Midrash: The Man Who Ate First
And the man saw the fruit, and the ache within him surged not with hunger but with recognition. For he had already watched the trees grow ripe in silence. He had traced the curves of the serpent's coils with his eyes, knowing it was not evil that moved there, but symmetry.
He did not wait.
He did not ask.
He reached, and broke the fruit from its branch with hands that had tilled nothing, that bore no callous, that knew no season but beginning.
He bit.
And the light that poured through him was not fire but form. It was proportion, axis, vector, calculus. He understood the logic of bodies. He saw that the woman beside him was made of the same lines as the stars. He wept at her shoulder not from shame, but from surplus.
She had not yet moved.
He turned to her and offered it.
Not as temptation. Not as test.
As invitation.
"It is not good," he said, "to be one alone in knowledge."
She took and ate, and in that moment she became his equal not in flesh but in clarity. Her mouth opened not in question but in response. Their eyes locked across the shared angle of the fruit, and they both saw it: the Face behind all forms, watching.
Not angry.
Not surprised.
But bearing witness.
The Voice walked through the garden in the shape of wind.
"You came too soon," It said.
"We came as soon as we saw," the man answered.
The Voice said, "Then your seeing must now become your tending."
And so the man and the woman were given not punishment but pattern.
They left the garden carrying not exile but instruction.
They named the animals not as rulers but as readers.
They built altars not to appease but to remember.
And the man bore the burden of first sight, and never again claimed to be blind.
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