David Kishik, author of The Book of Shem, on Cain, Abel, and the origin of violence.
The story of Cain and Abel is a rusty old needle that can still burst our cozy bubble. To stand “east of Eden” is to sense that the good is only a temporary deferral of evil and that fleeing happiness is so much more entrenched than its pursuit.
Contrary to what is commonly believed, Cain is not the first human to cut a life short. It is his younger brother, Abel the shepherd, who initiates the cycle of violence by slaughtering the best of his flock as an offering to a bloodthirsty God. The average reader of Genesis prefers to gloss over the fact that sacrificing nonhuman animals is an act of killing. After the Flood, Genesis will even present a convenient justification for eating their flesh.
Destroying the body of whomever humans happen to perceive as their own kind is usually considered the ultimate crime. At the same time, we turn a blind eye to the fate of everyone else—including humans whose very humanity is called into question. It is not by chance that Abel’s bloody act rarely registers in our collective memories. Instead, it serves as the background noise necessary for making his own death distinctly audible. His brotherly blood can “cry out” from the ground precisely because the animals’ blood is muffled. The more sacred one life appears, the more disposable another becomes. Lives never matter equally.
Although tilling the soil is so much more arduous, both mentally and physically, than herding cattle, God prefers Abel’s gift of meat over Cain’s vegetables. As a result, the heir apparent to the human race was “much distressed and his face fell.” But Cain’s touching reaction elicits no empathy. Instead, God reproaches him harshly with a decisive formulation: “If you do well, then keep your head up. But if you do not do well, sin awaits at your threshold, its urge is toward you, yet you can master it.”
We want to believe that the fratricide would have been averted if Cain had only listened to God’s counsel. But what if he heard it loud and clear? What if a clear understanding of these pivotal words is precisely what incited this particular murder and so many others ever since?
The first part of God’s message says that there are times when particular beings do well against all odds, like a lucky throw of the dice, by being blessed with a better life, or more life. At least for a while, negativity and resentment can be kept at bay as the pervasive feelings of humility and anger are suspended. If we keep our head up, our face acknowledges the face of the other. This comportment enables us to say we. It facilitates the optimistic view of the world as a space of mutual recognition.
So far, so good, if only this experience belonged to more than a privileged minority. But what about those who are not doing so well, who live less, or worse, who are compelled to turn their gaze downward due to failure, disappointment, pain, or shame? What about unlucky throws of the dice: those born to the wrong family, on the wrong side of the tracks, or with the wrong skin color? It is only at the entrance to their house, God argues, that sin crouches like a frightened dog trying to escape an approaching thunderstorm.
Nevertheless, the text implores the unchosen and accursed to find ways to rein in their wicked inclinations. The crushed and degraded do not have to give up and give in to sin. Victimhood does not excuse wrongdoing; it requires a person to be twice as good while getting half as much. The infuriating conclusion to God’s line of thought is that only the unfortunate must steer clear of vice, while the chosen, who are few and far between, don’t have much use for a moral compass.
It is written that “Cain rose up against Abel.” A long tradition interprets this line as an uprising of the disfavored son against a sibling who represents the ruling class. The rebellious party believes itself to be rejected for no good reason. Cain has done nothing wrong to deserve his bad fortune. God’s preference for Abel’s offering illustrates how every choice entails discrimination, and how every case of favoritism began as Abelism. Here and elsewhere it is (unwarranted) punishment that leads to crime, rather than the other way around.
Cain says something to Abel right before he kills him that only an Aramaic interpolation of the redacted verse dares to record: “There is no judgment, no judge, no afterlife, no reward for the righteous, and no punishment for the wicked.” So maybe Cain, in the end, is neither the paradigm of evil nor a symbol of revolutionary heroism, as later attempts to rebrand him would have it. If the world is defined as a sensible, ordered, and sharable space, then Cain may easily have felt completely out of touch with it. His undoing is a direct consequence of his worldlessness.
God’s preference for Abel’s offering illustrates how every choice entails discrimination, and how every case of favoritism began as Abelism. Here and elsewhere it is (unwarranted) punishment that leads to crime, rather than the other way around.
Cain knows that there is a wound at the heart of existence, one that sustains the distinct sense of dejection and despair throughout the first chapters of Genesis. Before Abraham enters the biblical stage, no name in this sacred book possesses dignity, not to mention rights or property. Everybody lives, but only barely.
Even God must feel destitute before he is glorified by his subsequent mass of adoring believers. Is anyone more abandoned and desperate, less embraced and recognized, than the solitary God? His eyes must be downcast just like those of any other creaturely countenance—not because he is looking at the earth through the clouds, but because every terrestrial failure is at its root a divine one.
Cain knows that there is a wound at the heart of existence, one that sustains the distinct sense of dejection and despair throughout the first chapters of Genesis.
In the beginning (and ever since), a being was hurt. Rather than allowing original sin or natural right to define human beings, the story of Cain and Abel implies that there is some incurable or inalienable scar that the living bear on their flesh.
There is, however, something that allows people not to be completely consumed by this primordial pain: not a permanent cure, but a local anesthetic. After the murder, God puts a mark on Cain, “so that whoever found him would not slay him.” Maybe those of us who manage to survive and live in relative peace can do so because we, too, carry Cain’s mark, which protects us, for now, from harm.
There is no bearer of rights who is not also a bearer of guilt. This is the logic that informs Cain’s final act as the builder of the first biblical city. Even today, urban centers can function as shelters or sanctuaries for lives that elsewhere would be persecuted with relative or total impunity. Genesis reminds us that every exceptional display of a safe and secure civilization is also a manifestation of its belligerent barbarism. Cain’s legacy is a poignant symbol of both.
Our small pockets of trust are invariably surrounded by an overwhelmingly hopeless desolation. Can such safe spaces spread across the land? A shining example usually ends up as oppressive darkness once its limited applicability is ignored. Survivors of shipwrecks search for lifeboats that, over time, turn into new battleships.
In compliance with the refreshing and intriguing, although idiosyncratic inner logic of the author, one may argue, that god, knowing in advance the choices of cain and abel, preferred the murderous offering of Abel in order to both educate Cain of his own murderous tendency as well as to bring Abel to justice. Cain, then, becomes a symbol of the complexity of humanity and its emotional turmoil and compromise
Posted by: Abraham of jerusalem | December 10, 2018 at 11:39 PM
This was a hilarious read! Thank you for this sarcastic piece!
Posted by: Kyle | December 7, 2018 at 05:26 AM