Blood Brothers

Bereshit 5778 / 14 October 2017

The story of Cain and Abel, which lies at the heart of parashat Bereshit, is one of the Torah’s best-known but least-well understood stories. The Torah relays only the barest details of what happened, punctuating the sparse action with lengthy but cryptic dialogue. In contrast with the stories of creation, paradise, and expulsion that open the book of Genesis and are part of a wide genre of ancient Near Eastern mythology, the tale of Cain and Abel has no parallel in any other known literary tradition.^[1] Unique to our tradition, the story belies easy interpretation and holds its meaning close to the vest.

While our story has no parallel in other writings, it does share many thematic elements with the stories of Adam and Eve that precede it.^[2] In each story the protagonist sins; God confronts the offender; and the guilty parties ultimately suffer banishment as a result of their transgression. In both cases, the human-divine interaction revolves around an apparently superfluous question. The first two chapters of Genesis consistently paint a picture of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator — and yet after Adam’s sin God asks, אַיֶּֽכָּה, “Where are you?”^[3] and asks Cain, אֵ֖י הֶ֣בֶל אָחִ֑יךָ, “Where is your brother Abel?”^[4] Do we imagine that God, Creator of heaven and earth, doesn’t know where Adam is hiding, or what happened to Abel? Even the most cursory reading of Genesis should convince us that God certainly knows the answers, forcing us to read these as rhetorical questions.^[5] The questions reflect God’s astonishment and outrage at the flagrant sins;^[6] God has come for a reckoning, to sit in judgment over the human sinners.^[7] God wants, ultimately, for Cain to confess and acknowledge the severity of his actions.^[8]

Cain feels the cold stab of conscience, and attempts to evade responsibility — but ultimately can’t escape the voice of his conscience any more than he can avoid the Master of the World.^[9] The Midrash imagines that when he exclaims, גָּד֥וֹל עֲוֹנִ֖י מִנְּשֽׂוֹא, “My sin is too great to bear,”^[10] that he admits his sin is even greater than his father’s — even though Adam violated a מצוה given to him directly by God.^[11] The consequences of Abel’s murder stretch on without end; Cain has not only killed his brother, he has also foreclosed all the potential generations that would have emerged from his line.^[12] He has committed an act whose consequences can never be mitigated and from which his hands will never be fully clean.

God’s description of Abel’s murder highlights the severity of Cain’s crime. After Cain weakly attempts to deny what he did — לֹ֣א יָדַ֔עְתִּי, הֲשֹׁמֵ֥ר אָחִ֖י אָנֹֽכִי, “I don’t know, am I my brother’s keeper?”^[13] — God’s outrage bursts out: מֶ֣ה עָשִׂ֑יתָ, ק֚וֹל דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹֽעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the earth!”^[14] Here the Hebrew word דם, “blood,” is phrased in the plural, דמים — a form used consistently in legal contexts to establish blood-guilt.^[15] Appropriately, the term צעק, “cry out,” also has a technical legal meaning: it a weak person’s distressed plea for help from a judge.^[16]

God’s use of technical legal terminology in this verse highlights a key complication in this story: by what right does God punish Cain for murdering Abel? We generally insist that, in order for punishment to be just, the offender must have been aware of the consequences of his action at the time of the offense^[17] — but we never see God instruct Cain or any other human not to kill another person. The story suggests that Cain’s sin lay not in violating God’s will, but in a more fundamental offense against natural law, inherent moral principles that we ought to understand even without a divine ordinance.^[18] Despite the literary similarities between the stories of Adam and Cain, here we have a fundamental difference: Adam violated God’s law, while Cain violated intuitive moral principles. If we compare the two, the Torah suggests — and the Midrash makes explicit — that Cain’s offense against natural morality constituted a far greater sin than Adam’s rejection of divine law.

The central question, which has both fascinated and confounded readers for millenia, seeks to understand the point of this dark tale. Why, of all the things we might need to know about our earliest ancestors, does the Torah tell us this story? Aside from the murder itself, the only other scene shows the brothers offering God sacrifices. Here too we hear of no מצוה; the Torah suggests that the impulse to worship emerges from within us.^[19] And yet this drive to acknowledge our Creator does not express itself equally in all people. While the Torah tells us that Cain offered God some of his harvest, it specifies that Abel brought “the choicest of the firstlings of his flock,”^[20] intimating that Cain offered less than his best for God. Cain’s desire to show God gratitude sat in tension with his urge to keep the best for himself.^[21] God, recognizing this in Cain, reminds him of his personal moral accountability^[22] — but Cain fails to restrain his baser impulses, with tragic results.

Our story, from this angle, becomes a cautionary tale about the over-expression of individual rights. Cain’s produce is his — the problem in the story lies in his extreme, almost pathological obsession with securing his right to that property. The Midrash illustrates the danger in this mentality with the story of a group of people traveling by boat. Just as they reach the open sea, they notice that one of the passengers has taken a drill and started drilling holes in the bottom of the boat, beneath his seat. “What are you doing?” the other passengers scream, “We’re all going to drown!” But the man with the drill replies, “What’s it to you? I’m drilling under my own seat.”^[23] The story presents an absurd extreme — and yet it’s not hard to find examples of this attitude in everyday life.

Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, the 19th-century architect of Modern Orthodox Judaism, warns us that “Whoever adopts the motto, ‘every man for himself,’ is not far from the hatred that impels a man to murder even the one closest to him, when he feels the latter stands in his way.”^[24] No surprise, then, that one of the earliest midrashim imagines that, in the conversation that preceded the murder, Cain asserted לית דין ולית דיין, “There is no justice and there is no judge.”^[25] Cain’s obsession with his own rights blinded him to the moral rights of others — even his own brother.

Last Monday night, Rabbi Shai Held shared one of the central insights from his new book, The Heart of Torah: whereas all ancient Near Eastern texts present the king or ruler as an earthly image of the gods, in the Torah each and every human being reflects the Divine image.^[26] Any story could have conveyed the essential horror of murder — but our story emphasizes seven times that Abel was Cain’s brother, underscoring that the Torah’s archetypal murder is fratricide. All humanity are brothers, this story practically screams at us.^[27] And yet despite the Creation story’s essential claim, that every human life reflects the Divine, the killing doesn’t stop with Cain. God is forced, after the flood, to affirm the value of human life explicitly: שֹׁפֵךְ֙ דַּ֣ם הָֽאָדָ֔ם בָּֽאָדָ֖ם דָּמ֣וֹ יִשָּׁפֵ֑ךְ כִּ֚י בְּצֶ֣לֶם אֱלֹהִ֔ים עָשָׂ֖ה אֶת־הָֽאָדָֽם, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the Divine image did God make man.”^[28] And then, to our shame, even that is not enough, even the untold thousands of commentaries and elaborations all on the same point fail to drive home the fundamental sin in murder. We still don’t get it, and so we get another fifty-eight human souls destroyed in Las Vegas.

Listening to the news coverage over the past two weeks, all the speculation about motive and attempts to understand the mindset of a depraved killer, it hit me: these questions may have practical implications for law-enforcement and public safety, but they lack any moral importance. Why is not a question that matters when it comes to murder. Instead of speculating about what drove him to commit such a heinous crime — which, if we are being honest, is largely meant to reassure us that these murders were committed by a “lone wolf,” a “disturbed individual,” not someone like us — instead of wondering about motive, let’s have a conversation about the second-order responsibility that rests with a society that has allowed individual rights, including, but not limited to, an individual’s right to purchase nearly any firearm he wants, in essentially unlimited quantities, to overwhelm all other considerations.

We — not any one of us, but Americans as a whole — have succumbed to the mindset that Rav Hirsch called the gateway to murder. In order to guarantee every citizen’s right to as many guns as we want — never mind that, for the vast majority of us, that number is zero — we have, as a society, decided that 11,000 shooting deaths a year is a fair price to pay. And so we get another fifty-eight bodies, another fifty-eight futures that won’t happen, another fifty-eight families torn apart, countless generations destroyed, and I can hear God screaming ק֚וֹל דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹֽעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the earth!”^[29] We get elected leaders who declare, לֹ֣א יָדַ֔עְתִּי, “I don’t know,”^[30] “What am I supposed to do about it,” while trying in vain, like Lady MacBeth, to wash the bloodstains from their hands. And the American public continue walking into the voting booth with an attitude of הֲשֹׁמֵ֥ר אָחִ֖י אָנֹֽכִי, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”^[31] This morning’s parshah makes it clear that, in God’s eyes, the only valid answer is yes, we are; and our parshah also makes it clear that, when it comes to bloodshed, there will always be a reckoning.

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Tags: America, bereshit, Gun Violence, Responsibility