Serving God with "You yourself"

An age-old question on the Cain and Abel story is: why does God accept Abel's offering and reject Cain's?

The Hasidic Master, Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Gur, known as the Sefat Emet, suggests that the answer is to be found in a close reading of two phrases from the story (Gen 4:3-5):

3. And in process of time (literally: at the end of days) it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground as an offering to the Lord.
4. And Abel brought, he too, of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat of it. And the Lord accepted Abel and for his offering;
5. But Cain and for his offering he did not accept.

The Sefat Emet quotes another Hasidic master, Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Przysucha, that the phrase "At the end of days" reveals to us why Cain brought an offering in the first place - it was due to the fear of his own death, which brought him to a thoughts of repentance and a desire to cover his bases. However, Abel brought "he too" (literally "himself too"), meaning while he was still alive, in life.

In other words, elaborates the Sefat Emet, Cain did not offer with his full heart and soul, he was merely afraid of his death, while Abel brought the fullness of his own being to the sacrifice; and that is the key in sacrificing to God, that one intends to use it as a way to become closer to God. To serve God with one's entire existence, not a behavioral gesture stemming from other motivations.

That is, in fact, the point of the all of the commandments. They are empty if not joined with the intention of deveykut, cleaving to God.

This reminded me of the book of Iyov/Job). In the first verses, Job is described as a righteous man and God Himself describes him as "blameless" to Satan. In the book, Job indeed rejects his friends' attempts to attach blame to him.

And yet - at the risk of joining Job's friends - I have to say that the explanation of the Sefat Emet made me think of the book of Job, and puts Job in the role of Cain.

From the outset, we hear that Job would always make sure to sacrifice, in case his sons had sinned while feasting. To me, that sounds like piety out of fear, out of covering his bases - and not out of fullness of connection to God. I feel as if the suffering God made him go through, along with the vision of the whirlwind at the end, were all designed to force him to bring "himself too", to move from being a meticulous saint who immediately checks to see if he has sinned in the minutest place but without actually serving God, to someone who by the end has been cracked wide open, discovered his own darkest places, and in that way can come to admit that he never really knew God before :

I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees you (Job 42:5)

The word for knowledge, daat, appears over eighty times in the book of Job. Jewish daat is not just in the mind - we need to know things intimately, with our entire selves, which is why the biblical Hebrew verb for conducting sexual relationships is leyda, the same verb as for to know.

We need to know G-d not through habitual actions covering ourselves in case we sinned, but with our heart cracked open and our full, flawed being.


> With thanks to my teacher Dr Elie Holtzer for his marvelous classes on Sefat Emet.

Fruit for fruit

Genesis 4:3

And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.

Why motivated Cain to bring an offering of the fruit of his land to God?

Many answers could be given, but in the dozens of Bibliodramas I have done with this story, one intriguing suggestion pops up quite frequently: Cain had heard all about the wonderful Garden of Eden in which his parents started their lives, standing in stark contrast with the laborious, demanding life they were now living. He wished to get back to that Garden; he wished to get back into God's graces. 

So he reasoned: God became upset when my mother took a fruit. I will give back fruit. 

This has logic. Yet he is not successful - God ends up accepting Abel's offering and rejecting that of Cain. Again, many explanations for this may be offered. But perhaps one message emerging from this is that you cannot fix things simply by reversing them. If you have hurt someone with offensive words, you cannot simply say to them the opposite or "I didn't mean it" or "I was joking". Rather, a process of apology and genuine conciliation, and a true process of repentance, must take place.

This was Cain's mistake. He ought to have tried to rectify the root cause of his parents' sin inside himself. Instead, he thought a technical action would do the trick.

Abel, on the other hand, brought the choicest of his flock. In this he was putting God above his own desires; and this, perhaps, was a (partway?) rectification of Eve's sin in priveleging her desires above God. Hence, his was accepted.