From this I shall probably hear what yeshiva students have to say about the famous apple.

I have never sat in a yeshiva — a school for the study of Torah — and been part of or listened to the arguments over every passage, line, and word.

Moreover, having lived thus far an American life, I’ve missed also the rich literature that has accompanied my religion, apparently, through the ages. Such as Hillel the Elder seems to have done his thinking before the Common Era and a thousand years before Maimonides played physician to the Kurdish General Saladin.

However, one might take a lesson not from the old text and figures varying in their historical placement and stature, but from what they lived and promoted in aggregate: a lively, long, and open argument about considerations involving others, nature, and God.

Such a conversation, whether between two debating partners over a book or a few books on a table or between a whole world diverse in experience, history, and lore, need never end and may be a part of the point of living as men and women: to know life well, take joy in it, and open the passage in time for others to live even better lives, more just, more in beauty, more with nature, ultimately more with God, the Divine, the Greater Spirit.

I don’t think evil, or what we call evil, was placed in the world for the convenience of the good to do good.

Evil — such as that in Syria today — may be part of the natural condition from which the good have arisen, reformed, and with every generation turned about and made smaller and, where possible, less virulent.

We have said since Exodus, “With each generation a little more freedom is won.”

But it has to be won.

I think Adam would have been poorer — less developed, less human, less conscious, less a man, frankly — had he never tasted that apple and experienced delight and life.

The emphasis may be placed on the blossoming of humanity, not so much on obedience, which God controlled in any case.

And for us mere humans, perhaps it is the conversation, the good and searching, compassionate, and caring quality of it, that is our purpose.