D’var Torah: Bereisheit 2025/5786 ברשית

Rabbi Charlie Schwartz, Co-Founder and Director of Lehrahus, A Jewish Tavern and House of Learning

Drinking from the Tree of Knowledge

The Tree of Knowledge is one of the most popular mixed drinks at Lehrhaus, even though it is spirit-free, though we are always happy to add your favorite spirit. The drink is a playful re-imagining of the Boston classic Ward 8, built around the biblical mystery of the Tree of Knowledge in this week’s parasha, Bereisheit.

In Bereisheit, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil stands at the center of the Garden, beautiful, inviting and forbidden. The Torah never tells us what kind of tree it was, but the rabbis could not resist imagining. Rabbi Meir said wheat. Rabbi Yossi said the fig. Rabbi Yehudah said grapes. Rabbi Abba of Akko said the etrog. The Lehrhaus version brings those ideas together with fig-leaf tea, lemon, pomegranate, and pineapple, a combination that is sweet, tart, layered, and complex.

You will notice there is no apple. That association does not come from Jewish tradition but from the Latin Vulgate translation, which rendered “fruit” as malum, a word that in Latin can mean both “apple” and “evil.” Over time, that linguistic overlap shaped centuries of Christian art and imagination, but not the Jewish one.

It is tempting to read the rabbis’ interpretations as clever guesses, but something deeper is at play. For them, the Tree of Knowledge was real, something you could see, taste and smell. They knew that the experience of daʿat tov va-raʿ, the struggle to discern good and evil, is as tangible as biting into fruit.

Maimonides pushes this idea even further. Before eating, he writes, Adam and Eve perceived the world through truth and falsehood, through the clear light of intellect. Afterward, they saw it through good and evil, through the murky, human lens of moral choice. In that sense, the Tree of Knowledge is not myth but a vivid description of what it means to be human.

My hope for us this year is that we approach Torah with that same vividness and curiosity, searching for our sacred text’s deepest truths, whether we are learning at home, shul, in school or over a Tree of Knowledge at Lehrhaus.

L’chaim to a sweet new year of learning and growth.