In the Beginning was Desire - a new film about Adam and Eve

But David Grubin’s 40-minute film, In the Beginning was Desire, which explores the story of Adam and Eve, is an imaginative introduction to her approach. This is Judaism for grown-ups, at a deeper level than the homilectic simplicity we may still associate with the stories from childhood.

Grubin is an accomplished film-maker, whose output includes biographies on American presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Lyndon B.Johnson for American TV. He was introduced to Avivah Zornberg through his daughter Eve, who lives in London and is poet-in-residence at LSJS.

“I have always been intrigued by Bible stories and that is the mother of all stories,” he says. “I am also fascinated by Avivah Zornberg’s thinking — she is brilliant. I love her whole manner and way of presenting.”

To produce the film, he collaborated with Israeli-born artist Naomie Kremer who had a real feeling for the material too.

“Naomie has the ability to imagine,” he says, “and that’s what the whole story is about — Eve being able to imagine before Adam and turning us into the human beings we are. That’s one way of looking at the story.”

When they started, he explains, “we weren’t sure how we were going to do it”. It needed “ a certain amount of experiment with the imagery and the words to find a way to communicate what Avivah has to say visually”.

While her books are “very dense,” he acknowledges, “if you go and hear her talk, it’s a whole different experience.”

In the opening scenes, wispy white filaments which gradually you can make out as the outline of Hebrew letters float over a backdrop of a rolling ocean, representing a Creation that unfolds from words but also illustrating the dynamic flow of the Hebrew text where new meanings lie waiting to be discovered. “In the Jewish tradition, the Bible is always open to interpretation,” Zornberg later comments.

Splashes of colour form into an impressionistic tableau of the Garden of Eden in which the silhouettes of Adam and Eve, played by actors, enact their drama. The sequence of their creation is like watching modern dance.

The film presents the story through verses from the Bible and Zornberg’s audio commentary, which closely examines the exchanges between Eve and the serpent and between the first humans and God. The imagery is layered, “one thing on top of another”, Grubin says, as if visually echoing Zornberg’s multi-layered thought.

Adam and Eve, she explains, is “about how there came to be human beings who are like us”. When Adam first appears, he is “a kind of robot figure”, android-like with a simple inner life.

When Adam first calls Eve ishah, woman, because he conceives of her as taken from man, ish, Zornberg remarks “he really doesn’t have a name for her because he is baffled by her.” Only after they have tasted of the fruit tree of knowledge, does she acquire the name Eve.

Their self-discovery comes at a price, the loss of paradise, but Zornberg asks, “do we really want that simple life again”, giving up our human choices.

Adam and Eve “didn’t fall,” she comments, “they were birthed from a blissful bubble.”

“She is upsetting the way people like to think about this story,” Grubin says, in which “Eve is the heroine”.

But the film makes clear that Zornberg is drawing on “ancient sources in order to make her ideas resonate with the past,” he says. Still, some people may be shocked at the suggestion that you cannot understand the stories from the text of the Torah alone, that “you need the rabbis’ interpretation”.

The film he describes as “a love project”, a creative venture undertaken purely for its own sake.

“In America I did a series called The Jewish Americans. It was a history of Jews in America. That was very well funded because Jews are very proud of their history in America and they want people to know about it. I always say they should be also be proud of the Torah.”

You could, he says, “do a whole series of films like this”. Amen to that.

For more about David Grubin, see here and for Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, here