The Shame Hidden in the First Word 2

I ended the first essay with a hope about stepping out from among the trees. A person can only come out of hiding, I said, once they feel they have been clothed with love. I wrote that the last gesture is not judgment but tenderness. Writing that sentence warmed me. But when I went back to the text, a verse I had left unread was waiting for me. Straight after the garments, the man is sent out of the garden. Cherubim are placed at the east of Eden, and a flaming sword that turns every way guards the path to the tree of life. The last gesture was not the clothing after all. It was a door closing behind them.

At first I felt a quiet ache. Then I went back to the image from the first essay. A cold morning, a mother or father guiding a child’s arms into the sleeves, one at a time. And I thought about how that morning carries on. A mother does not dress her child so that he will stay at home. She dresses him because he is going out. To school, into the cold, onto a road she cannot walk for him. She does not hold the door open, but she does not send him out naked either. Perhaps tenderness is not erasing the consequence. Perhaps tenderness is the warmth that goes with a person into their consequences. Adam and Eve did not leave the garden naked. They were wearing garments sewn by God’s own hands. Bereshit Rabbah tells us that in the Torah scroll of Rabbi Meir, kotnot or was written not with an ayin, garments of skin, but with an aleph, garments of light. Perhaps as they walked out, something of the garden’s light was still on them. The sages draw a task for us from this verse. God clothed the naked, so you too must clothe the naked. He visited the sick, so you too must visit the sick. Outside the garden, its last act of tenderness is left in our hands.

This time I read the verses just before the garments more slowly. First comes that heavy sentence. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return. And in the very next breath, Adam gives the woman beside him a name. Eve. The mother of all living. That detail moved me deeply. A few verses earlier Adam had pointed at her. The woman You gave me, he had said. Now, for the first time, he gives her a name of her own. Until that moment he had only called her isha, woman, the name of her kind. At the very moment he hears of death, he sees who is standing beside him. Perhaps this is how the mending of a relationship always begins. By moving from blame to naming. When we begin to see the other not as the source of a problem but by their own name, with their own life.

All of this brought me back to the first word. Yare boshet, drawn from the letters of Bereshit. Awe and shame. The whole warmth of the first essay was born from that reading. But looking more closely at the letters, I notice something subtle. The yare that comes out of the letters is a verb, one who fears. The noun for awe is yirah, and it is written with a final heh. In the first word, that heh is missing. Letters open a door, but they do not name everything behind it. That missing letter stayed with me for days. In Kabbalah, heh is the letter of breath. It is the last letter of the Divine Name, the letter of the Shechinah. The awe in the first word is awe with its breath missing. Perhaps that is exactly what exile is. The Zohar reads teshuvah as tashuv heh, let the heh return, and the Tanya unfolds that reading. Perhaps the whole story was already written in that first word. A wonder that has lost its breath, and a world waiting for that breath to come back.

In the first essay I wrote about the boundary Eve added to God’s word, do not touch it. I wrote about a fear mixed with love being passed on as though it were a command. But returning to the story, I saw something I had missed. When the command was given, Eve had not yet been created. You may eat of every tree of the garden, but of this one you shall not eat was said to Adam. Eve heard it not from God but from Adam. What she held was a word that had passed through someone else’s voice. When the serpent asked whether God had really said so, she had no way to check, for she had never heard it herself. I find this very familiar. The values we receive secondhand, words we have been told but never heard for ourselves, are the first to shake when someone questions them. Societies are no different. Rules handed down for generations but never traced back to their source have nothing to hold on to when someone asks why. Mishlei gives a short warning. Do not add to His words. The problem is not setting a boundary. The problem is forgetting whose voice the boundary came from.

The garden actually began with a permission. I had not seen this clearly enough in the first essay. God’s first words to man are not a prohibition. Mikol etz hagan achol tochel. Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat. The verb is said twice, as if telling a child, don’t be afraid, it’s all yours. Once the serpent speaks, the whole garden vanishes and only that one tree is talked about. Perhaps the first temptation was not the fruit itself. It was the narrowing of the gaze. A whole garden laid out in front of you, and the eye fixed on a single prohibition. We know this from our own lives. Forgetting the hundred things given in a relationship and chasing the one thing that was not.

But there is another detail I missed in the first essay, and now I cannot stop seeing it. Eve takes the fruit, eats, and gives it also to her husband, imah, with her. Adam was there. He had been beside her throughout the conversation. While the serpent spoke, while Eve answered with the boundary she had added, while she looked at the tree, Adam said not a word. In the first essay I wrote that Eve stood alone at the moment of decision. Now I think that loneliness was more painful. Being alone with someone right beside you. It is one of the wounds I hear most often when couples talk. Someone who is there in body but not in spirit. Perhaps the first break in the garden began before the fruit, in that silence.

Not everything the serpent said was a lie. Their eyes were opened, and good and evil became known. He did not lie. He took a piece of the truth and put it in the place of the whole. Perhaps the serpent’s real cunning lay not only in his cleverness but in his ability to hide his intention. Every sentence he spoke was true, but he concealed why he was speaking. I know that what wounds people most is very often not a lie but a hidden intention. And yet this does not make the one deceived innocent. Being deceived is not the same as having no responsibility at all. Still, wherever we have been deceived, there is a comfort in seeing ourselves only as the victim.

In the first essay I described Ramban’s reading. That a new desire awoke within the human being, one able to want a thing and its opposite. But the text leaves a question open. Before eating the fruit, Eve had already found the tree desirable. So desire was there before the fruit. On this question it was the teaching of Rav Yehuda Ashlag that guided me. For Rav Ashlag, the purpose of creation is the Creator’s wish to give goodness, and the essence of every created thing is the will to receive. So desire is not a fault that crept into creation later. It is what being created means. The very word Kabbalah means receiving, accepting. But Rav Ashlag distinguishes two ways of receiving. A will that receives only for itself, and a will that receives in order to give, so as to become like the Giver. What is received may be the same. What changes is the direction within the one receiving. What follows is my own reading. In the garden the problem was not desiring, but the way of taking. That tree had not been given to man. Eve did not receive the fruit as something held out to her. She plucked it with her own hand. The same fruit, but one is received from an outstretched hand, and the other is snatched.

In the first essay I wrote that learning to tell apart the two voices within us might be one of the kindest things a person can do for themselves. I also leaned toward Fromm’s reading of disobedience as the beginning of freedom. Now I am not so sure. Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin says man was already free in the garden. Had he not been free, how could he have chosen? So what was born in the garden was not freedom. What was lost there was the ability to tell those voices apart. And this takes me further. Telling them apart is more than a kindness. Perhaps it is freedom itself. There is a question that comes before what do I want. Where does what I want come from? And I don’t think that question can be answered alone. A person often discovers what they truly want only once they are heard.

Then, in the cool of the day, that voice walks in the garden and the two of them hide among the trees. In the first essay I wrote about the tenderness of this scene. This time I was caught by Adam’s answer. I heard Your voice and I was afraid, because I am naked, so I hid. Va’ira. He does not say I was ashamed. He says I was afraid. And I realized that this is the first sentence a human being speaks about himself in the Torah. I heard, I was afraid, I am naked, I hid. The I is spoken for the first time, and it arrives in fear. I see this often in the people who sit across from me. The first self people present is usually a guarded one. A person begins their story from where they are hiding. And here the root of yare from the first word returns, but with another face. The Zohar speaks of two kinds of fear. One is fear of punishment, of loss, of what might happen. The other is the sense of one’s own smallness before His greatness, true yirah. The awe in the letters of Bereshit has turned into fear in Adam’s mouth.

And the most touching detail is this. The fig leaves had been sewn. There was a covering. Yet Adam still says to God, I am naked. The leaves covered the way they looked at each other, not their nakedness before Him. What we hide from people, we cannot hide from Him.

God’s question strikes me as the first therapeutic question in the Torah. Mi higid lecha ki eirom atah? Who told you that you were naked? Not how did you find out, but who told you. It is what I always ask the people who sit across from me. Who told you that you were worthless? Who told you that you would not be loved, that you were not good enough? Most of what a person believes about themselves they first heard from someone else, and they mistake that voice for their own. And the Torah’s answer to this question surprises me every time. As soon as they leave the garden, the fourth chapter opens with this sentence. Veha’adam yada et Chava ishto. And Adam knew Eve his wife. For the first time, the verb to know describes a union. When their eyes were opened in the garden, they did not know, they judged. Real knowing began outside, when two people drew close to each other again.

Where are you? Ayekah. God knew where the man was, yet He asked. The first question is not about sin but about where a person stands. He is not judged at once. First he is called, first he is listened to. As I write this, I look at my own life. Since childhood I have said the same thing to the people I love. See me. And the first person in the Torah to give God a name is a woman sent away from home, left alone in the desert. Hagar calls Him El Roi. The God who sees me. The sages read Ayekah alongside Eichah, written with the same letters, the first word of the lament sung after the destruction of Jerusalem. Eichah yashvah vadad. How she sits alone. Perhaps Ayekah is not an interrogation but a lament. And there is one more detail. Ayekah is singular. God calls not to both of them, but to Adam, the man who stood beside her without a word. Perhaps the real question was this. Where were you? Not what did you do, but where were you.

In the first essay I wrote that the copper serpent healed from the very place it had wounded. The story has a sequel, and I did not tell it there. Centuries later King Hezekiah breaks the copper serpent that Moses had made, because the people had begun burning incense to it. A means of healing had taken the place of the Source and become an idol. The Mishnah had said it long before. It was not the serpent that healed, but hearts turned upward. In the first essay I wrote that we sew our defenses from the fabric of our own wounds, and that tearing them off by force does not heal. This story teaches me one more thing. Timing. The copper serpent was not broken straight away. For centuries it stood raised up and healed people. It was broken only when they began to worship it. Defences are the same. For a time they keep us alive, and they deserve respect. The time to say goodbye to them is the moment they stop protecting us and start ruling us.

In the first essay I also wrote that shame has another side. A shame that carries the trace of Sinai. In the same passage, the Talmud ties that trace to a verse. That His fear may be upon your faces, so that you do not sin. The sages read this fear on the face as shame. What gladdens me here is this. The shame on the face stands in the same verse as the fear of Him, as yirah. On a face that blushes, awe and shame can stand side by side once more.

So why was the way to the tree of life closed? Reading it as a punishment always felt heavy to me. But the verse says the cherubim were placed not to block the way, but lishmor et derech etz hachayim, to guard the way to the tree of life. The verb shamar means both to watch over and to keep. The way was not destroyed. It was kept. Mishlei says of wisdom, etz chayim hi, she is a tree of life. Tradition says these words of the Torah. Perhaps the way was not closed, but kept safe, to be given again one day at Sinai. I know it is also a mistake to think the mind can explain every divine boundary. Sometimes we must be silent where the text is silent. But in the silence of this verse, I hear a gift being kept until the right time.

In the first essay I read the garden mostly from a person’s inner world, and I know that has its limits. The Torah does not only describe how a person feels. Feeling better is not the same as acting rightly. Being free of shame does not repair the harm done. For that, a word is needed. Teshuvah. But I must add one thing. Most people need to be heard before they can apologize. Someone drowning in shame cannot take responsibility. They can only hide, or blame. And before the Torah speaks of consequences, it calls out Ayekah. It calls first, it listens first. Teshuvah begins when a person feels they have been called.

So what was broken in the garden? In the first essay I wrote that the bond between awe and shame was broken. I still think so. But now I see another break beneath it. What broke was the we between them. The silence in which Eve was alone with someone beside her, the leaves sewn against each other, the finger that said the woman gave me. Man’s bond with God and his bond with another person snapped at the same moment. And the mending began in the same place. With a name. Eve. And with garments laid over two people by the same hands.

I ended the first essay hoping that someone who feels clothed with love can come out from among the trees. Now I know that Adam and Eve did not leave the trees of their own accord. They were sent out. But they left clothed, with a new name between them, and with a path kept ahead of them. God gave them a garment. He did not walk the path for them. But He did not leave them alone on it either. And that first question still follows each of us, every night. Ayekah. Where are you?

–

Sources

1. Bereshit 2:15 to 3:24 and 4:1. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.3
2. Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 7, Bereshit read as yare boshet. https://www.sefaria.org/Tikkunei_Zohar
3. Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 14a, clothing the naked. https://www.sefaria.org/Sotah.14a
4. Mishlei 30:6, “Do not add to His words”. https://www.sefaria.org/Proverbs.30.6
5. Ramban on Bereshit 2:9, and Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, Nefesh HaChaim 1:6. https://www.sefaria.org/Nefesh_HaChayim.1.6
6. Zohar I, 11b, the two kinds of yirah. https://www.sefaria.org/Zohar%2C_Introduction
7. Eichah Rabbah, Petichta 4, Ayekah and Eichah. https://www.sefaria.org/Eikhah_Rabbah.Petichta.4
8. Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:8 and II Kings 18:4, the copper serpent and Nehushtan. https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Rosh_Hashanah.3.8
9. Shemot 20:17 and Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 20a. https://www.sefaria.org/Nedarim.20a
10. Mishlei 3:18, “She is a tree of life”. https://www.sefaria.org/Proverbs.3.18
11. Bereshit Rabbah 20:12, kotnot or in the Torah of Rabbi Meir. https://www.sefaria.org/Bereshit_Rabbah.20.12
12. Bereshit 16:13, El Roi. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.16.13
13. Zohar III, 122a, and Tanya, Iggeret HaTeshuvah, chapter 4, teshuvah read as tashuv heh. https://www.chabad.org/library/tanya/tanya_cdo/aid/939617/jewish/Chapter-4.htm
14. Rav Yehuda Ashlag, Hakdamah le Sefer HaZohar (Introduction to the Book of Zohar), the purpose of creation and the will to receive.