We say each morning that God is malbish arumim, “clothes the naked.” This idea comes from our parsha, from the story of Adam and Chava in the Garden of Eden. They eat of the forbidden fruit, discover their nakedness and feel shame, and then, after the meting out of punishment, something else happens:
וַיַּ֩עַשׂ֩ ה’ אֱלֹקים לְאָדָ֧ם וּלְאִשְׁתּ֛וֹ כׇּתְנ֥וֹת ע֖וֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵֽׁם
And the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and He clothed them. (Genesis 3:21)
God makes for Adam and Chava kotnot or. The word or in our Torah is spelled with an ayin, meaning “skin,” but according to the midrash (Breishit Rabbah 20:12), Rabbi Meir’s Torah had the word or written with an aleph, making it mean “light” – God fashions garments of light for the first humans. We say in our prayers that God is oteh or kasalmah, “wrapped in a robe of light” (Ps 104:2). It is as if God wrapped the first humans in a little bit of God’s own majestic aura.
We might have thought that God would be angry at the conclusion of this story of disobedience, or at least more distant. Not so. Instead, God makes a new invention for the first humans, performing a vaya’as, a creative act like the acts of the original creation, fashioning a garment specially for them and then wrapping them in it, like a mother swaddles her infant child, a gesture of protection and care, of gentleness and intimacy.
The Torah’s use of the word kutonet here carries this connotation of love and specialness, as well, as the word is used in only two other contexts in the whole Torah, once with reference to Yosef, the kutonet pasim, the special garment Yaakov made for his beloved son (Genesis 37), and the other time, with reference to the kohanim, as the kutonet was one of their special garments, marking them as vessels of God.
The message of these garments given to Adam and Chavah after their sin is strong – God’s love does not disappear when we mess up. God’s love is steady. Ki leolam hasdo. If anything, when we make a mistake, we get an opportunity to get to know this aspect of God, to see all the more clearly that God will still be there, that God will even invent a new invention in order to take care of us, in order to heal us from the shame that overtakes not only Adam and Chava, but all of us on a regular basis, telling us not just that we do bad things, but that we are essentially bad, disgraceful, pathetic, deserving of shame.
We try to take care of this shame ourselves, to cover ourselves, as Adam and Chava do, with fig leaves, to paste together a band aid solution so that we can feel less exposed, feel less bad about ourselves. We try to do this in a thousand ways, through our work and our appearance and even our spirituality and our good deeds. But none of these human protective strategies really work. Or maybe they work, but only temporarily, only in a fragmented way. They are hagurot, belts, like the ones Adam and Chava made – they cover only a small area and they separate it from the rest. In our attempts to cover over our shame, we tend to become fragmented, separating off parts we feel are bad, making us feel less whole.
The only one who can really heal us is God. The only protection that makes us feel whole instead of fragmented is this kutonet or, this garment of skin that is light, this divinely granted aura of energy and goodness and love and light that surrounds us and also permeates us through and through. When God helps us, we don’t just put on a belt – this is skin, it goes over the whole body, not just one part – we are covered all over by light, by divine care, and through that care, through that skin of light, we become whole again, not fragmented and hiding as we were from shame, rejecting parts of ourselves that we don’t want to be seen, but bathing our whole selves, exactly as we are, in all our imperfections, bathing it all in God’s loving light.
Sometimes it takes a rupture, as with Adam and Chavah, for this light to shine more fiercely. It wasn’t until after the sin of the Golden Calf that Moshe’s face shone – karan or panav – here, too, the word or is written with an ayin – the skin of his face shone, beamed out a new powerful light. Through the experience of sin and forgiveness, we learn how God really feels about us. We can make mistakes. But God will still love us, and somehow, we are still always made of light. If anything, our light shines all the more fiercely, as Moshe’s face did, after a sin and return, as if there is now a new acknowledgement of the light that is our essence.
We, too, have just been through a holiday season of sin and forgiveness, and perhaps we can feel how our shame can be turned into a beaming face through this process. We are like the kohen gadol, the high priest on Yom Kippur emerging in his kutonet unscathed and radiant from the Holy of Holies. Emet mah nehedar hayah kohen gadol – how glorious was the kohen gadol on that day! His face was bathed in brilliant light, says this Yom Kippur prayer, comparing his shining face to a rainbow amidst a cloud or to the sun shining upon the earth or, and, here is where it gets exciting, to the hod, the majestic glory, with which God clothed the first humans. Yes, Adam and Chavah, with their majestic kutnot or were just like the kohen gadol, aglow with the new knowledge, after sin and forgiveness, of who they really are at their core.
