So close to their human function was work that the biblical author uses the same word for “tend” as “worship.” To care for the garden was to worship the Creator. Eden was a divine domain of work and worship, not a world of sedentary laziness or unproductivity. The created world was to be creatively worked and nurtured. Work is not a mistake or a curse. Yet work becomes our curse when it becomes what we worship. “Labor is not,” writes Abraham Heschel, “only the destiny of man; it is endowed with divine dignity.”
