ABSTRACT
Harold Bloom wrote, "Sigmund Freud's most profound Jewishness, voluntary and involuntary, was his consuming passion for interpretation''. Psychoanalysts, the human being, created in the image of God, are like a text, subject to ongoing and interminable analysis and interpretation. The emphasis on human creativity as fulfilling a spiritual God-like obligation is nowhere better expressed than in the daringly original and innovative approach to biblical interpretation and exegesis that we find in the brilliance of Aviva Zornberg's essay. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, following traditional midrashic interpretation, assumes that Adam and Eve had an erotic life and were intersubjective, self-reflective individuals involved in a mutual, sexual partnership prior to eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. God has to protect his supremacy by an act of force, by expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and by thus preventing them from taking the second step toward becoming God—eating from the tree of life.
