Bereshit
/The context is one of the best
known stories of the bible.
Together in the Garden of Eden,
surrounded by the rich panoply of
creation,
the first human couple have
everything they could possibly
want!
except one thing,
a tree from which they are
forbidden to eat.
Needless to say,
that is the one thing they want.
“Stolen waters taste sweet,”
says the Book of Proverbs.
They eat,
Their eyes are opened,
They lose their innocence,
For the first time they feel shame.
When they hear
“the voice of G-d” they try to hide,
but they discover that G-d is
someone from whom we cannot
hide.
G-d asks them what they
have done.
Adam blames his wife.
She blames the serpent.
The result is: paradise lost.
The episode is rich in its
implications,
but I want us to study one of its
strangest features.
The woman has been told that:
“with pain she will give birth to
children.”
Next, Adam is informed that he will
face a life of painful labor.
There,
then follows a sequence of
three verses which seem to have
no connection with one another.
Indeed, statements that does not
correctly follow from the meaning
of the previous statements.
“By the sweat of your brow,”
G-d says to Adam,
“you will eat your food until you
return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are and to dust you
will return.”
Adam named his wife Eve,
because she would become the
mother of all life.
The Lord G-d made garments of
skin for Adam and his wife and
clothed them.
The problems are obvious.
• Adam has just blamed his wife
for leading him into sin.
• He has also been condemned to
mortality.
• Why,
at just this point,
does he turn to her and give her a
new name?
And
• Why,
immediately afterward,
as they are about to be exiled from
Eden,
does G-d perform an act of
kindness to the couple,
giving dignity to the very symbol
of their sin, the clothes with which
they hide their shame?
The mood seems to have changed
for no reason.
The bitter resentment of the
previous verses suddenly
dissolves,
and instead,
between Adam and his wife,
and between G-d and the couple
there is a new tenderness.
Rashi is so perplexed that he
suggests that the middle verse is
out of chronological sequence.
It is the end,
not of the story of the sin of eating
the forbidden fruit,
but of the earlier scene in which
Adam gave names to the animals
and while doing so found
“no suitable companion.”
As we will see,
that is not the only way of
interpreting it.
Stranger still is the interpretation
given by the first century sage
Rabbi Meir to the phrase
“garments of skin,”
" bigdei ‘or "
Rabbi Meir reads the ayin of the
second word as an aleph,
" bigdei or "
and this interprets the phrase as
“garments of light.”
This is an almost mystical
suggestion and a deeply intriguing
one.
Why not,
when they were in paradise,
but as they were leaving it
were the couple bathed with
divine radiance, clothed in
“garments of light”?
Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah said,
“It is impossible for there to be a
session in the house of study
without some new
interpretation.”
In that spirit let us see whether we
can find new meaning in this
passage.
When he heard the words,
“dust you are and to dust you
will return,”
for the first time Adam became
conscious of his mortality.
The Torah is silent on what Adam’s
thoughts were in the wake of this
discovery, but we can reconstruct
them.
Until then, death had not entered
his consciousness,
but now it did.
What, if we are mortal, will live on?
It was then that Adam
remembered G-d’s words to the
woman.
She would give birth to children
in pain, to be sure, but she would
bring new life into the world.
Suddenly Adam knew that even
though we die,
if we are privileged to have
children,
something of us will live on:
• our genes,
• our influence,
• our example,
• our ideals.
That is our immortality.
This was an idea that eventually
shaped the character of the whole
of Judaism in contradistinction to
most other cultures in ancient and
modern times. Judaism defeats
mortality by engraving our ideals
on the hearts of our children,
and they on theirs,
and so on to the end of time.
Once Adam became aware of his
mortality, he understood that
without Eve, he could not have
children,
and children were his share in
eternity,
and their physical being,
their “nakedness,”
was not simply a source of shame.
There is a spiritual dimension to
the physical relationship
between
husband and wife.
The principle of divine creativity
itself, namely that
love creates life.
That is when he turned to her and
for the first time saw her as a
person and gave her a personal
name,
Chavah,
Eve,
meaning, “she who gives life.”
Previously Adam had not given her
a name at all.
He called her ishah, “woman,”
he himself had not had a proper
name until now either.
He is simply called ha-adam,
“the man”
a word that appears 21 times
[3×7]
Not until he gives on the woman a
proper name does he acquire one
himself, Adam.
With the appearance of proper
names, the concept of person is
born.
The concepts of “name”
and “person” are intimately linked.
G-d makes every human being in
the same image, his image, and
they are all different.”
The moment when Adam turned to
his wife and gave her a proper
name,
Chavah,
was a turning point in the history
of civilization.
It was then that G-d robed the
couple in garments of light.
Now we understand that
extraordinary sequence of three
verses.
Discovering his mortality,
Adam knew that he could only live
on through his children,
born through an act of love.
That was when he realised that
immortality cannot be achieved by
one alone,
but only by the union of two.
That is the profound message of
the first three chapters of
Bereishith,
a story about
language,
relationships
and what it is to be a person.
Judaism is the story of how the
love we feel for another person
leads to the love of G-d, and robes
us in garments of light.
Best Regards
Jean-Pierre FETTMANN
+65 94604420