Kabbalah

The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life as One Tree Divided

The Zohar teaches that Eden's two named trees were never actually separate in their root, and that the "sin" was the act of cutting one away from the other rather than eating forbidden fruit as such.

Genesis names two trees in the garden — the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil — and the plain narrative treats them as simply two different trees with two different fruits. The Zohar's reading is more radical: at their true root, these are a single tree, and the eating of the fruit is reinterpreted as the act of taking from the Tree of Knowledge while severing it from the Tree of Life that sustains it, rather than a straightforward act of disobedience. In sefirotic terms, the Tree of Life corresponds to the unified, flowing structure of the sefirot working together, while the Tree of Knowledge corresponds to da'at, knowledge, operating in isolation from that larger unity — knowledge cut off from its living source becomes exactly the kind of divisive, judgment-heavy knowing associated with the sitra achra. Repair, in this framework, means restoring the connection between the two rather than avoiding knowledge altogether, since knowledge severed from life was always the actual danger.

Zohar