(for the week of October 2nd, 2010/24 Tishri, 5771)
Parashat “B’reisheet”
Genesis 1:1-6:8
This week, Boston news has been focused on a horrible murder in Mattapan. While murders are always terrible, this one aroused a special sense of horror and outrage because the murder victims included Eyanna Flonory, a 21 year old mother and Amani Smith, the two year old child she held in her arms. Trying to understand the heart of a murderer is always frightening and difficult. But it’s especially tough to imagine the soul of a person who could shoot a toddler.
Still, we need to try and understand rather than simply turning away in disgust. This is not because of some liberal fantasy about compassion for criminals or a sense of collective guilt. Rather, the flaw in our humanity that permits one human being to take another’s life continues to be the root of so much evil, brokenness and suffering in our world that we are obliged to search for it. And according to this week’s parasha, both the flaw and the struggle are as old as humanity, itself.
At the center of this week’s portion is the story of the first murder; Cain kills his brother, Abel in a fit of jealousy. In that climactic moment, God calls out to Cain: “What have you done? Your brother’s blood is shrieking to Me from the very ground (Genesis 4:10)!” But the mishnah* points out a peculiarity in the Hebrew word for ‘blood.’ The word is written in the plural form. It is as though the Hebrew says, “Your brother’s ‘bloods’ are shrieking to Me.” On this basis, the mishnah explains that Abel’s unborn descendants also cried out to God (i.e., their blood as well as the blood of Abel, himself, called out to God). The mishnah text then continues with the famous teaching: “Therefore but a single man was created in the world to teach that if anyone has caused a single soul to perish, Scripture imputes it to him as though he had caused a whole world to perish.**”
Some part of the terrible human flaw that permits us to murder each other has to do with our blindness to this Truth. Each human life, every human being is about so much more than biology. We are more than consumers, more than competitors, even more than enemies. Every human being contains a whole world, both in terms of the future lives that could grow from each of us and all the other types of creativity with which we add to God’s world. This awesome, potential meaning lies hidden in every person. And it is only when we forget that Truth, only when we intentionally ignore the miracle that is a human being, only when, like Cain, we become overwrought with jealousy, anger, greed or fear that we permit ourselves to push this Truth out the way and extinguish a life and all the possibilities the life contained. Finding the wisdom to recall that truth in moments of intense, destructive passion is a struggle as old as the Torah. But it’s one we can neither afford to ignore or abandon.
*The Mishnah is the earliest legal masterwork of rabbinic Judaism, redacted around the year 200 C.E. by Yehudah Ha’Nasi.
**Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5