Don’t Look at Me
In loving memory of
Matana bat Rachel — מתנה בת רחל ז״ל
26th of Tishrei — כ״ו בתשרי
Lovingly remembered by her children. May her memory always be for a blessing.
⸻
The Torah has barely begun before something goes wrong.
Adam and Chava eat from the one tree that was forbidden to them. Adam hides, and Hashem calls out to him:
אַיֶּכָּה
Where are you?
Bereishit 3:9
Hashem knows where Adam is and what has happened. The question gives Adam an opportunity to acknowledge what he has done.
When Hashem asks whether he has eaten from the tree, Adam does not deny it. But before he says “I ate,” he points to Chava, and through her, to Hashem Himself: “The woman whom You gave to be with me.”
Chava does the same. She blames the serpent who deceived her.
One generation later, the pattern becomes darker.
Cain kills Hevel, and Hashem comes to him with another question:
וַיֹּאמֶר ה׳ אֶל־קַיִן אֵי הֶבֶל אָחִיךָ וַיֹּאמֶר לֹא יָדַעְתִּי הֲשֹׁמֵר אָחִי אָנֹכִי
Hashem said to Cain: Where is Hevel, your brother? And he said: I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?
Bereishit 4:9
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks drew a distinction between these responses: Adam and Chava evade personal responsibility, but Cain goes further and denies moral responsibility altogether.
Within two chapters, we encounter three different ways of saying much the same thing:
“Don’t look at me.”
That instinct has hardly disappeared. A marriage breaks down, a friendship ends, or a workplace turns bitter, and each person can give a precise, flawless account of what the other did wrong. The harder account is our own.
Other people can hurt us, provoke us, and behave badly toward us, and taking responsibility does not require us to pretend otherwise. Their wrongdoing remains theirs. But ours remains ours.
Bereishit does not leave us there.
When Tamar sends Yehuda his seal, cord, and staff, pledges he had given her without knowing who she was, she challenges him with two words:
הַכֶּר־נָא
Please recognise.
Bereishit 38:25
Her words carry an echo. When the brothers brought Yosef’s blood-stained coat to Yaakov, they too had said, “Please recognise.” The Midrash hears those words returning directly to Yehuda.
He could remain silent.
Instead, he says:
צָדְקָה מִמֶּנִּי
She is more in the right than I.
Bereishit 38:26
No serpent in Yehuda’s words.
Yet Yehuda’s journey does not end with taking responsibility for his past.
Years later, in Egypt, Binyamin is about to be left behind as a slave, and the brothers still do not know that the ruler before them is Yosef. Yehuda had personally guaranteed Binyamin’s safe return to their father. Now he steps forward and offers himself as a slave in his brother’s place.
The brother who once proposed selling Yosef now refuses to let another brother be taken.
With Tamar, Yehuda faces what he has done.
With Binyamin, he faces what he must do.
The Torah’s first questions to humanity were never about finding out what had happened. “Where are you?” “Where is your brother?” They are a summons to stand before our actions and decide whether we will answer for them.
Adam had Chava. Chava had the serpent. Cain asked: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Yehuda had an answer.
שַׁבָּת שָׁלוֹם
שמואל
