Litvaks East of Eden
We want a labor force––
that’s why Hispanics came,
and are the ones, of course,
whom some now choose to blame,
as God blamed Eve and Adam,
though Adam delved and dug.
The apple He forbade ’em
contained a lethal bug.
Their status, legal im-
migrants, was fast aborted;
God called for cherubim,
and had them both deported,
and thus expelled the workers
who managed once in Eden
to bring Him bread and circus,
and take care of the weedin’.
Of course we should respect
all immigrants, but we
should also not neglect
the Hebrew pedigree
of Bible words, distorting
its precious words as Eve
once did while she was courting
Adam, as I do believe
she did, when disobeying
God’s orders, doing what
the snake to her was saying,
and driven from the plot
of earth called Eden for
that reason. Listen to
the words and don’t ignore
their meaning as some do,
when reading texts expecting
to be, as Adam was, forgiven
though, for God’s words neglecting,
with Eve from Eden driven.
The moral is: It’s all
about the words, and em-
igration and a wall
that many may condemn
are not a remedy
to stop the shame from bleedin’,
east of two parks, first Eden,
then in the west, Yosemite.
Ginzberg did not the word “timshel” used by John Steinbeck overrule
with timshol, you may rule, in East of Eden, misled by a Litvak’s
pronunciation, Ginsberg’s Lithuanian accent the accidental tool
that caused this accident caused by a talmudic scholar’s Hebrew hack.
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The word “timshel’ in “East of Eden” was explained by Sheila Tuller Keiter in “Netflix’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel and said to be Hebrew, but who was the talmudic genius responsible for that?” Jewish Review of Books,” Fall, 2026:
John Steinbeck began almost every working day of 1951 with a letter to his editor at Viking Press, Pascal Covici, before turning to East of Eden. At one point Steinbeck recruited Covici, himself a Romanian Jew (Pascal Avram), to find a rabbinic authority to consult with on the original Hebrew of the key phrase in Genesis 4:7. As the fictional Lee’s Chinese elders turned to the rabbis, Covici turned to Professor Louis Ginzberg of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, one of the preeminent rabbinic scholars of his generation. Ginzberg’s most well-known work, The Legends of the Jews, is a retelling of the entire Hebrew Bible in the light of classic, sometimes fanciful, rabbinic interpretations. It is a work of massive, almost unfathomable erudition and remains an invaluable resource today (I use it frequently).
Alas, the Steinbeck-Covici letters do not reveal exactly what Ginzberg told Covici and what Covici relayed to Steinbeck in this game of exegetical telephone. However, it seems that great minds did not think alike. For some reason, Steinbeck was not entirely pleased with Ginzberg’s interpretation of the key word. He wrote Covici:
Don’t forget that in the Jewish translation you sent, they did not think “timshel” was a pure future tense. They translated it “thou mayest.” This means that at least there is a difference of opinion and that is enough for me. I will have to have the whole verb before I will finish, from infinitive on through past, subjunctives and compounds and futures. But we will get it. We may have to go outside of rabbinical thought to pure scholarship which may be non-Jewish. . . . Dr. Ginzberg, dealing in theology, may have a slightly different attitude from that of a pure etymologist.
This is confused and confusing. Steinbeck clearly didn’t understand how verbs worked in Hebrew and may have simply given up. However, one thing that is clear is that Steinbeck arrived at his spelling and pronunciation of the Hebrew nonword “timshel” as a result of Covici’s consultation with Ginzberg, one of the greatest scholars of Hebrew texts of his generation. How was this possible? Here, I have a hypothesis.
Ginzberg was born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1873 and immigrated to the United States in 1899. Having received a traditional yeshiva education in his youth, Ginzberg would almost certainly have pronounced Hebrew with a Lithuanian, or Litvish, accent, which differs significantly from that of other Ashkenazi Jews. For instance, the word “Torah” might be pronounced “Toyrah” by Polish Jews but “Teyrah” by Litvaks. The “oh” sound morphs into an “ey.” Thus, “timshol” in Ginzberg’s Litvish accent might have sounded like “timsheyl,” which is almost Steinbeck’s “timshel.”
For a moment in 1951, a literary giant and a talmudic genius indirectly sparred over the implications of a single biblical phrase, inadvertently bringing us the iconic nonword “timshel.” And who am I to step into the fray seventy years later and presume to solve the “timshel” mystery? Well, that’s the beauty of interpretation. Thou mayest.
Interestingly, the final word in “East of Eden” is “Timshel!”