Tag Archives: Philo

Cain and Abel: A New Understanding

This week we restart the Torah reading cycle with Beresheet. One of the most complex, mysterious, and intriguing passages in the parasha is the story of Cain and Abel. The entire account gets only 17 verses total. First, Cain has a bright idea to bring Hashem an offering—the first time we hear of such a concept explicitly in the Torah. Abel then copies his brother, and gets rewarded for it, while Hashem seemingly ignores Cain’s offering. This upsets Cain and he is “greatly distressed” (Genesis 4:5). Hashem asks Cain why he is so upset. “Surely, if you do right, there is uplift. But if you do not do right, sin couches at the door; its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.” (v. 7)

The next thing we are told is that Cain is speaking to Abel, and suddenly “rises up” to kill him. God questions Cain, points out the blood of Abel calling out, and then curses Cain to be a wanderer upon the Earth. Cain’s response is that “my sin is too great to bear!” (v. 13) Cain worries that once he becomes a defenceless wanderer, anyone who finds him will kill him. God promises to give Cain a protective mark. Cain then goes to live in the land of Nod, gets married, has a son called Hanokh (“Enoch”, not to be confused with the other, more famous Enoch who never died), and builds a city that he names after his son (v. 17). That’s the whole narrative, and it brings up numerous big questions:

  1. Why and how did Cain kill Abel?
  2. When God asks Cain “where is your brother?”, Cain answers that he doesn’t know. How could Cain blatantly lie to God? Is he not aware of the basic fact that God is omniscient? Did he learn nothing from his parents (Adam and Eve) who tried to hide from God?
  3. On that note, Cain is clearly on a high prophetic level, able to communicate openly and directly with God. He seemingly invents the concept of offerings to Hashem, and later admits that his “sin is too great to bear”. This does not sound like an evil person. On the contrary, it sounds like someone who deeply wishes to serve God, and who is remorseful and repentant. Which is it? Who was Cain really?
  4. Cain worries that if he becomes a wanderer, “hidden from God’s face” (4:14) and without God’s protection, anyone who finds him will kill him. If there are no other humans besides Cain, Adam, and Eve at this point, who is he worried about? And who, exactly, did he end up marrying?
  5. Finally, despite being cursed to wander, we are told that Cain did not actually become a wanderer at all and, on the contrary, build the first human city! Why was his curse not realized? And why did he build a city? Why is a whole city necessary for a single family? And why did he specifically name his city Hanokh?

To answer the first question, the commentaries provide several answers. Continue reading →

Shabbat haGadol: the Great Sabbath

Why is the Sabbath before Pesach called Shabbat HaGadol? What does it have to do with Creation, Judgement Day, and the Final Redemption? Find out in this class where we also take a deep dive into the various Jewish calendars that were used 2000 years ago at the end of the Second Temple era, and how the “great calendar debate” still affects us today. Plus: the Zohar on the secret behind the solar calendar and why Earth’s orbit is 365 days.

Mysteries & Secrets of Tefillin

At the end of this week’s parasha, Ekev, we read one of four passages in the Torah that speak of the great mitzvah of tefillin. In the list of 613, tefillin is actually two separate mitzvot—one for the head, and one for the arm. Some even say that tefillin counts as eight mitzvot, since we should multiply by four for the four times the Torah speaks of it! (Menachot 44a) Today, the mitzvah of tefillin is one of the best-known practices in all of Judaism, thanks in large part to the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s tefillin campaign starting in 1967, in the days leading up to the miraculous Six-Day War. We find many Jews who are otherwise secular or unaffiliated still laying tefillin every day. Following October 7, demand for tefillin was so high that there were reportedly shortages. Yet, tefillin binding hasn’t always been so widespread and well-known.

The Talmud (Berakhot 47a) suggests that one thing distinguishing Torah scholars (talmidei chakhamim) from the general public (am ha’aretz) is that the latter do not don tefillin. Even in responsa literature from the times of the Geonim (roughly 500-1000 CE), we find Jews asking if tefillin should be worn by all Jewish men, or if it was specifically reserved for great rabbis and Torah scholars. More puzzling still, we find that no other prophet besides Moses speaks of them, and there is no explicit mention of tefillin anywhere in the rest of Tanakh. Nor is there any historical or archaeological evidence of tefillin prior to about two millennia ago. Tefillin may just be the most mysterious Torah mitzvah we have. Where did it really come from, and what secrets does it contain? Continue reading →