Suddenly this week I gained a new understanding of Genesis 2, the Garden of Eden  with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. For me it has long been an etiological allegory, giving contextual meaning to the origins of good and evil while explaining our failure to achieve eternal life. Now I see the story differently.
We ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which, like the infusion of a new gene into the human genome, altered every human decision by endowing it with moral valence. The Bible would urge us toward the positive moral choice in every instance, but freedom is nonetheless given and humans become independent moral agents.
We are expelled from the Garden due to our choice to achieve moral knowledge and our resultant devisings and their actions, not because humanity disobeyed God. Now the Tree of Life becomes reserved for the sum total of our life actions, not some instantaneous condition thrust upon us by our Creator. Had we eaten of Eternal Life without morality we would never have known the nature of death or tragedy. Immortality would be meaningless without moral choice and the knowledge of alternatives. But having eaten of The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil the way to The Tree of Life is barred until the sum of our individual actions are totaled and God knows whether we chose life or death.
Those who murdered the Israeli and Arab boys choose death for all of us, Jew and Arab, humanity in general; and most particularly the inevitable future victims. God created an ambivalent world: of death of life. It's ultimate disposition will be determined by the sum of individual choices that actually, in virtually every instance, have universal implications and impacts. This week, the centennial of the events leading to World War I, it was reported that the assassins of Archduke Ferdinand stated that had they known the outcome of their actions they would not have done what they did. But that statement exemplifies every deed performed every single day, because the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil pervades each thought and manifests itself in every deed. Final results can never be known for certain at the moment of action.
These deaths, so tragic that nations weep for the losses, are mere manifestations of actions taken over years on both sides, ignoring their final outcome as though it would never be; or hoping that either side could triumph and ignore the other's reality. But the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil will take its toll on us all, and whether we create the path to the Tree of Life with each decision will determine future events in specific ways we cannot know at this moment except that they will most assuredly occur.