by Rav David Stav, yeshiva.org.il, translated by Hillel Fendel.
One of the most fascinating educational challenges facing every parent who wishes to teach Torah to his children is how to present the stories of brotherly rivalry and fighting in the Book of Genesis. Children learning Genesis for the first time are generally not old enough to have ever been exposed to the idea of murder – and certainly not between brothers! For them, close family is supposed to be their most protective, safe and secure environment. Parents go to all lengths to settle fights in the home, to teach their children to compromise and sometimes give in – and suddenly they find themselves having to explain, in the framework of Torah study, that Cain has murdered his brother Abel, because of some fight whose details are not explained.
We can of course just skip over this story and let the children discover it when they're a bit older. But what about the story of the sale of Joseph, and the other sad stories of brotherly hatred? We can't skip over all of them! Our working assumption has to be that G-d's word was spoken to, and meant for, all of us, young and old alike. We must therefore uncover the message and teaching that the Torah wishes to transmit to us in these difficult stories, and especially in Cain's murder of his own brother.
The Torah provides us with some background to this story: Cain felt that he had been treated unfairly compared to his younger brother, in that Abel's sacrifice was Divinely accepted and his own was rejected. It's important to note that the Torah tells us that it was Cain who initiated the sacrifices: "Cain brought of the crops as an offering to G-d; Abel also offered from the first-born of his flock…" (4,3-4). G-d accepted Abel's offering and not that of Cain, who became very angry, and did not calm down even after G-d sought to appease him. And then we reach this intriguing verse: "Cain said to his brother Abel, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him" (verse 8). The verse doesn't tell us what Cain said to Abel! Nor does it say what the latter answered him, if at all.
The number of answers given to these questions, it seems, can compete easily with the number of explanations for Moshe Rabbeinu's sin when he hit the rock…
One Medrashic proposal is that Cain and Abel were arguing over how to divide the world between them after their parents' demise; another one is that the issue was whose area would house the Beit HaMikdash; and still another is that the fight was who would get to marry their mother after their father passed. The common denominator of these and other suggested explanations is that they have absolutely no support from the verses.
The famed Nechama Liebowitz, a great Bible teacher in Jerusalem who died in 1997, saw the above explanations as attempts to explain not these verses, but rather the very nature of strife and dissention in the world.
Yet it appears that the most essential point here is the very fact that the Torah tells us nothing at all about the argument between them, or if there even was one. Not only that, it looks like the Torah clearly cut off Cain in the middle of his words: "Cain said to his brother Abel" – what did he say? We wait to hear what was said and what happened, but we then see that we have been clearly shut out.
And that itself is the message: The Torah does not want to get involved in the details of the argument between them. It is telling us that it doesn't even matter what they said to each other, and what they were or weren't arguing about. The bottom line is that there were two brothers and one killed the other. People can argue about the gravest and most important issues, and they can be perfectly justified in feeling jealousy or discrimination. But even such justified feelings cannot justify brotherly murder.
And when we realize that Cain was no regular Joe – he was actually a prophet, it would seem, for he merited to speak directly with G-d – the message cries out even more strongly: Even a prophet may not take his brother's life.
The 19th-century commentator Malbim suggests that Cain was sure, based on G-d's words of comfort to him in the previous verse, that the right thing to do was to kill Abel. Accordingly, the first murder in history stemmed from a misunderstanding of G-d's words! That is, Cain carried out this murder "for the sake of Heaven," and not out of jealousy or any other base feeling. If we assume that every "first" in the Torah has a meaning that truly indicates the roots of the phenomenon in question, we learn from here a tremendous lesson:
When one brother strikes another, both sides believe they are acting for the sake of Heaven – and this is perhaps the worst danger of all. The most dangerous brotherly disputes are when they are accompanied by the conviction that they are what G-d wants. The same happened when the brothers sold Joseph: They were convinced that Joseph was a downright spiritual danger to the entire nation.
As R. Yonasan Eybeschutz (18th century) wrote in his Yaarot Dvash, "Aside from the disagreements between Hillel and Shammai, no other argument is truly for the sake of Heaven – because even when that element exists, the Sitra Achra also has a part in it, and it will end up bad… It is the way of the Evil Inclination to say that everything is for the sake of Heaven, thus misleading a person in all his ways."
Rav Tzadok HaCohen of Lublin (d. 1900) wrote slightly differently in Pri Tzaddik: "A dispute for the sake of Heaven is only when the disputants behave with affection and friendship towards each other; but if there is strife, then even if the dispute is for the existence of the world, it does not have the 'light of goodness.'"
Nowadays, it is very hard to find an argument that is for the sake of Heaven, as even legitimate and important disagreements very quickly turn into insults and worse – certainly not in line with the above thoughts by Rav Tzadok and Rav Eybeschutz. Every year, when we read of the murder in Parashat B'reshit, our failures to wage peaceful disputes echo around us.
My late father used to quote the previous Belzer Rebbe, Reb Aharon, when he heard one of this followers say, "It is a mitzvah to curse" a particular Jew because of certain terrible things he did. The Rebbe said, "A mitzvah? There are some mitzvot that one need not fulfill so carefully." And when one man told that it was an actual sin to help certain people, he would say, "There are some sins that one is allowed to commit once in a while – and may our sins be in having too much baseless love, and not hatred and quarreling."
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