with their increase will now be wayfarers innthe world. The Creator either had to withdraw into hisninvisible omniscience or follow his creatures into theirnpredicament. This he did, but no longer a landlord. Nonmore walks in the cool of the day. No conversations. Anthunderer now from high places. A patriarch bereft of allnbut power. An archangel whirling a left-handed swastikanbefore the garden gate, humming forbidden, forbidden, anhollow hum, for there was no garden. Once lost, innocencenis gone forever. It was hard for the landlord to give up hisngarden, his artifacts, and there was Cain cultivating thenwilderness, insolently using Time and its seasons to imitatenHis own creations. Sweating but bringing forth fruit fromnthe ground. To be blessed. Not to praise his creator, but hisnproduce.nSo it seems, and so it seems that the power of the Creatornas artist was displaced in the divine omniscience by thenpower of possession. One of the faculties of creation putsnthe essence of the artist into his artifact. It was out of thisnthat Cain, the inheritor, acted, that is imitated. Manncannot create what is already there. He can only imitatenwhat his vision discovers and what by form he can render.nAll the artists in Time cannot exhaust one created artifact,nfor in it is the fullness of the divine intention. But thenlandlord of the garden in his shift in roles mistook imitationnfor the thing itself Now the god as patriarch was a jealousnnnJUNE 1987113n