The Farmer and the Herdsman (Extract)

By JOSHUA GUTOFF
Extract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. The Torah portion Bereishit, Genesis 1:1-6:8, is read on Shabbat October 25 It's not always easy to recognize irony in a text from a different time and place (try giving a bunch of high school students a passage from Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal"), but it's hard to miss it in the opening stories of the Bible. According to the second chapter of Genesis a second human being was created as a favor to the first, because God says that "it was not good for a person to be alone" (2:18). Yet the interactions we actually see are tragic. With Adam and Eve there is deceit, temptation, and blame; with Cain and Abel, murder. If you know siblings, if you've raised siblings, if you grew up with siblings, it perhaps won't be all that surprising that a story of brothers ends in violence, especially given the setting: God has accepted the sacrifice of one, rejected the other. It is easy to imagine the feelings that might have led to, and then the words, and then the lead-up to that last fatal encounter. Indeed, we have to imagine what went on between them because at the pivotal moment, when Cain actually addresses Abel, there is a sudden gap in the text: "Cain said to his brother Abel… and when they were in the field Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him." (Gen 4:8) This ellipsis has provided the opportunity for a good deal of rabbinic speculation as to what went on between the two, but the force of the text itself is to close the door on this speculation. We cannot know what was actually said or what the feelings between them actually were. At the time of the killing both Cain and Abel are ciphers, lacking the specificity that makes them fully human. It is as though the text were deliberately trying to make the point that the violence between the two was not related to the individuals in their particularity, but to a much more general issue. What is it that we do know about them? They are humans, created in the Divine Image. And they are brothers. But in spite of this similarity, Cain's grain offering is rejected, while Abel's lamb is accepted. It is worth noting that God's somewhat cryptic admonition to Cain, "If you do well, there will be uplift," suggests that the problem wasn't with the difference between animal and vegetable sacrifices. That, at least, is a relief, because each brought what they had. Cain, after all, was a farmer and Abel was a herdsman. Contributing editor Rabbi Joshua Gutoff is a writer and teacher in New York. Extract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.