So I’ve been here at The Yeshiva for about a year. I’m going home for a couple of weeks in June and I’m starting to really worry about what it will be like in the “outside world.”

Here’s the thing about the Yeshiva/Outside world dynamic: a couple of weeks ago, there was a young woman who came to check out the Yeshiva because she was thinking of studying here in the summer. She ended up studying with me in the 2nd level talmud class. As we went through a sugya about certain mitzvot potentially superseding Shabbat, and I tried to explain what was going on, she kept asking me what the relevance was. Why do we care what Rabbi Eliezer thought about shaking a lulav on shabbat, especially since that’s not what we do anyway? And why would he think that you could when everyone else thought otherwise? And why do we care? How can this matter if it’s not about saving someone’s life or about the community or the sorts of things that are, you know, really important? Why would something as trivial as shaking a lulav supersede Shabbat? And what’s so important about Shabbat anyway??

These are the sorts of questions I can hear people asking all the time in the “outside world.” And they are reasonable questions. Why does any of this matter to people who live in a real world with a surrounding culture that tells them what is important and where those things don’t, on the surface, seem to bear any similarity to the sorts of things we get so embroiled in at Yeshiva? And what troubled me was that I didn’t know how to answer those questions. I knew, deeply, structurally, why these things were important… at least why I thought they were important. But I didn’t know how to communicate any of it because it is built on the entirety of my learning, on the way that the structure, the deep structure of the tradition and the text are put together, how things fit, how reasons and symbols grow out of each other and build our practice. It is built on my understanding of what I have just begun to have a bit of understanding of after a year of intense study. How can you communicate that to a person impatient for answers, for meaning, for relevance?? It’s perfectly relevant for my life, but only because I found reason to tie my life to this tradition and to the study of it, and in order to do that I made a conscious decision to try my best to release as many of my preconceptions about what is “important” or “relevant” as I could before trying to learn, because I knew that if I held to them I would blind myself to what the Yeshiva could give me. I’m just not sure how to translate that. I’m not sure how to communicate to someone why they shouldn’t marry a non-Jew. I don’t know how to communicate to someone why they should come to shul or keep kosher. I don’t know how to communicate to someone that they shouldn’t drive or go shopping on shabbat. If I can’t learn how to communicate such things, then I’m going to have some significant difficulties in a relatively short while.

I talked to Reb Shmuel about this and he told me he thought was the way to address my concern about losing my sense of how to communicate what I’ve gained in Yeshiva to the Jewish “outside world” was not, chas v’shalom, to withdraw from Yeshiva but davka to go even deeper and learn more, and God willing that will give me more security in my learning and more of a sense of how to transmit, how to share my learning. I hope so. So like Shimon Bar Yochai (lehavdil) I go back into the cave for another 12 months.

Hevel wasn’t really there.

Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not trying to make excuses. I did what I did, what was was as it had to be. Agency was mine, I bear the punishment and the mark of it, and God is the True Judge.

But in the beginning was a word. And another. And another. And thus was the world created– with stories. And we, whose lives were the first lives and whose births were the first births, our lives were made of the stuff of stories. I was born to be Man.
Hevel was born to die.

I would sometimes prod him to see if he would dissolve into vapor at my touch. You have to understand, it wouldn’t have seemed so odd. In those times, things were as they were and we, the first three, were discovering a newly created world. We were each so different from each other, would it be so odd to have a man who was flesh and a man who was not? Well he was solid enough– solid enough to bleed, solid enough to kill– but though, as it turned out, he could be killed, he did not truly live. Hevel was not Named. Hevel did not speak. I was given to Mother Chava to be Man after Father Adam. Hevel was addded. Added to be My Brother.

To see what I would do.

My suspicions about my brother came to a head when we brought the offerings before The Lord. It was given to me to till the soil, to toil for our bread. This was the charge of The Lord to Father Adam and passed to me. How then could I not offer before The Lord that which is our sustenance? How would I not offer the choicest of what we were given by The Lord to feed and maintain us? Hevel was the keeper of a flock, something he silently took upon himself without our knowing why. As we learned, from the flock we could take wool for clothes and milk for cheese, but we knew nothing of flesh. How then would I have thought to bring flesh as an offering? For that matter, how would he?

And yet, thus he did. My offering lay before the Lord, and there was an uneasy silence. And I watched as he silently took a lamb of the flock. I watched as he took his knife in hand. I watched as he did the unthinkable.

The blood flowed forth from the neck of the animal, life drained such as I’d never seen, poured out at the base of the altar. The body, the lamb that was no longer a lamb, he offered by fire. This he did without a word, without a moment of hesitation, as though he had recieved instruction. As he did this inconceivable thing, I gazed at him, first in confusion, then in horror.

But when the smoke began to rise, and when the flesh began to sizzle, and the fat began to melt, that was when I understood. The aroma of roasting meat filled my nostrils as I looked at my grain offering, and knew suddenly that it was lacking. What I had to offer from my own, from myself, from who I was, from my experience, could not live up to what Hevel seemed to just know, seemed to have embedded in his very being directly from God. A perfect knowledge, a perfect understanding. My understanding was imperfect. My sacrifice was imperfect.

I was imperfect.

It wasn’t reasonable. It didn’t make sense. Who was he? What was he? He was silent. Insubstantial. He had no desire, no will, no purpose, no identity. He had no anger and no joy. No longing and no satisfaction. He was inert. He was futility, vanity embodied.

He was perfect.

God spoke to me then, as I sat hunched by the altars of our offerings, Hevel walking silently back toward his flock. The weight of my confusion was nearly too heavy to bear. What could this mean, to be so flawed and to be taunted by this vision of perfection? What did it mean to have my sacrifice rebuffed by God who had given no instruction, and yet have him, my brother, somehow just know?

“Will It Not Be That If You Do Well…”

Do well? What is it to “do well?” What can that even mean? How could it be that I should do well in the eyes of my God when my brother is His vision of perfection?

“Sin Crouches At The Opening, Its Desire Shall Be For You, And You Shall Rule Over It.”

And thus my fate. God is telling me my future. Like Father to Mother, I will be tied for all time to sin… it will be my bride. Because I am in an impossible situation.

This is a set-up.

I stood and began to walk toward the flock. I had to try to understand. And Hevel… Hevel knew. He had to. He knew about the flock, about the lamb, he knew about the blood, the flesh, about fire and flesh, the smoke, the pleasing odor– he knew what it meant to Do Well. It was all he ever did.

And thus I took Hevel into my field. I would talk to him, I thought. Ask him, beg him, plead with him to tell me how to do right in the eyes of God. This angel of a brother of mine, who knew the heart of The Lord, who knew the secrets of the smoke of the altar– he would give me those secrets. And maybe, maybe then, we could live together in perfect praise of the Lord, both of us doing Well in his eyes, with no sin to tempt and taunt, and no need to master it.

But it was not meant to be. And now I think that it never was. Because God is telling this story with my life, creating His Just-So world. Only God’s world is not “just so.” It can’t be. And like Mother and Father before me, I will take the fall so that God can have his complicated and conflicted world, full of turmoil and desire and anger, full of sorrow and pain, full of love and joy and comfort, full of sin, and of mercy, and redemption.

Hevel’s silence was maddening. I spoke to him softly, timidly at first. I spoke to him as a friend, a fellow man, relating from shared experience, new people in a new world. He was silent. I spoke to him then as a brother, with love, the love of a brother born of the same womb by the same seed, the love that I longed to feel from him. He was silent. I spoke then with anger, my voice strengthening, my face reddening, with jealousy as I felt he jealously guarded the secret to being God’s favorite. He was silent. My voice faltered and I spoke with baffelment, almost with awe. Who are you? I asked flatly. What are you? He was silent.

Finally, despair. I didn’t have a brother. I saw this Hevel for what it really was. Inert. Stagnant. Dead. This was the antithesis of everything that would drive God’s creation. If Hevel was Man, then man was dead at birth.

Hardly knowing what I did, I picked up a rock that seemed to appear from nowhere at my feet. It fit my hand as though made for this purpose. I raised it high as Hevel, this brother-thing given me to see what I would do, gazed blankly, serenely into my eyes, not a word, not a flinch, not a move. “Lord,” I whispered, “forgive me for doing your will.” And I brought my hand down.

The blood flowed more freely than I imagined it would, pouring out among the stalks, soaking into the soil, feeding the produce of the land given me to till. God’s perfect creature, this thing that had never lived, lay dead before me, life drained as I’d seen only once before.

As I sank to my knees before the body, the brother that was no longer a brother, I heard the whisper of God, a voice of sorrow, of pity, mocking me: “Where Is Your Brother Hevel?”

Where is he? Where was he ever? I wasn’t given a brother, and yet I was. This lifeless shell before me, how different was it really from when it was animated? He never spoke. He never felt. He never loved. He never loved me.

Was it given to me to guard this creature that belonged to no one but God? You, God, know much better than I where your puppet my brother is. For my part, I know not.

Even as I spoke the words, as they left my mouth, I knew what they meant. I was speaking the future of my offspring, of humanity. My question would ring throughout the ages. I, through my words, through my actions, was creating the story, creating humanity, creating the world. Yet, not me. In those early days, our lives were the stuff of stories. We were not people, we were the words, the hands of God.

And so I need you to understand. I’m not trying to make excuses. I did what I did, what was was as it had to be. Agency was mine, I bear the punishment and the mark of it, and God is the True Judge.

But in the beginning, the words were people, and the people words. And thus was the world created– with our lives and our actions. I was not destroyed for my crime, but protected, guarded, ensured that my seed would be sown, that my crime would live in the heart of every man, that the world would move, driven by the engine of my imperfection, so that man might strive. Driven by my anger, my sorrow, my pain, so that there may be in this world love, joy, comfort.

And thus was the world created in mercy.

And thus was born Redemption.