What if one of the most familiar stories in the Bible has shaped our understanding of ourselves, our relationship with God, and the relationship between men and women in ways we’ve never stopped to question?
For centuries, the story of Adam and Eve has been used to explain humanity’s fall from paradise. Eve was deceived by the serpent, Adam followed her lead, and humanity was cast out of the Garden of Eden. From this story came interpretations that portrayed women as spiritually weaker, subordinate to men, and responsible for humanity’s suffering.
But how much of what we’ve been taught actually comes from the story itself? And how much comes from the people who held the authority to interpret it?
The Stories We Inherit
Over the past several episodes of Know Thy Soul, we’ve explored fairy tales like The Handless Maiden, Perceval, and Dame Ragnell. These stories have helped us recognize the wounded masculine and feminine, the loss of our connection to the soul, and the journey toward restoring that connection.
But there’s a reason we began with fairy tales.
Most of us didn’t grow up hearing these particular stories. We could approach them without already knowing what they were supposed to mean. We could listen with the curiosity of a child, noticing the symbols and discovering their meaning for ourselves.
The stories in the Bible are different.
Many of us have been hearing them since childhood, along with interpretations that have become so familiar we rarely think to question them.
Consider the apple in the Garden of Eden. Nearly everyone knows about it, yet the Bible never identifies the forbidden fruit as an apple.
Or consider the two special trees described in Genesis 2:9: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
And what about the familiar teaching that Eve was created from Adam’s rib? The Hebrew word tzela, often translated as rib, can also mean side.
These details invite us to look again at a story we thought we knew.
Who Gets to Interpret the Rules?
There’s a fascinating psychological experiment involving a deliberately unequal game of Monopoly.
Researchers gave one player enormous advantages from the beginning. That player started with more money, collected more money, and could move around the board more easily.
And as the game progressed, something interesting happened.
The advantaged players increasingly behaved as though their success reflected their own decisions and abilities, giving comparatively little attention to the advantages they’d been handed.
I’ve often thought about how this pattern plays out in our understanding of religious authority.
For centuries, the institutions responsible for preserving and interpreting the Bible were overwhelmingly controlled by men. Those interpretations helped shape laws, marriage, education, religious leadership, and the roles women were expected to occupy.
When the people benefiting from a system also hold most of the authority to explain why that system exists, what assumptions might go unquestioned?
And what happens when those interpretations are eventually treated as though they came directly from God?
What If We Stopped Playing the Game?
This question has become deeply personal for me.
For much of my life, I believed that if I could just explain myself clearly enough, eventually other people would recognize what I was trying to tell them. They would see the inequality, understand why it mattered, and something would change.
But I eventually came to understand that I couldn’t make another person recognize something they were unwilling or unable to see.
And more importantly, I no longer wanted to spend my life convincing other people of my worth.
Even if nobody else in the world ever fully recognized that worth, I had come to recognize it within myself and, most importantly, in my relationship with God.
That is something nobody can take away from me.
It’s a realization that brings me back to the Handless Maiden. Her hands don’t grow back because she convinces someone else she’s worthy of having them. They grow back as she reconnects with something within herself.
And perhaps that invites us to ask a different question.
Rather than spending our lives trying to convince others that the rules are unfair, what might change if we began recognizing where we have the freedom to stop participating in them?
Returning to Genesis with Fresh Eyes
Genesis wasn’t originally a Christian story. It is the first book of the Torah, the sacred teachings of the Jewish people, and it was studied and interpreted long before Christianity existed.
There’s a beautiful teaching in Jewish tradition that says the Torah has seventy faces, suggesting that sacred scripture contains many layers of meaning, beyond any single interpretation.
And within Jewish mysticism, we encounter another beautiful teaching: Shekhinah, the indwelling divine presence, often associated with the feminine aspect of God in Kabbalah.
I’ve come to understand this divine presence not simply as something we’re supposed to believe in, but as a presence we can learn to recognize, connect with, and follow.
It’s a relationship that has profoundly shaped my life, including the unexpected journey that led me to write Eden Unveiled, an entire book devoted to the first three chapters of Genesis.
I never intended to write that book. It began as a single paragraph in Growing Hands, an observation about childhood, shame, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
But that paragraph became a section, then a chapter, and eventually a book of its own.
And the more I studied Genesis, the more I began to recognize connections I hadn’t expected to find.
The Story We Thought We Knew
I didn’t begin studying Genesis with the intention of challenging religious authority or disproving anyone else’s beliefs.
I was following where I felt I was being led, allowing myself to be curious, and following my desire to understand more.
And isn’t that interesting?
Curiosity and desire. The very qualities we’ve so often associated with Eve’s temptation and humanity’s fall.
Yet in my own experience, those qualities weren’t leading me away from God. They were drawing me into a deeper relationship with God.
And that leaves me wondering whether the story of Adam and Eve has something very different to teach us from what we’ve inherited.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll return to the Hebrew text and begin exploring the symbols, language, and layers of meaning woven into the first three chapters of Genesis.
Not so that you’ll replace one interpretation with another, but so that you can begin looking at the story for yourself.
Because perhaps the first step toward recovering our connection to the soul is learning to see with fresh eyes.
Mentioned in this episode:
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Why we began with fairy tales before turning to the biblical story of Adam and Eve.
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How centuries of religious interpretation have shaped our beliefs about men, women, and God.
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The surprising details in Genesis that many of us have overlooked.
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What a rigged game of Monopoly reveals about power, privilege, and our understanding of fairness.
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How inherited beliefs can become so familiar that we mistake human interpretations for God’s will.
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What the Handless Maiden teaches us about reclaiming our worth, setting boundaries, and spiritual sovereignty.
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Why Genesis’s Hebrew origins invite us to approach the story with fresh eyes.
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Shekhinah, the feminine divine presence, and what it means to develop a conscious relationship with God.
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How one paragraph in Growing Hands unexpectedly became Eden Unveiled, an entire book devoted to the first three chapters of Genesis.
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The full episode transcript is below.
Why We Began with Fairy Tales
Hi Friends,
Welcome to Know Thy Soul, where we explore the stories, symbols, and truths that help us bring our world back into balance.
If we zoom out and look back over the past several episodes, I imagine some of you may be thinking, this is all great, Jenn, but these are just fairy tales. These stories aren’t in the Bible.
And to that I would say, I’ve been building toward something with these fairy tales for a reason.
You see, most of the stories I’ve shared so far probably aren’t particularly familiar to you. You likely didn’t grow up hearing about the Handless Maiden or Dame Ragnell, so when you listened to them, you could approach them with something we talked about in our last episode: the eyes of a child.
You didn’t already know what they were supposed to mean. You weren’t carrying around years of interpretations about them. You could simply listen and begin discovering their meaning for yourself.
But the stories in the Bible are different.
Many of us have been hearing them since childhood. And whether we grew up in a religious household or not, the interpretations we’ve inherited have shaped the world we live in, often without our even realizing it.
And here’s something I want you to consider. For centuries, the interpretations of scripture passed down through religious institutions have been shaped overwhelmingly by men. And I would argue that many of those interpretations reflect the very consciousness we’ve been exploring in these fairy tales. A consciousness still wearing armor, disconnected from the feminine, and living in a divided world.
So over the next several weeks, I want to offer you something different.
I want to explore these biblical stories symbolically, through the eyes of a woman who has spent much of her life learning to shed the armor, grow her hands back, and trust the wisdom of her own soul.
I’m not asking you to believe my interpretation over anyone else’s. That would defeat the entire purpose.
I’m inviting you to look at the stories themselves, question what you’ve been taught they mean, and see what you discover when you approach them with fresh eyes.
And we’re going to begin with one of the most familiar, and perhaps most misunderstood, stories in the Bible.
The story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.
The Story We Thought We Knew
The biblical Creation story is arguably one of the most influential stories in the history of Western civilization.
And it’s a story we all think we know. A garden. A man. A woman. A serpent. An apple.
We’ve heard it so many times that most of us have stopped asking questions about it. It’s become part of the background of our collective understanding, quietly shaping how we see ourselves, our relationship with God, and especially the relationship between men and women.
Think about what we’ve been told this story means.
We were told that Eve was responsible for the fall of humanity. That women are somehow spiritually weaker because she was the one who was deceived. That because she was created second, she was less important, and that her purpose was to serve as Adam’s helper.
We were told that women were designed to be ruled over by men. That Adam represented humanity, while Eve represented temptation. And that because of her actions, suffering and death entered the world.
We were told that pain in childbirth and the struggle to work the land were punishments handed down by an angry God. That something was permanently damaged in human nature, and that we could only be redeemed through a savior. That God closed the gates of Eden, and humanity was cast out of paradise.
And over time, these interpretations helped shape entire systems of belief about what was good and what was evil.
Obedience was good. Submission was good. Women sacrificing themselves for others was good. Accepting what we were taught without questioning it was good.
But curiosity? Desire? Sexuality? Trusting our own intuition? Questioning authority or believing we could experience the divine within ourselves? Those things weren’t good.
We were taught to understand God almost exclusively in masculine terms. God the Father. God the Son. And even the masculine Holy Spirit.
And for centuries, in certain religious and political settings, challenging established interpretations of scripture could bring accusations of heresy, persecution, and even death.
When Questioning Was a Sin
I remember hearing the story of Adam and Eve when I was a little girl, and every time Eve was blamed for the fall of humanity, I would cringe.
There was something about that interpretation that just didn’t sit right with me. I certainly didn’t have the knowledge or language to question it back then, but I remember that feeling.
And I was also taught that questioning what the Bible said was a sin. That obedience was what good girls did. We were supposed to listen, believe what we were told, and not question the authority of those who were teaching us.
So like so many things we’re taught when we’re young, I didn’t really know what to do with that feeling. After all, who was I to question a story that adults were telling me came from God?
But that feeling never entirely went away.
And this is where I want you to remember our naked emperor. Because how many of these interpretations have we accepted simply because everyone around us insisted they were there? How many times have we been told what the story means without ever stopping to look at what’s actually on the page?
Learning to See with Fresh Eyes
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Did you know that the word apple isn’t mentioned anywhere in the story?
Think about all those paintings, all those children’s Bible stories, and not one mention of an apple. How did we all become so certain about something that isn’t even in the text?
Or did you know that there were actually two trees in the Garden of Eden? Not just the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but also the tree of life. Pull out your bible, it’s right there in Genesis 2:9.
And here’s another one. We’ve always been told that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. But the original Hebrew word, *tzela*, can mean side. In fact, it’s used elsewhere in the Torah to describe the sides of the Ark of the Covenant.
So what might that change about the way we understand the creation of woman?
Most of us were told what the story meant long before we ever had the opportunity to read it for ourselves. When others told us the emperor was clothed, we believed it.
And there’s something interesting about the way our minds work. Once we’ve been taught to see something a certain way, we tend to notice the details that confirm what we already believe, while overlooking the things that don’t fit. Psychologists call this confirmation bias.
So we can read the same story over and over again, and still miss what’s right there in front of us. Not because we’re incapable of seeing it, but because we’ve already decided what we’re looking at.
And that’s why I’m inviting you, just as Jesus invites all of us, to approach this story with the eyes and curiosity of a child who hasn’t already been told what everything means.
I think there’s something about the openness of a child, before we’ve learned what we’re supposed to believe, that allows us to see things adults often miss.
And I don’t believe Jesus was asking us to stop thinking or questioning, the way I was taught growing up. In fact, I think he may have been inviting us to do just the opposite.
Think about little children. They ask hundreds of questions. Why is the sky blue? Where do we go when we die? Why do people do the things they do? They’re endlessly curious about the world around them, and they’re not afraid to ask questions when something doesn’t make sense.
From Paradise to the Wasteland 7:35
And this brings us back to something we explored in one of our earliest episodes, The Tapestry, that we are going to continue weaving with this story.
Two of the main stories we’ve been exploring are The Handless Maiden and Perceval, which have shown us the wounded feminine and the wounded masculine.
And these two stories have something important in common. They both begin in the wasteland and show us the journey of finding our way home.
But they leave us with an important question: How did we end up in the wasteland in the first place?
And this is where the biblical creation story comes in.
Because unlike The Handless Maiden and Perceval, which begin in the wasteland and show us the journey home, Genesis begins in paradise and ends in exile or wasteland.
It’s the story of the first fracture. The original separation that, I believe, set so much of our modern world into motion.
When I returned to this story with not just the eyes of a child, but as a woman who had spent years studying symbolism, the soul, and spiritual traditions from around the world, I began to see something very different.
I saw a story of harmony and balance. A story that reveals not only the workings of our outer, physical world, but also the inner, spiritual world that so many of us have lost touch with.
And what I discovered was more than a story about how God created us. I began to see a map of how we were created to be, how we lost our original harmony, and perhaps most importantly, the path that leads us back to it.
And you may be thinking, how is that even possible? How could a story that’s been used to justify the subordination of women for thousands of years actually hold the key to dismantling those very beliefs? Well, it may be the greatest plot twist ever.
Well, that’s a question much too big to answer in a single episode, and one we’re going to spend the next several weeks exploring together.
The Rigged Game of Monopoly 9:35
But that raises another question, one I’ve spent years trying to understand. How did we end up with such a different interpretation of this story? And why are the institutions that claim authority over it so reluctant to consider another?
Well, I found something that helped me understand this in a rather unexpected place.
A game of Monopoly.
I recently watched social psychologist Paul Piff share a fascinating experiment involving a rigged game of Monopoly.
Several years ago, researchers invited pairs of strangers into a room and asked them to play Monopoly. But before the game began, they flipped a coin.
One player was randomly chosen to be rich. That player started with twice as much money, collected twice as much every time they passed Go, and even got to roll two dice instead of one.
The other player started with half the money, collected half as much for passing Go, and could roll only one die.
So before either player even touched the board, you can probably guess who was going to win.
The researchers were interested in what happened to the players along the way. And almost immediately, something fascinating began to happen.
The players who had been given the advantages began behaving differently. They became louder, more dominant, and more confident. Some began celebrating their successes, slamming their pieces onto the board, and making a big show of how well they were doing.
The study included more than 100 games of monopoly with over 200 total participants.
And here’s where it gets fascinating: when the winning players were asked why they were so successful, they focused on their own decisions and strategies, giving little to no attention to the fact that the game had been rigged in their favor from the very beginning. Think about that for a moment.
And I have to tell you, I don’t know that I find this surprising so much as I find it validating.
Because I think women have been watching some version of this Monopoly game play out for centuries.
We’ve seen what happens when the men who hold power begin believing they’re entitled to it, and when they become so accustomed to their advantages that they stop recognizing the struggles of the women who suffer under their power. The truth is, any oppressed population can say the same things about their oppressor.
When you’re on the losing end of a system, it’s often much easier to recognize how power shapes our understanding of what’s fair, what’s natural, and what we’re entitled to.
The Psychology of Power and Religious Authority 12:03
Now, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with Adam and Eve.
Well, think about who has historically held the power to interpret scripture.
For centuries, the religious institutions that shaped our understanding of the Bible were overwhelmingly controlled by men. Men held most of the positions of authority. They were the priests, the theologians, the scholars, and the people deciding which interpretations of scripture would be taught and passed down.
And to put that in terms of our Monopoly game, they didn’t just benefit from the rules. They held the power to write and enforce them in the first place.
And one of the stories used to justify those rules was Adam and Eve.
Think about how often Eve has been portrayed as the source of humanity’s downfall, while Adam has been presented as the rightful authority. How often this story has been used to teach that women are spiritually weaker, that they should be subordinate to men, and that this hierarchy was established by God himself.
And those interpretations didn’t remain confined to religious teachings. They influenced laws, customs, marriages, education, and women’s opportunities to participate in society.
They helped shape who was allowed to speak, who was believed, who held authority, and whose understanding of God was considered legitimate.
And this is where I think understanding human psychology becomes so important.
Because the men who interpreted these stories didn’t exist outside the societies they lived in. They were raised in cultures where male authority was often considered natural, where women had fewer rights, and where those differences were frequently understood to be part of God’s design.
So imagine what happens when someone who has spent his entire life believing that men were created to rule over women approaches a sacred story about the creation of man and woman.
What is he likely to see? What assumptions might he bring to that story without even realizing it? And what might he overlook because it challenges everything he’s been taught about his place in the world?
And I want to say something here, especially to the men who may be listening.
None of this is meant to suggest that men are inherently bad, or that every man is responsible for the systems we’ve inherited. But I do think it’s an invitation for all of us, and especially those who have benefited from these systems, to begin recognizing the rules we’ve been playing by.
Because I don’t believe these systems have been good for men, either.
Remember the wounded king in *Perceval*? And the Handless Maiden, who had lost her ability to act upon the wisdom of her own soul?
Both of those figures live within each of us, men and women alike.
What If We Stopped Playing the Game? 14:35
And maybe you’re wondering, okay, Jenn, so where do we go from here? How do we change a game when the rules have been handed down for generations, millennia even?
Well, I think the Handless Maiden has something again to teach us here.
Remember, she eventually left the king’s household and entered the wilderness. She stepped away from the patriarchal world she’d known, and it was there, away from the structures that had defined and controlled her life, that she began the journey of growing her hands back.
And I think there’s something important about that. Because how do you convince someone that a game is unfair when they’ve spent their entire life benefiting from its rules? Especially when they’ve come to believe that their advantages are natural, deserved, or even ordained by God? The answer is, you can’t make them.
I spent a good part of my own life trying to do exactly that. For years, I believed that if I could just find the right words, eventually they would understand what I was trying to tell them.
But a few years ago, I began to realize something. You know that old saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink?
There’s a lot of wisdom in that.
Because no matter how clearly we explain something, we cannot make another person see what they’re unwilling or unable to recognize. And we can spend an extraordinary amount of our lives trying.
But somewhere along the way, I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life convincing other people of my worth.
I didn’t want to keep explaining why I deserved to be heard, why my experiences mattered, or why I was entitled to the same dignity and respect as anyone else.
And here’s what changed everything for me.
I realized that even if nobody else in this entire world ever fully recognized my worth, I had finally come to recognize it within myself. And most importantly, I had found it in my relationship with God.
And that is something not a single soul on this planet can take away from me.
And that’s part of what the Handless Maiden discovers in the wilderness. Her hands don’t grow back because she finally convinces the king, or anyone else, that she’s worthy of having them.
They grow back as she reconnects with something within herself that was never meant to be surrendered to another person’s authority.
And remember those three fingers pointing back at us whenever we’re pointing at something outside ourselves?
Maybe one of the most important questions we can begin asking isn’t, how do I make this person recognize my worth? Or how do I make this religion recognize my worth? Or political party? Or whatever other organization believes in inequality in any shape or form.
Maybe it’s, why am I still waiting for them to? What choices might I make differently if I truly understood that my worth was never theirs to give me in the first place? Why am I continuing to participate in relationships, whether they’re personal relationships, workplaces, or religious institutions, where I’m treated as somehow less than someone else? Why am I waiting for someone else’s permission to claim the dignity and authority that already belong to me?
Now, I recognize that many people around the world don’t have the freedom to simply walk away from oppressive systems. And even when that freedom exists, leaving can come at an enormous personal cost. But the benefits are completely worth it.
But when we do have a choice, we have to ask ourselves why we keep participating in a game whose rules require us to abandon some part of who we are.
And this is where boundaries come in. Learning to set boundaries was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, especially with my anxious attachment patterns. But it’s also been one of the most life-changing.
And I wonder what would happen if women began setting those same boundaries with the religious institutions they’ve spent their lives supporting.
Imagine if women, along with the men who believe in their equal spiritual authority, simply stopped showing up at institutions that refuse to recognize it. What if we stopped contributing our time, our money, our energy, and our devotion?
I think we have far more power within these institutions than we realize. Without the people who sustain them, some might eventually disappear. But others might finally have to confront the very beliefs and structures they’ve spent centuries defending.
And perhaps that would mean experiencing their own dark night of the soul. Taking off the armor, walking into the wilderness, and finding the courage to confront the suffering these systems have caused, rather than continuing to defend them.
And maybe from that place, men and women could begin creating something different together. Not another system where one holds power over the other, but one grounded in a different understanding of our relationship with God and with each other.
Because I don’t think the answer is to take the Monopoly money away from men and hand it all to women. That would still be the same game.
I think the invitation is to ask whether we want to keep playing that game at all, or whether we might finally begin creating one based not on winning and losing, but on partnership.
And what if the story of Adam and Eve, the very story that has been used to justify so much of this inequality, has something entirely different to teach us about how we were created to live?
Shekhinah: The Indwelling Divine Presence 20
And before we begin exploring Genesis, I think it’s important to remember that this wasn’t originally a Christian story. Genesis is the first book of the Torah, the sacred teachings of the Jewish people, and it was being studied and interpreted long before Christianity existed.
And there’s a beautiful teaching in Jewish tradition that says the Torah has seventy faces. Meaning that these sacred stories contain many different layers of meaning, and that no single interpretation necessarily captures everything they have to teach us.
And I love that idea. Because it reminds us that even after thousands of years of study, there may still be wisdom waiting to be discovered in stories we think we already know.
And speaking of faces, there’s another one I want to introduce you to today. One that connects to everything we’ve been exploring on Know Thy Soul, and to the divine presence I’ve spent so much of my life learning to recognize and follow.
The feminine face of God.
In Kabbalah, God is understood to encompass both masculine and feminine aspects. And the feminine aspect of the Divine Presence has a name: Shekhinah.
Shekhinah comes from a Hebrew root meaning “to dwell.” And we find that same root in Exodus, when God tells Moses to have the Israelites build a sanctuary so that God may dwell among them.
And I believe that sanctuary is you. Not simply some external place you have to travel to, or a building you have to enter to encounter God, but the very mind, body, and soul that you inhabit every single day.
And when we create that sanctuary within ourselves, we begin restoring our relationship with the feminine face of the divine. The indwelling presence I’ve come to understand as the soul.
Or, in the language of the fairy tales we’ve been exploring, the Handless Maiden grows her hands back, Ariel regains her voice, and Sleeping Beauty awakens from her slumber.
The feminine is restored to her rightful place, and we begin to experience that divine presence within ourselves once again.
Eden Unveiled: My Journey into Genesis 22
And this feminine presence isn’t simply something we’re meant to believe in. She’s a presence we can learn to align with, to attune ourselves to. Even the word Kabbalah means receiving, and I sometimes think of it like tuning a radio to the right frequency. The signal may have been there all along, but we have to learn how to receive it.
And the more I began attuning myself to that presence in my own life, the more magical my life became.
I’ve already shared some of my favorite stories about how I began writing my books. But I haven’t told you how one book became two.
While I was writing Growing Hands, I kept thinking about how our beliefs are formed in childhood, and how we gradually lose touch with the feminine wisdom within us.
And I remember writing this one little analogy about a toddler running around the house naked. They’re not embarrassed by their bodies. They haven’t yet learned that there’s anything to be ashamed of.
But then an adult comes along and says, “Oh my goodness! Put some clothes on! You can’t run around like that! That’s shameful”
And suddenly, the child begins learning that being naked is bad and being clothed is good. Something that was completely natural and integrated a moment ago has now become something to be ashamed of.
And I began thinking about how much that resembles the story of Adam and Eve. Because isn’t that what happens in the Garden of Eden? They eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and suddenly they become aware of their nakedness and feel ashamed.
When we eat something, an apple, we take it into our body and becomes part of us, the same way these beliefs become part of us.
It was just one little analogy. That’s all I intended it to be.
But before I knew it, I had gone tumbling down the Genesis rabbit hole. And I’m not entirely sure I’ve found my way out just yet!
That one paragraph became a section. The section became a chapter. And that chapter just kept fighting me, until eventually it became the longest chapter in Growing Hands.
And I remember the day I realized that this needed to be its own book. And I looked up at the sky and thinking, “I just wrote an entire book, and now you want me to write another one?”
Well, once I came to terms with the idea of starting all over again, I pulled that chapter out of Growing Hands and spent the next year and a half writing Eden Unveiled, an entire book devoted to just three chapters of Genesis and a little bit of the book of revelation.
And I can tell you, I was guided through that entire process.
Sometimes I’d be taking a break from writing and open Instagram, and there would be a reel discussing the Hebrew roots of a word I hadn’t even thought to investigate.
Or a friend would mention a passage that connected directly to what I was working on. And these little moments kept happening. Over and over again.
In fact, just yesterday, while I was working on this episode, I got a notification from my vocabulary app reminding me to open it so I wouldn’t lose my daily streak.
And do you know what the word of the day was? Edenic
I mean, come on! Of all the words in the English language!
But one of my favorite experiences happened while I was writing Eden Unveiled. I was uncovering so many unexpected connections in Genesis that I could hardly believe what I was finding. And one day, I decided to ask my tarot cards what I needed to know about the story I was telling. Could this really be true?
Now, here’s what you need to understand. I had accidentally left two marketing cards in my tarot deck. You know, those little promotional cards that come with the deck but aren’t actually part of the tarot.
So I asked my question, shuffled the deck, and two cards came flying out.
And wouldn’t you know it? They were the two marketing cards!
Somehow, after all that shuffling, those two cards had stayed together, and they both came flying out at the same time.
At first, I was completely confused. What was I supposed to make of that? But then I took a closer look.
The cards were advertising a book. And do you know what the subtitle of that book was? The Untold Story.
The untold story!
And here I was, writing an entire book about an untold story around the first three chapters of Genesis.
And here’s what’s interesting. I didn’t set out to challenge the patriarchy. I wasn’t trying to discredit anyone or prove that everything we’d been taught was wrong.
I was simply following where I was being led, allowing myself to be curious, and yes, even following my desire to understand more.
And isn’t that interesting? Curiosity and desire. The very things we’ve so often been taught to associate with Eve’s temptation and humanity’s fall.
Yet in my own experience, following those things wasn’t leading me away from God. It was drawing me into a deeper relationship with God.
Now, you can certainly call all of these things coincidences. And I’m not asking you to believe they were anything more than that.
But when I look back at how this book came into being, and all the unexpected connections that seemed to appear along the way, I see the presence I’ve spent so much of my life learning to recognize and follow.
And that’s what I mean when I talk about developing a relationship with God. Not simply believing that God exists, but learning to listen, to recognize the invitations that appear in our lives, and to have the courage to follow where they lead.
And I believe that’s how Shekhinah has been working in my own life.
And there’s something else I’ve noticed that I find really interesting.
Whenever I tell another woman that I’m writing a book about Adam and Eve, almost without exception, her immediate response is, “Oh, I want to read that!”
And that’s before I’ve told her anything about the book. I haven’t explained my interpretation, or what I’ve discovered in the Hebrew, or even what the book is about beyond those three words. Adam and Eve.
And I’ve thought about that a lot. Because I wonder if there’s something within us as women that recognizes there’s more to this story than we’ve been told. Some deeper knowing that the familiar interpretation has never quite captured the whole truth.
And here’s what I find especially fascinating. I believe that very knowing, that inner wisdom we’ve spent so much of our lives learning to question or ignore, is actually woven into the story itself.
And over the coming weeks, I’m going to show you where I see it.
And there’s one more beautiful teaching about Shekhinah that I want to leave you with.
The Kabbalist Moses Cordovero described Shekhinah as bringing forth new secrets and new understandings of Torah. And he said that those who continually uncover new interpretations of these sacred stories are actually harvesting her.
I love that image. That when we return to scripture with fresh eyes, searching for wisdom we haven’t yet discovered, we’re not being disobedient, we’re actually participating in the continuing unfolding of divine wisdom.
So next week, let’s start harvesting Shekhinah together.
And we’re going to start at the very beginning, with the very first verse of Genesis.
Just seven Hebrew words. Twenty-eight letters. And yet, within those few words, their arrangement, their meanings, and their numerical relationships, I believe we can begin to uncover the story that unfolds throughout the rest of the Bible.
And I can’t wait to share with you what I’ve discovered.
Until next time, may you know thy soul. It already knows the way.
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