From almost the beginning to the very end of the Book of
Genesis, one theme whirls through many variations: war and peace
between brothers (and one pair of sisters).
The war between Cain and Abel is the first event outside Eden,
the first event of "normal" human history. Why? Why do
humans turn to killing when they leave the Garden of Delight?
Abel, the second-born child whose name means "Puff of
Breath," and Cain, the first-born whose name means
"Possessive," bring offerings to God—the fruit of
their labor in field and pasture. Abel's offering is accepted,
Cain's is rejected.
Cain is angry—what else would you expect? But he says
nothing. God speaks the first word: "Why are you
glowering?" God waits. There is no answer. Instead Cain
tries to turn his flaming face away, lest it betray his anger.
God tries again: "Why has your face fallen? If you intend
good, lift it up!"
If we think of Cain and Abel as our own children, we might
imagine ourselves as parents asking them these questions:
"Look at me! Talk to me! Answer me!"
Cain still gives no answer. Hearing none, God continues,
"If you do not intend good, sin crouches at the door. Its
urge is toward you, but you can rule over it." Cain gives no
answer to God. Instead he speaks to Abel, to his brother.
Kills him.
Wait. Cain seems to speak to Abel, but the text is very
strange: "Cain said to his brother Abel...." What? What
did Cain say? In most such passages of Torah, what follows these
words is a quotation, a saying. Just above, the same words about
God "saying" to Cain are followed by what God said.
But here there are no words, there is no quotation. Some
contemporary translations leave an empty space, three dots, a
silence. No more can Cain speak to Abel than to God. So the story
continues, wordless. "So it was through their being in the
fields that Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed
him."
Again with our own children vividly before our eyes, we can
see the story in a new way. We can see them refusing to face our
own parental challenge, failing to encounter us—and taking
out their anger on each other, on someone weaker than an awesome
parent.
But why is the Parent so terrifying? Why did God reject Cain's
sacrifice in the first place? And once Cain got angry, would
there have been no better, gentler way for God to invite Cain
into an encounter? Surely we can share Cain's initial anger at
his Parent's favoritism. And even though we are filled with
horror at Cain's twisting of his anger against God into violence
against Abel, we can still empathize with the fear that made him
do that twisting.
Perhaps by this point in the story, God the Parent, Reality,
looked grim and awesome. God had told Eve and Adam to choose a
life of unknowing blissful childhood, and they have refused. They
have chosen instead to grow up, leave childhood, shape their own
futures, even at the risk of death.
Their choice of independence hurtles them into a world of
scarcity, where food comes hard, through sweaty toil. And
nurturing comes hard too: There is a dearth not only of material
support, but also of love and acceptance. God can respond fully
to just one brother.
Which brother? The easy choice would be the older one. The one
who in every family already is bigger, stronger, when the younger
sib arrives. The one who gives his parents their first assurance
of a biological future. The one who in many social systems,
including the Israelite law of inheritance, wins more wealth and
deference than his younger sibs.
Cain and Jacob
But God responds not to the older Cain but to his younger
brother, Abel. In a world of scarcity, God reverses the
"natural" order. Amidst these narrowed choices, God
calls Cain to what is a redemptive choice: If you want to grow
up, grow up all the way: Face God fully. Argue. Put your anger
into words. This encounter is what God invites Cain into.
But Cain rejects adulthood. Perhaps he is afraid. Or perhaps
he hears his parents' wistfulness for Eden; so instead of growing
up into a new relationship with God, he tries to regress to a
still older one. Nostalgically he tries to remain a child. But
there is now no bliss in childishness. To be childish now means
to be sullen and resentful. To be sullen now means death. So Cain
bequeaths to human history the long, long struggle to grow beyond
the sullen rage at life that tricks us into murder of each other.
"Grow up!" says God. Challenge Me, answer Me,
wrestle Me. That is adulthood.
If we fail to wrestle God, we will murder a brother; just as
it is only when Jacob learns to wrestle God that it becomes
possible for him to make friends with his brother.
If we refuse to speak truth to power, says the story, we will
end up speaking lies or silence to the powerless—and doing
murder. If we refuse to see clearly, truthfully, the world our
parents have bequeathed us, says the story, then we will be
unable to make the world we want to make.
Neither sullen nor nostalgic, says the story—for
sullenness and nostalgia are the degenerate shapes of anger and
of love. Better clear anger and clear love, with all their risks.
The Children of Abraham
But the Bible then moves on from the saga of the mothers and
fathers of the human race to a smaller arena, the mothers and
fathers of the Jewish people. Here again we hear the motif of the
brothers' war, in a series of variations. There is even a story
of two sisters' struggle.
And in these stories, something new happens: The conflicts are
warlike, but not fatal. Indeed, in each generation, the outcome
is a reconciliation, until the brothers' war itself can be
extinguished—or rise to a new level. It is almost as if God
learns from the mistakes and failures of the earlier saga and
starts over to work things out another way.
So now we enter the saga of the children of Abraham.
Generation after generation in the saga, there rises the issue of
"firstbornness." It is settled differently from its
settlement in the story of Cain and Abel. There God chooses the
younger, but the older rejects that settlement. So the conflict
becomes irreconcilable, and the first-born "wins": He
destroys his younger brother.
In the Abrahamic saga, generation after generation, God
again—as with Abel—chooses the later-borns. But in this
saga, the first-borns "agree" to lose. They lose in
power and in blessing, both as a channel of material prosperity
and as a channel of redemption. And unlike Possessive Cain, they
step aside.
By doing this, by stepping back, they make it possible for the
conflicts to be reconciled. Generation after generation, the
stories end not with death but with a fragile peace in which the
younger brother holds the limelight: The Bible focuses on Isaac
rather than his older brother Ishmael. Yet Ishmael is not left
empty, he is blessed as forefather of a people. What is more, the
two brothers meet in love when their father dies. The Bible
focuses on Jacob rather than his older brother Esau, but Esau is
not left empty. He survives with many flocks and followers to
establish his own people in Edom, and here too the two brothers
meet lovingly after decades of separation.
Two sisters, Leah and Rachel, enter into struggle. (Indeed,
one of them calls it an "Elohim-struggle," a
God-struggle, in which she is able to prevail—in language
that parallels the more famous night when Jacob, frightened of
re-encountering his brother, wrestles God and prevails.) Here
neither wins a clear victory in love or child-rearing, and
neither achieves a full reconciliation. The relationship is much
more complicated. In the next generation, the Bible focuses on
Joseph, second youngest of 12 brothers. He rises above them all
and, after a story of fury, hatred, and separation, is reconciled
with them.
And then, Joseph's two sons test out the final resolution of
the issue. What happens with these two sons, Ephraim and
Manasseh? Jacob, their grandfather, insists on blessing them.
Jacob, who had fooled his father into giving him the first-born's
blessing, leaps across a generation to end the collision over
firstbornness. Jacob, who has learned how to stop wrestling with
his brother and wrestle with God instead, shows Manasseh and
Ephraim how not to wrestle with each other.
Jacob recognizes and affirms his own victory over his
first-born brother by reversing the hands with which the
blessings should be given. The right hand—the first-born's
hand—he reaches out to Ephraim, the second-born. The left
hand—the second-born's hand—he reaches out to bless
Manasseh, the first-born.
But in the same moment he dissolves the tension, for he
blesses them simultaneously, with a single blessing. Lest they
miss the point, he literally crosses his arms to bless them
"backwards" and explicitly rejects Joseph's objection
that he has it wrong. And he blesses them both in the same
breath, saying "By you"—a singular you, each of
them singularly at the same instant—"shall Israel
bless, saying, God make you as Ephraim and as Manasseh." And
indeed Jewish tradition teaches to this day that children be
blessed "that they be as Ephraim and as Manasseh."
Why these two? Why not as Joseph the ruler over Egypt, or as
Jacob who wrestled God, or as Abraham who went on the trackless
journey? Because here at last are two brothers who share the same
blessing, who do not have to suffer exile or separation or
despair or death for each other's sake. Says Jacob, your blessing
as a people is to be like these two: blessed in your loving
friendship, in your ability to go beyond the brothers' war.
Why all this concern over the war between the first and second
brother? Why should it permeate the Book of Genesis? Because with
it the Bible accomplishes a marvel of two-level teaching.
First it teaches that the first-born is not to
dominate—almost certainly a teaching intended to reverse and
resist a previous social politics in which the first-born won
wealth, power, and blessing simply by virtue of birth. And then
it teaches that the second-born is not supposed to rule either.
What is supposed to happen is reconciliation, and finally the
dissolution of the conflict itself. But even the dissolution of
the conflict must keep its memory alive, or else the tugs of
blood, fondness, charisma, and power may revive and people may
regress to letting the first-born rule again.
What a subtle teaching of how to end domination! To a modern
hearing, the brothers' war seems real enough—ask almost any
brother, almost any sister. And the struggle among age-mates
still burns: Ask the schoolchildren of Littleton, Colorado. But
even this seems not the sharpest struggle of our public lives.
Perhaps the substitution of women for the second-borns in these
stories and men for the first-borns would carry something like
the same trumpet blast of liberation. Try it: The women who have
for centuries been powerless "win," time after
time—but each time there is a reconciliation.
Indeed, we might read this saga of the powerless younger
brother who comes to the fore as a tale about not only brothers
but also other pairs of powerless and powerful: the poor facing
the rich, blacks facing whites, women facing men, Jews facing
Gentiles, the gay facing the straight, the crippled facing the
healthy, the speechless trees and ozone facing the talkative
human race. All the powerless of our own society, in their
relation with the powerful.
Read this way, the saga loses none of its power for talking
about the uses of power in that smallest of societies, the
family. It loses none of its energy for laying bare the agonies
of those who literally are brothers, sisters—still, today,
at war and struggling to make peace. But the saga gains power and
energy if we hear it speak to every collision of the powerful and
powerless in which we act and live.
It gains power and energy for change if we can identify
ourselves with Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph struggling to win free of
the power their older brothers are born to—and then can
identify ourselves with Ishmael, Esau, Judah struggling to win
free of the humiliation and the weakness their younger brothers
have put upon them. So just as Cain's murder of Abel is the first
consequence of exile from Eden, the teaching of Ephraim and
Manasseh is to be the key to reopen Eden. It is the Cain-and-Abel
story that must be overcome if the gates to re-enter Eden are to
open.
So the threads of Genesis lead us to this new beginning,
beyond the brothers' war. The new people acting on its new
knowledge is to be one model of how the human race as a whole
might redeem the world.
One model. The model that can end in reconciliation. Yet we
move from Genesis into the Book of Exodus, and there it looks as
if the model vanishes. In Exodus, God calls Israel God's own
"first-born." This is patently untrue, since Israel is
the newest and poorest of the peoples. Egypt and Babylon are far
older, richer, more powerful, smarter. So God reverses the
"natural" order, and chooses as first-born a pack of
slaves.
But now the story changes. Egypt, the older brother, refuses
to step back as had Ishmael, Esau, and Judah. Like Cain, Egypt
insists on its older-brother status. But this time a God who has
grown in experience through the generations of Abraham will not
permit the older, stronger, to keep enslaving the younger, weaker
brother.
So in Exodus, liberation cannot be achieved until the powerful
have been shattered and the oppressed have departed, once and for
all. With Pharaoh there seems to be no reconciliation.
This pattern, the pattern of Exodus, has impressed itself with
great power on the minds of every people that has learned the
Torah or has learned its secularized analogues, like Marxism. It
is the model for modern revolutions, national and social, where
the saving remnant hopes to wipe out oppression and corruption,
depart physically or politically from the oppressors and
corrupters, and remake their country. The pattern has been so
powerful that we have paid little attention to the alternative
that emerges from Genesis: the war and peace of brothers.
Yet the Prophets of Israel looked beyond the Book of Genesis
to see a future in which, "In that day, Israel shall be the
third alongside Egypt and Assyria, each a blessing in the midst
of the earth—for Yahweh of the multitudes has blessed each,
saying: ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of
my hands, and Israel my inheritance'" (Isaiah 19:24-25).
The model of the brothers reconciled.
Today we need the model of the brothers. For there are many
struggles where we do not want to destroy the oppressor or
separate into a new society. Instead we need
liberation-with-reconciliation. Not the gruesome grin of the
powerless commanded to love their taskmasters, nor the gracious
smile of the powerful who are glad to love their serfs. But the
free laughter of wrestlers, where the grapple of liberation and
the clasp of love are intertwined.
How many of us, women or men, want women to be freed from men
by smashing men and leaving them? How many of us, black or white,
want blacks to be freed by smashing America or leaving it?
Exodus may be the last resort in every struggle. If we must,
we must. If the stronger refuse to step aside, then like Pharaoh
they may end on the ocean floor. But we should know that the door
out is not the door in. Exodus is not the path to Eden.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the author of Godwrestling—Round
2, among many other works of spiritual renewal, was director
of The Shalom Center when this article
appeared. He and his brother Howard Waskow also wrote Becoming
Brothers, a "wrestle in two voices" that tells the
story of their own struggles and reconciliations.
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