On the Creation of Emotion
By Rabbi Gershon Winkler

I was recently asked when it was that God created emotion. I
searched through the entire story of Genesis in the Torah and
could not find any mention of God saying: „Let there be emotion.‰
So I grew impatient, furious, frustrated, angry, disgusted.

Then it hit me. Emotion was first instituted by First Man,
Ah‚dahm, or literally Earth Being, who -- when caught spitting
out the core of the apple he had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge
of Good and Bad -- reacted with the first expression of emotion
recorded in the Creation story: „I heard your voice in the Garden
and I became afraid because I was naked, and so I hid‰ (Genesis
3:10). The first emotion ever mentioned, then, is fear. And fear
is attributed to nakedness, to being bereft of something vital to
Ah‚dahm‚s sense of well-being. The moment he felt naked, he
became afraid. The moment he became afraid, he felt un-safe and
had to hide. From what exactly did he feel the need to hide? From
the voice of God in the Garden. Specifically in the Garden. It is
as if the voice of God would have been okay anywhere else, but in
the Garden it was intimidating, scary. In these key words we
discover the root of emotion. Emotions like hate, love, fear,
jealousy, anger, etc. narrow our perspective in the moment of our
emoting, so that the entire scenario of the experience becomes in
that moment limited to the Garden, so to speak, to a particular
arena that blocks out every other possibility.

When we tune into our feelings of love, for example, we in that
moment experience specific love of a specific person, place, or
thing. When we feel hate, we block out all other possibilities
of alternate judgments concerning the person or situation. When
we feel jealous, we again block out the entire cosmos and focus
instead on the immediate relationship, absenting all other
possible relationships. Emotions, then, stem out of the primal
fear introduced in the Creation Story. We love, and we fear
losing that love. We hate and fear repercussions of that hate.
We become angry out of fear that we have in the moment lost
control or lost our sense of the meaning of things, of the order
of the universe. In those moments when we are embroiled in our
emotions, our experience plays out for us within the narrow
confines of the scenario of that moment, in the narrow confines
of the Garden.

The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, taught the 13th-
century Rabbi Ez‚ra ben Sh‚lomo of Gerona (in Sod Etz Ha‚da‚at),
are actually one and the same tree. Eating of the „forbidden
fruit‰ implies severing an experience from its primordial unity,
and in the story of the Garden of Eden it implies therefore the
act of separating the two attributes of the one tree: the
attribute of Life ˆ oneness ˆ and the attribute of Knowledge ˆ
individuation. According to the story, the dangers inherent in
the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge appear unrelated to the act of
encountering her fruit, but are rather related to the act of
ingesting it. As long as both realms are one, there is no danger
of losing oneself to the evils of particularism and its dormant
sense of superiority over an Other. Once severed from one another,
however, and divided into two separate trees, the relationship
with an Other is in danger of becoming hydraulic.

Emotions are not some kind of curse simply because they stem from
the primordial consumption of the Forbidden Fruit. Rather, they
are challenging. Nothing of the Forbidden Fruit, my teacher‚s
teacher Rabbi Yoy‚zel Horowitz used to say, is bad. The first
Human, he taught, could have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and
lived forever. They were not forbidden from eating of that tree,
only warned not to. Big difference. In every emotion, we face the
same challenge taught in this ancient story: Do we let the
emotion temper us, or do we temper the emotion. Do we allow the
fear to send us into hiding and denial, or do we employ the fear
to awaken us to the fact that we are missing something vital to
our well-being. Do we allow the feeling of love to overtake us to
the point of obsession and even at times overshadowing those we
purport to love, or do we employ the sensation of love toward
nurturing and appreciating those we love, stepping back to allow
them the space to become their optimal selves. Do we permit the
emotion of jealousy to transform our love and appreciation of
someone into a sense of possessing that someone, or will we
direct our jealousy toward deepening our appreciation and valuing
of that someone. Do we let our emotion of anger overtake us so
that our impulses impede our capacity distinguish right from
wrong, or do we redirect our anger toward empowering our passion
for sensing right from wrong. Instead of hiding when we feel
„naked‰ we should try to recover what it is we are missing, we
are bereft of, naked of.

Whether the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden is historical
fact or not is irrelevant. The Torah is our people‚s guide, and
its ancient stories are rich with pragmatic wisdom that can help
us not only better ourselves but equally as important, understand
ourselves. Did God create emotions? Hmmm. Not so sure. Seems
from the Torah‚s story of the genesis of humanity, it was humans
who invented it. And then the humans went ahead and applied all
those various emotions to God, and ended up recreating God in thei
r own image and lived happily ever after∑and sadly, and angrily,
and jealously, and hatefully, and lovingly, and fearfully.