Long before the Bible addresses Judaism, it asks us to grapple with what it means to be human. Few questions are more urgent than how to live in a world that does not fit our expectations—a world of suffering, unfairness, and loss.
Modern life helps us avoid these questions through consumerism and endless scrolling...until it can’t. At some point, life asks: How will we live when the world is not as we believe it ought to be?
In Parshat Bereshit, the Torah begins answering that question with two names. Eve names her firstborn Cain, declaring, “I have acquired a man with God.” She names his brother Abel, but gives no reason for the name. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that Hevel, the Hebrew pronunciation of Abel, does not simply mean “vanity,” as the word is usually translated. It is closer to breath or vapor: something present but impossible to grasp.
Cain and Abel. Acquisition and impermanence. Possession and breath.
Cain brings an offering to God, and Abel brings one too. God accepts Abel’s offering, but not Cain’s. Cain confronts the gap between expectation and reality, between ought and is, and he burns with anger.
God asks him: “Why are you angry? Why has your face fallen?”
Then comes one of the most enigmatic verses in the parsha: “If you make good, you will lift; you can master it.”
Note what God does not say. He does not explain why Cain’s offering was refused. God does not give him the why; He gives him the how: If you choose to make good, you can be lifted and lift others. But if you remain trapped in your anger, sin will crouch at your door.
Viktor Frankl would later make this central to his thought: Even when we cannot choose our circumstances, we can choose our stance toward them. We can seek meaning rather than explanation; we can move from helplessness toward agency.
Perhaps that is what God means to convey to Abel. You cannot always make life good. But you can choose to make good from the life you have been given.
But Cain chooses otherwise. He murders Abel, as though he could destroy the fragility and uncertainty his brother represents. Yet afterward Cain fears that anyone who finds him will kill him. He has become, for a moment, his brother Abel: vulnerable to a life he cannot control.
Perhaps that is why Bereshit follows the holiday of Sukkot, on which we read the book of Ecclesiastes in synagogue. Ecclesiastes confronts us with the hevel of existence: its fragility, transience, and resistance to our control. Then we turn to the beginning, where the Torah invites us to create and build.
And in this process, we need both Cain and Abel. We need Cain’s impulse to acquire, build, create, and change the world, and we need Abel’s knowledge that life is fragile, its outcomes uncertain, and our time here brief.
We cannot always repair the world, but we can decide how to stand within the world we have. God’s challenge to Cain remains ours: Given the life you did not choose, what good will you choose to make?
May this year give us the courage to accept what we cannot control, the wisdom to recognize what remains in our hands, and the strength to make good—and, in doing so, to lift ourselves and those around us.
Dr. Tanya White writes, teaches and lectures on Tanach and Jewish Philosophy in Israel and abroad. She is a senior lecturer at the Matan Women's Institute for Torah Studies and LSJS and a lecturer in Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
