Parshah Commentary

Shortly after October 7th, I led a group of Jewish Currents readers in a text study about mourning. At one point, we read about the custom of burying a murder victim as found, without the traditional rituals of bathing or shrouding the body, in order “to raise up anger and to wreak vengeance,” as the 16th-century Eastern European commentator Rabbi David HaLevi Segal puts it. As I hoped, we discussed the desire to do evil in return, which was of course the order of the day. While most of us debated whether the violence solicited was human or divine, the cartoonist Eli Valley made the provocative suggestion that God was the object of the fury, as if the practice anticipated Elie Wiesel’s post-Holocaust play, The Trial of God, in which the victims of the Khmelnytsky massacre arraign the Deity.

The Rabbis had the same thought about the world’s very first murder, which occurs in this week’s parshah, Breishit. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai compares Cain and Abel to two gladiators wrestling before a king who can stop the fight when he pleases, but chooses not to intervene. As the loser is dying, he howls, “Who will plead my case before the king?” Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai likens these desperate last words to Abel’s posthumous plea; when God confronts Cain, he says, “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” This midrash is shocking, not least to its author, who prefaces his parable, “The matter is hard for the one who says it, impossible for the mouth to make it explicit.” Ironically, Abel’s blood pleads for justice from the authority who oversaw his murder—indeed, the analogy implies, from someone who valued his life less than the spectacle of his death. It is as if God said to Cain, as a later midrash indeed suggests, “your brother’s blood is crying out about me from the ground.” (The difference between “to” and “about” here is merely vocalic.) Proving that not only moderns can interrogate the ways of God to man, this midrash outstrips even Wiesel, who piously imagines a trial scene, replete with evidence, moral claims, and reasoned judgments. For Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, only suckers mistake our world for a courtroom. It is instead a coliseum, in which the sole verdict is the emperor’s pollice verso, his capriciously turned thumb delivering or withholding mercy.

Atheism is in the air in the legends surrounding Cain: A fanciful, late-antique Aramaic translation has him proclaiming, “there is no judge and no judgment” before killing his brother, in what became the slogan of Jewish disbelief. Yet I doubt Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai was preaching godlessness, which would make his long career as a conscientious legalist and pious exegete a very strange, elaborate bit. So what was he teaching? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that in Breishit, Cain gets an oddly light sentence. Although biblical laws uniformly prescribe execution for intentional homicide, Cain lives on, and is even divinely protected from human retribution (“whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance”); although cursed to wander the earth, he promptly settles (in the absurdly named “land of Wander,” as if his exile were merely lexical), builds a city, and starts a family. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai is explaining this non-punishment as God’s acceptance of complicity. The king refuses to make the gladiator the scapegoat for the evils of the coliseum.

Such guilt-ridden mercy reminds me of an idea taught by my ancestor, the 18th-century Hasidic Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who assured his followers that when human beings are judged on the high holidays, we can be sure of an acquittal, because, after all, it was God, not us, who created the evil impulse. Remarkably, the Berditchever is casting himself, and all humanity, as Cain, repeating an argument the midrash assigns to the murderer pleading his case before God. After weeks of chest-beating and grovelling, such cynical optimism can feel refreshing. But the Berditchever Rebbe’s leniency implies a stringent catch. For, of course, we too can find ourselves in the position of the judge within rotten, unjust structures. (I think of this point, for instance, when I grade papers written by working-class students poorly educated in an underfunded school system—and of course, a good many politicians who crow about punitive “law and order” could profitably reflect on it as well.)

Who knows if there is divine justice or not, whether our cosmos is a courtroom or a coliseum? We may be certain, however, that our capitalist imperium is the latter, and we might thus learn from Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai’s God to pardon those trespasses in which we ourselves are implicated.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, will be published in November 2025.