Emek Ayalon from Tel Gezer, Israel: by Shai Gluskin, December, 2006[Jacob] came close and kissed [his father Isaac]. [Isaac] smelled the fragrance of his [son Esau’s] clothes and he blessed [Jacob who was wearing them]. [Isaac] said, “See, my son’s fragrance is like the fragrance of a field blessed by YHVH.” (Genesis 27:27)

It’s easy to remember the moment in Genesis when Rebekah covers her favorite son Jacob in goatskins so that he’ll feel, to his blind father’s touch, just like his hairier twin Esau. The image of an ambitious mother secretly wrapping and binding her younger son’s hands and smooth neck (in rough approximation of Esau’s rough hands and neck) tends to linger, doesn’t it?

It’s just as easy to forget a more mundane detail in this scene, yet within it an important clue to Jacob’s vulnerable position may be embedded. It is this: before covering Jacob’s hands and neck with goatskins, Rebekah dresses him in his brother Esau’s clothes—his brother’s hamud clothes, the text specifies. (Genesis 27:15). Now hamud refers to things that are desirable, choice, even coveted for their attractive qualities. What on earth could make this rough outdoorsman’s clothes so attractive and important to Rebekah at this moment? Won’t her goatskin ruse be sufficient? We learn the answer twelve verses later. It is Isaac himself who tells us:

[Jacob] came close and kissed [his father Isaac]. [Isaac] smelled the fragrance of his [son Esau’s] clothes and he blessed [Jacob who was wearing them]. [Isaac] said, “See, my son’s fragrance is like the fragrance of a field blessed by YHVH.” (Genesis 27:27)

Jacob, in his brother’s clothes, now smells—not like any old field&mdsash;but a blessed field. Which can leave us wondering what Jacob might have smelled like to his father had he come to him with his hands and neck wrapped in goatskins, but still wearing his own clothes. The medieval commentator Rashi tells us that freshly washed goatskins smell awful, “could there be a worse odor?” he asks. “[The fact that Torah describes these borrowed clothes as hamud] teaches [us] that they smelled like the Garden of Eden.”

We can opt, however, for a more literal reading: Esau’s clothes smell like something that God holds so dear as to bless it—a field, in this case. By extension, Jacob’s own clothes may carry a stale smell, the fusty smell of goat grease and cooking smoke mixed with the fetid smell of the inside of sleeping tents, a smell his father would have recognized instantly as Jacob’s very own. [See prior teaching about Jacob being yoshev ohalim, someone who dwells—perhaps in our terms, “hangs out”—in and around tents.] And this very literal reading of the word hamud used to describe Esau’s clothes can, in turn, lead us to an unconventional understanding of Jacob as a young man; a reading that nonetheless may have some resonance for our own time.

In Genesis 25:27, Esau is described as a “man of the field“ while Jacob is described as a man of—well, as a mild man, a pure man, a simple man, a wholesome man, a quiet man, the kind of person who liked to stay at home. These are all real English translations of the phrase ish tam [a tam man], taken from every mainstream Biblical source available. [Several translations admit how problematic the word tam is in this context and note that “the meaning of the Hebrew is unclear.”] Of course the word tam is also used to describe the Simple Son of the Passover Haggadah. But somehow calling Jacob a “simple” or “naive” man on the order of the rabbinic archetype doen’t work. The unsophisticated of the Four Sons hardly does justice to his Hebrew name Yaakov, which puns easily on the word akov—crooked, deceitful.

We needn’t leave the Book of Genesis in order to find three other instances of the use of the word tam and some of its related forms. Let’s have a brief look at these additional examples.

1. In Genesis 47:15, after Joseph settles his famished brothers and father (the much older Jacob!) in Egypt, we learn that “the money ran out—va’i-tom et hakesef,” in Egypt and in Canaan.
2. Three verses later, “the year came to an end, ran out—vati-tom hashana
3. In that same verse, “the money [for provisions] ran out—ki im-tam hakesef.

While these translations have in common the idea of something being completed, spent, consumed, used up and certainly attach themselves well to what can happen to money and to a year, how could tam’s other meanings attributed to the young Jacob—mild, plain, simple, quiet, wholesome—bear any relation to either one? The money was “simple”? The year was “plain” or “innocent”?

But the young Jacob and the money and the year may yet have something in common: none of them flows. Certainly the money has stopped flowing, and this worries Joseph, now in charge of Egypt’s food supply. The year is no longer flowing; another year has now begun. And the young Jacob of Genesis 25:27, who presumably never goes out to fields blessed by YHVH, may have also stopped participating in the flow of nature, or may not even have begun to feel any connection yet with the world around him&mdsash;the flow of days, seasons, life itself—unlike his brother Esau, a man of the field, whose clothes hold “the fragrance of a field blessed by YHVH.”

Jacob casts off his staleness, as we know, even before he reaches his Uncle Laban’s homestead across the mountains in Haran. On his first night away from home, he falls asleep right on the ground and his connections to the natural world begin—with a vengeance. May we, who spend more of our days and nights in buildings than in fields, also have opportunities to cast off all that is stale and disconnected in us. We can’t save the planet until we feel, deep down, ineffably connected to it.

Questions for thought and discussion:

1. Do you have hamud (special, choice) clothes that smell of the field, like Esau’s? How does it make you feel when you wear them?
2. How can we rejuvenate our connection to the earth when we feel that our connection with it no longer flows the way it once did?
3. What activities do/can we have to deepen our connection to the earth in our Jewish communities? What personal and communal advantages are there to participating in such activities?