The Fall of Wonder

How Judaism Ate from the Wrong Tree

A frum friend sent me a voice note after reading my last post The Death of Religious Curiosity

"Beautiful! Nailed it! The original chasidim would have agreed with every word. But here’s how they would have phrased it..."

So I listened. And then I rewrote the entire post - this time, in their language.

This is what came out. Enjoy.

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A hundred years ago, a yeshiva bochur might have spent his nights wrestling with a question.

How does an infinite, unchanging God write a book?

How does something beyond time, beyond language, beyond form - express itself in words, in sentences, in a physical scroll?

His brain burned with the contradiction. His soul tangled in questions.

Today, a yeshiva bochur memorizes halachos for a test. The contradiction doesn’t bother him. Because no one asks anymore.

Judaism lost something.

The Tree of Knowledge and the Death of Wonder

It all starts in Gan Eden.

Etz HaDaas. The Tree of Knowledge.

"והייתם כֵּאלֹקים, יודעי טוב ורע."

“You will be like God,” the Nachash tells Chava. “You’ll know good and bad.”

Sounds noble, right? What’s so terrible about knowing good and bad?

But here’s the thing. Knowing between good and bad doesn’t mean learning. It doesn’t mean seeking truth. It means certainty. It means defining truth. It means saying, I know what’s right. I know what’s wrong. The conversation is over.

That’s the real tragedy of the Etz HaDaas. It wasn’t about morality. It wasn’t about sin.

It was about Adam stepping away from Chachma - from wonder, from unfiltered curiosity - and locking himself into Bina and Daas. Into definition. Into structure. Into certainty.

And here’s the kicker.

Who gave him the fruit?

Chava.

נשים הן בינה. They define. They contain. They give form to raw potential.

And Adam? He let that trait get the better of him. He wanted to know between good and bad. He wanted clarity, certainty, finality.

But that’s the one thing you can’t have.

Because real truth sits above knowing.

The Highest Wisdom Is Not Knowing

We think of knowledge as a straight line - from ignorance to understanding, from לא ידעתי to יודע אני.

But the mekubalim saw it differently.

To them, real wisdom isn’t knowing. It’s not knowing.

The second you land on an answer, you’ve already stepped down from truth.

The word חכמה rearranges to כח מה - the strength of What? That’s not a coincidence. Chachma is curiosity itself. It’s the power of the question.

The moment you try to contain it, you lose it.

Bina and Daas come later. They take raw curiosity and structure it into something usable. But structure is always a loss. The second you define something, you shrink it. The second you know something, you’ve moved away from truth.

This is why Judaism today feels suffocating. It has collapsed entirely into Bina and Daas. No tension. No wonder. No willingness to sit inside a question.

Just certainty.

The Tragedy of Certainty

One of the most radical ideas in Kabbalah is this:

לא החומר יולד את הדעת, אלא הדעת יולדת את החומר.

Matter does not create consciousness. Consciousness creates matter.

Logic says the brain produces the mind. Thought is just neurons firing.

The mekubalim saw it the other way around.

Reality flows downward from consciousness. From the infinite into the finite.

And if consciousness precedes matter, then answers - rigid, closed, finite answers - can never touch true reality. Because the second something becomes fixed, it has already stepped down into Bina and Daas.

Truth sits above them. In Chachma.

This is why certainty is dangerous.

The moment we claim to have the truth, we’ve already lost it.

The Fear That Killed the Question

Certainty is comforting. It makes you feel safe.

And somewhere along the way, Judaism decided it wanted to be safe.

The Gemara is built on relentless questioning, on contradictions, on leaving things unresolved. The mekubalim saw Torah as a cosmic structure, an infinite system to decode. The early Chassidim tried to bring that wildness back - to inject Judaism with mystery and wonder.

But at some point, the gates closed.

Curiosity became dangerous. Questions weren’t a path to truth anymore. They were a threat to it.

So Judaism shrank.

It collapsed into certainty.

It ate from Etz HaDaas.

The Etz HaChaim Alternative

But there was another tree.

עֵץ הַחַיִּים. The Tree of Life.

No one said you couldn’t eat from that one. No one said it was off-limits.

Because Etz HaChaim isn’t about certainty. It isn’t about knowing truth. It’s about living it.

עֵץ חַיִּים הִיא לְמַחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ. The ones who hold on to it. The ones who seek. The ones who never stop searching.

דְּרָכֶיהָ דַּרְכֵי נֹעַם, וְכָל נְתִיבוֹתֶיהָ שָׁלוֹם.

Its ways are ways of pleasantness. And all its paths - every single one of them - lead to peace.

Certainty doesn’t lead to peace. It leads to conflict.

It leads to din. To division. To societies collapsing under the weight of their own rigid truths.

But peace? Peace requires humility. It requires not knowing. It requires holding space for someone else’s truth.

עֵץ הַדַּעַת kills civilizations. עֵץ הַחַיִּים saves them.

When Judaism Stopped Searching

Jewish thought used to be in motion. It wrestled. It questioned. It danced between the infinite and the practical.

• Kabbalah wasn’t fringe mysticism. It was an intellectual attempt to map reality.

• Halacha wasn’t a rigid system. It was a conversation between the finite and the infinite.

But at some point, we stopped reaching.

We collapsed into certainty.

And now, Jewish thought has become a closed system, built not on exploration but on preservation.

Judaism used to search.

It used to wrestle with truth.

It used to leave things unresolved.

When was the last time a yeshiva guy said, “I don’t know”?

When was the last time a beis medrash privileged a question over an answer?

This is the Judaism we’ve inherited. A Judaism that has forgotten how to wonder.

A Judaism that ate from the wrong tree.

Reclaiming the Infinite

If Judaism wants to matter again, it needs to do more than tolerate questions.

It needs to privilege them.

It needs to stop seeing itself as a rulebook and start seeing itself as a search for truth.

The greatest religious minds always knew the truth was bigger than the words we use to describe it. That language is a placeholder. That every name we give God is just a temporary label for something too vast to pin down.

When physicists talk about quantum particles, they don’t really mean "particles." They just don’t have a better word. They know their language is flawed.

Judaism used to know that too.

But in so many places, it has forgotten.

Instead of acknowledging the limits of its language, it retreated into certainty. And certainty is the enemy of growth.

Instead of chasing certainty, maybe it’s time we reached for the other tree.