Esau's Clothes

Rebecca then took her older son Esau’s best clothing (literally: “his desired clothing”), which she had in her keeping, and put them on her younger son Jacob.                                    Genesis 27:15

Rashi (in his second comment) explains the adjective “desired” thus: “the clothes which Nimrod desired.”

Pirkei D’Rebbi Eliezer [chapter 24] presents an interesting and curious version of the Midrash, explaining that these clothes, which Nimrod desired, were the leather garments which the Creator made for Adam and Eve after they sinned in the Garden of Eden [Genesis 3:21]:

Rabbi Yehuda the Prince says: Esau, brother of Jacob, saw Nimrod wearing the garments which the Holy One, blessed be He had made for Adam and Eve, desired them and killed Nimrod and took the garments from him.

The obvious questions are how the garments made by God Himself for the first human couple came into the possession of Nimrod and why is it that Esau was so desirous of having these garments?

The kabbalistic approach [Zohar, Genesis 141] that Jacob constituted the rectification of the first sin of Adam can provide an answer to our questions.

Clothing is something external to a person, which in some sense hides the person’s essence. The leather garments thus represent Adam’s departure from his (and mankind’s) mission in this world: to serve the Creator out of free will. The evil Nimrod, who “led the entire world in rebellion against God” [Rashi, Genesis 10:8], took Adam and Eve’s garments and made them the quintessential thing, using them to completely cover the Divine image within him. Esau, who is also described as a hunter [Genesis 25:27], like the evil Nimrod, the first great hunter [Genesis 10:9], desired the garments for the same reason as Nimrod, to suppress the good inclination within himself. In dressing her younger son in these garments, Rebecca brought Jacob back to the primal state of man before the sin, the aspiration to realize man’s destiny of choosing to overcome his evil inclination and do God’s will.

Jacob’s status as rectifier of the first sin is hinted in the Talmudic statement [Babylonian Talmud Bava Metzia 84a]: “the beauty of Jacob was similar to that of Adam,” as elucidated by Tzror haMor, who comments: “the primal beauty and pleasantness of Adam departed when he sinned, and Jacob achieved these when he received Isaac's blessing, and the land returned to its original beauty and was redeemed from its curse.”