In my grandfather’s Manhattan apartment overlooking Riverside Drive, the family would collect for the annual Passover celebration. Round the table were his sons and their wives, his younger daughter, my mother, along with my father, my sister and me. His elder daughter, my Aunt Myriam, lived with her family in Jerusalem.

Among the grandchildren old enough to talk, I was the youngest. That meant it fell to me to chant the four questions in Hebrew (“why is this night different – in the first, the second, the third and the fourth particular way – from all other nights?”). 

One part of the ceremony, meant to create a sense of fun, has the youngest hide one piece of the unleavened flatbread (matzah) that’s eaten in place of leavened bread during the Passover week. It’s unleavened in commemoration of the Israelites’ departure from Egypt in haste such that they had no time to wait for bread to rise. At the Passover commemoration dinner, the hidden matzah is found and returned of course, but only after a round of mock bargaining, with the youngest wanting a present in reward for coming up with it. 

The “bargaining” is supposed to be fun. But, rightly or wrongly, round that table I was believed to be the favorite grandchild. Under the shadow of that shared, unspoken belief, suddenly the mock bargaining turned acrimonious, to the point where I fled the table in tears. I remember Aunt Myriam’s daughter Naomi, then in New York, a lovely eighteen-year old sabra (native born Israeli), going over to console me and incidentally get me back to the table. 

It was the last Passover my grandfather would be well enough to conduct, and a sad reminder of the perennial fight for the blessing.

The pen name of my grandfather, Rav Tsair (the Young Rabbi), is on a street in Tel Aviv. His work is still studied in Jewish seminaries. He bore a striking physical resemblance to God, as years later I sometimes said jokingly. I mean “God” as represented in such Christian works of art as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. That figure – the one with the flying white beard and the creation-making forefinger.

In my childhood one time, my sister and I were seated on the wine-colored rug at his feet, talking about how you can’t tell in advance which events you will or won’t remember. When we shared our thought with our grandfather, he leaned down, pointing his ever-so-consequential finger in our small faces and said performatively –

You will remember this moment all your life –

all your life you will remember it!

Of course, we did.

And speaking of early days, when did human history begin? For those Christians who take the Bible seriously, it began when Eve succumbed to the serpent’s coaxing, ate the only fruit in the entire Garden of Eden that God had ruled off limits, Adam followed suit, and they both got booted out of the Garden. Henceforth to work, to suffer in childbed, to die. In the Christian view, no redemption was available for what they did – the Original Sin – till God incarnated as a man and suffered a painful death. Thus the debt was paid that we, given our limited human resources, could not possibly pay.

The Jewish story goes rather differently. Eden or no Eden, we never lose the ability to do the right thing. (Or the wrong thing for that matter, whether inside or outside the Garden.) The Eden story has analytic value. It models what human life is not. It’s not inconsequential. It’s not paradisaically trivial. Our lives unfold in the world of action, where every action makes a difference.

So what is the act that sets the stage for history from the outset and from that point going forward? Adam and Eve get themselves two sons, Abel and Cain. Abel knows how to behave with God. His “sacrifice is accepted.” Cain by contrast doesn’t know how. His sacrifice doesn’t make the cut. More serious still, Cain won’t try to figure it out. 

Instead, Cain murders Abel. What could be more natural and understandable? All the same, he didn’t have to do it! So the “voice of [his] brother’s blood cries out” to God “from the ground.”

The motif of sibling rivalry – of fratricide actual or intended – threads its way all through Genesis, the first Book of the Hebrew Bible. The one where the major themes are laid out.

Now let’s look up from the Book of Genesis and ask how else one could account for the tidal wave of malicious hatred of Jews that’s now flooding our planet? Isn’t there an undertone, a muttering voice in the midst of it that says,

Surely God will like me better –

now that I have no rivals because

I’ve murdered Abel?

Myself, I don’t actually think it’s a winning strategy for getting to be God’s favorite. However, once people get wound up that way, it’s difficult to disengage the mechanism. Best not to wind it up in the first place. 

Related Content: Tales of Rav Tsair | Can Sibling Rivalry Be Ontological? |

Bulletin from History