From the moment of evil's appearance as the serpent of Eden, it has lured us with its promise that we can “be as God.” This most clever of “beasts” knows our secret lust. Since the spark of each person really is part of God, each of us thinks the universe ought center around me. Behind every sin is the serpent's ruse, “ Take ...You deserve it, just like God,” “ Rage ...You don't have to yield to anyone, just like God,” “ Get high ...Feel the bliss of expanded consciousness, just like God.” A narcissistic craving always lies at the root of sin.

“And the Lord G-d made to grow out of the ground every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; also the Tree of Life in the midst of the garden and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

Tree of Life consciousness, says the 11th century Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, is to see the world through a perfectly rectified lens of True-and-False: to touch the spark of each moment and whole-heartedly choose its most spiritually productive response. The Tree of Knowledge, in contrast, is a much lower state. It only holds consciousness of Good-and-Evil, which are True-and-False distorted by emotional judgment and personal attachments.

A child first acquires the awareness that enables speech when it begins to ingest wheat. Kabballa explains that this is because the numerical value of the Hebrew word for wheat (chitah) is 22, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. This Kabbalistic fact connects wheat to the sefira of Insight for it is there that the capacity for conscious awareness first appears. Not only do letters enable speech, they are also required for thought. These rarified letters that glimmer in the mind as the source of our creative insights are the spiritual root of wheat.