Cain Still Walks Among us
Wednesday marked three years since October 7th, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
For me, this anniversary felt painful, and in many ways lonely as a Jew. In cities across the world, the streets this week filled with protests against Israel and Jews, many of them openly sympathetic to Hamas and its cause, rather than with mourning for those murdered and taken from us.
Bile rose in my throat when I read the shameless statement my mayor (I still can’t believe I’m writing that) put out, framing October 7th as a way to blame Israel for genocide, without even naming Hamas.
I was so angry. I wanted, on that day, only to mourn those who were taken from us, and instead the world kept intruding with its ugliness.
I have been sitting with that fact. Strangely, what’s come to mind in response is a new Netflix show.
I recently watched East of Eden, the new adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel. (I confess I have not read the book yet. It just moved to the top of my list.) One Hebrew word from this week’s parasha lies at the heart of Steinbeck’s story.
In Genesis 4, God accepts Abel’s offering and rejects his brother Cain’s. Cain’s face falls. And before Cain has done anything wrong, God warns him: “sin crouches at the door; its urge is toward you, yet you can rule (timshol) over it.”
Steinbeck heard a whole debate open up in that last phrase: timshol, thou mayest rule over sin. His novel is an argument about those words. Some believe humans must sin. Some believe human nature will conquer sin. Steinbeck insists on a third reading: humans are free to choose, to sin or not to sin.1
In Steinbeck’s story and in Genesis itself, these words are said to Cain before he murders his brother. Those of us who know the story may take this sequence for granted. But why does God warn Cain before he has done anything wrong?
Here’s the answer that I’m exploring this year. I believe God is cutting off Cain’s excuses in advance. God wants Cain to know, with total clarity, that he has a choice. So when Cain murders Abel and then asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, it is a double chutzpah: he was already told by God that he could conquer sin.
The episode is both an argument about free will and an argument about the human propensity to pretend we have no free will, to evade responsibility and to blame others.
Genesis is obsessed with these two themes. The Torah’s first stories are a sustained argument that human beings are moral agents who must answer for what they do. They also show us how difficult this is, how desperately people try to escape responsibility for their actions.
Genesis opens with a catalogue of blame. Adam, confronted, blames Eve and manages to blame God in the same breath: “The woman You put at my side, she gave me of the tree.” Eve blames the snake. Even before the blaming comes the hiding: Adam among the trees, God calling out Ayeka, where are you. Hiding fails, blaming fails, and exile follows.
And when God asks Cain where his brother is, Cain responds with the most famous evasion in history: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Cain’s sin helps us understand the mechanics of this human impulse. It begins in envy, long before it becomes hatred. God accepted his brother’s offering and refused his own. Cain had a choice about where to direct that pain. He could have looked at himself, which is exactly what God invites him to do: take responsibility. Instead he looked at his brother. Resentment of another’s success curdled into blame, and blame into murder.
God’s warning is realistic. Sin crouches at the door. Its urge is toward you. The impulse is not scheduled to disappear. It waits there permanently, wanting in. Nowhere does God promise Cain, or us, that it can be eliminated. If anything, by telling us Cain’s story, the Torah all but promises that it won’t be.
This brings me back to October 7th, and to the sense so many of us share, watching the world respond to our massacre, that we are once again targets of the oldest hatred.
Antisemitism can be understood, in part, as Cain’s impulse operating at civilizational scale: the conversion of grievance into blame, and of blame into hostility toward the Jew. It is the practice of making another people responsible for one’s own failures and fears.
The economist Thomas Sowell was once asked what Jews could do to prevent antisemitism. His answer was one word: “Fail.” For Sowell, Jews “are people who have succeeded an awful lot in the midst of other people who have not.”
For Sowell, Jewish success can become a target for people who need someone else to blame for their own failures. The accusations change with the circumstances, but the impulse to make Jews responsible for other people’s grievances persists. Sowell’s answer was a dark joke with a serious core: hatred that serves a need in the hater cannot be argued away simply by changing Jewish behavior.
If Sowell helps explain why Jewish success cannot protect us from antisemitism, Ruth Wisse asks what follows from recognizing that fact.
I read Ruth Wisse’s memoir Free as a Jew last week, and I have not stopped thinking about her life and her arguments, many of which I did not believe before October 7th but am increasingly coming to see as foundational.
Wisse also understands antisemitism in part as a politics of blame, an ideology that organizes grievance against the Jews. But what unsettled me most is her indictment of Jews who grew too naive about this. She expects the haters to hate; she understands that Cain’s impulse is alive. Her harder criticism is for Jewish communities who believed the blame game had been retired from history.
Writing about European Jewry before the Holocaust, she observes: “Jews were innocent of all they were accused of, but by attending to self-improvement without commensurate care for self-protection, they had created a political vacuum and for others a political opportunity.”
She argues: “As a general rule, a self-reliant community that fails to protect that which it creates, and that cannot threaten reprisal in kind, will fall prey to the resentment or ambitions of others.”
Wisse does not hold Jews responsible for the persecution they suffered. Her argument is that a community’s failure to recognize political realities or prepare to defend itself can leave it vulnerable to those who would destroy it.
Together, Sowell and Wisse offer a warning that feels especially urgent after October 7th. We inherited Genesis but forgot its lesson. We came to believe that Cain had been subdued, that the impulse crouching at the door had been civilized out of humanity. We mistook the decline of certain forms of antisemitism for the disappearance of the impulse itself. Wisse’s indictment is that this belief, generous as it was, became a form of negligence.
Consider again what happened on Wednesday, in the streets. If watching the world mark the anniversary of our massacre with demonstrations against Israel and Jews, many of them celebrating or defending the people who carried it out, has not convinced us that Cain’s impulse is alive, I do not know what will. The loneliness so many of us felt this week is the loneliness of Abel’s blood crying out from the ground while the crowds explain why Cain had a point.
But the parasha refuses despair, and so must we.
God never promised that the impulse to envy, blame, and hurt would disappear. God told Cain that it could be mastered. For generations, we have read that verse as a message about our own souls, and it is: timshol, thou mayest. This year, I hear it also as a description of our situation as Jews among the nations. We cannot make Cain master himself, and we cannot argue the world out of an impulse as old as the fourth chapter of Genesis. But we can take responsibility for how we respond.
We can make sure that when Cain comes, he finds the door guarded, and that, unlike Abel, we are not unsuspecting or naive.
Guarding the door demands determination and political realism. The work of protecting Jewish life did not end with “never again.” Jewish safety cannot rest on the hope that hatred has finally become obsolete. It requires us to guard what we build and defend our people, without mistaking the hatred directed at us for a judgment on the worth of what we have built.
None of this requires us to surrender Jewish joy, turn away from the world, or give up on the allies who courageously stand with us against hatred. We must continue to build, celebrate, create, and sustain Jewish life. But we must do so with clear eyes, understanding that the responsibility to protect that life cannot be outsourced to the hope that others will always do what is right.
“Never again” is a promise that we will not be as vulnerable as Abel, as much as it is a repudiation of Cain. We cannot choose whether Cain walks among us. We can choose whether we leave the door unguarded.