Cain and Abel Meet Minority Report

Rabbi Melanie Aron

October 5, 2002

Early on in our meetings, Cameron raised the issue of whether the problem with Cain wasn't God's fault and not Cain's. After all it was God who rejected Cain's offering and that's what really set him off. While the rabbis justify God's action, reading a whole subplot into the words "while Abel, for his part, brought the choicest firstlings of his flock;" the Biblical text does not clearly state the reason for God's preference. Cain was clearly hurt by this rejection and to our contemporary way of thinking, at least the way we often argue, that rejection was what caused his anger at Abel and the subsequent murder. So all that transpired can be blamed on the rejection rather than on Cain himself.

On Yom Kippur I tried to suggest that there is something wrong with that flow of reasoning, because it glosses over one very important stage in the chain of causality - the moment at which Cain decides how he will act. The same point was made in a rather dramatic, or some might say melodramatic, way in the movie Minority Report. In that movie, through the use of psychics and computers, the police became involved in arresting people before they actually had committed a crime. Pre-crime investigation depended on the assumption that a & b & c caused d & therefore if you knew a, b & c happened, you knew that d would happen. But any student of philosophy or astute observer of human nature knows "it ain't necessarily so." There is a pivotal moment where the human being, as a free agent, makes a choice and that choice cannot be fully attributed or blamed on what came before. That is what enables an individual to make a breakthrough, to overcome a horrible childhood and come a contributing adult - or to become a whistle blower who refuses to "go along to get along."

An article I read about Tisha B'av by Joshua Gutoff sheds more light on this issue. Gutoff writes about the Destruction of the Temple but then comments on Genesis chapter 4: "Cain's sacrifice," hewrites, " was not rejected because he was already a villain: Cain became a villain because he could not handle the meaningless rejection of his sacrifice." In explaining his conclusion, Gutoff quotes a text from the Talmud in which a father wounds a son. The father then places a bandage on the wound and tells his son, "Keep this bandage in place and it will prevent your wound from becoming infected and inflamed." The Talmud quotes this as a parable of the story of Cain, only in the Biblical story, the bandage is God's words of advice: "Surely if you do right there is uplift,

but if you do not do right, sin crouches at the door.

Its urge is toward you yet you can be its master."

Cain however rejects the bandage, God's good advice, and so his wound festers, his resentment increases, until he becomes a killer.

All of us are Cain in that we live in a world where bad things will sometimes happen to us unfairly. The world of creation is not built to protect us from every natural disaster or human injustice- in that sense the rabbis say that our Father, as it were, God wounds us. Sometimes things will go wrong which are not our fault. Storms will come up, people will become ill, things will break for no reason and sometimes people will mistreat us. When these things happen we will be better off if instead of feeling abandoned by God, we remember that God has given us a bandage for our wounds - the Torah with its wisdom on how to live in our imperfect world. As Gutoff puts it "Like Cain, we must live in a broken world. But unlike Cain, we needn't be broken ourselves." The test of our characters is whether we allow setbacks to excuse us from responsibility or whether we can truly rule over the impulse to do evil.

This morning on Shabbat Bereisheet we begin our year long journey through the Torah for insight that will help us rise to the challenge.