The Jewish Power Blog: Humiliation and Violence
Genesis relates (4:1-16) that Cain, the first-born, was “much distressed” when his sacrifice was rejected while his brother Abel’s was accepted. God notices, and exhorts Cain to move on and try to do better, to do the right thing, for “sin couches at the door; its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.” But Cain’s resentment is unalleviated, and he murders Abel; when God questions him, he denies responsibility: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
The older brother, the first-born, takes for granted his entitlement to power. Of course his offering will be favored! The patriarchal system implies a hierarchy. That’s just how things are – just the way they’re supposed to be. Tension over this birth order hierarchy recurs repeatedly in the Bible: Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, Joseph and his brothers, Ephraim and Manasseh, David and his brothers. The rigidity of the hierarchy keeps being challenged by other forces: love, God’s will, moral and personal qualities. Esau, like Cain, is angry when his “natural” right to power is undermined; Rebekah ships Jacob off to Haran to escape his threat of violence (Gen. 27:41). And Joseph’s brothers indeed resort to violence in their resentment of his dreams of upending the power hierarchy dictated by birth order.
Patriarchy, of course, is not only about birth order; it is also about gender dynamics. The Bible portrays ambivalence about this power structure in several stories in which the “natural” power hierarchy is undermined by the cleverness or righteousness of women. For example, it is Rebekah who engineers Jacob’s obtaining Isaac’s blessing (Gen. 27:5-13); Tamar sabotages Judah’s attempt to deny her her right to remarriage (Gen. 38); and the great power of Pharaoh is turned to naught by the Hebrew midwives and by Yocheved, Miriam, and Pharaoh’s daughter (Ex. 1-2).
Meanwhile, back to the beginning: Cain sees his “natural” power undermined, questioned, challenged; he sees himself as a victim; so he responds to his feeling of powerlessness by exerting physical power – he lashes out with violence. We might see Cain’s humiliation and his violent response as an archetype that can explain much of the violence all around us, from femicide to school shootings to the rise of terrorist militias: men whose “natural” power – as determined by traditional patriarchal structures of family and society – has been undermined by social and economic transformations. Authority, dignity, identity, personhood are questioned or felt to be cancelled and what remains is the instinctual urge to reassert power.
The rabbis of the Talmud recognized the destructive power of humiliation, repeatedly stating that “public humiliation is equivalent to bloodshed;” (Bab. Talmud Baba Metzia 58b) and illustrating the point with several poignant stories in which humiliation indeed leads to death: for example Rabban Gamaliel’s death because of Rabbi Eliezer’s humiliation (59b); and the sad ending of the friends Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, because of a sarcastic remark (84a).
God suggests that Cain rise above his victimhood (“sin couches at the door but you can be its master”). Don’t lash out – take control. Understand that moral power transcends the natural power of the patriarchy, and if you want to be accepted by God, respected, powerful, then you will have to take responsibility, to do the right thing, to examine yourself and your actions and “do right.”
Note that Cain’s humiliation was caused by God, who rejected his offering. Perhaps that’s why Cain is not punished by death as we might have expected (“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.” [Gen. 9:6]). Rather, he is sentenced to be an eternal wanderer; he who was the tiller of the soil is exiled therefrom – doomed to live as a permanent victim, alive but powerless, homeless, always at the mercy of others. Perhaps God is taking some responsibility for Cain’s act, attenuating his guilt, giving him a second chance, sending a message to all who encounter him and hear his story.
(Interesting footnote: The fourth century Church Father Augustine (Saint Augustine) uses a “midrash” on the Cain story to explain Jewish-Christian relations: Cain, the older brother, is the Jews, whose offering ]halakhah[ has been rejected – so he kills the younger brother ]Christ/the Church[ and is sentenced to be permanently homeless, powerless, but protected by God in order to bear witness.)
The powerful forces unleashed by humiliation call into question, perhaps, our traditional understanding of “defeat” and “victory.” Esau was defeated by Rebekah’s stratagem, but Jacob had to spend twenty years in exile and was still overcome by fear of Esau’s revenge on the way home. Judea was soundly defeated by Rome in the Great Revolt (67-73 CE), but lashed out again in the Kitos War (115-7) and in the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-5). The Allies defeated Germany in World War I, but Germany’s humiliation at the Versailles Peace Conference is widely seen as a major stimulus for the rise of Nazism’s violent extremism. It seems that resolutions based on dialog and compromise, as soft-minded as that may sound, may lead to more sustainable long term results than “total victory” or “complete obliteration.”
Food for thought.
