{"id":138,"date":"2008-06-09T16:27:14","date_gmt":"2008-06-09T21:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/?p=138"},"modified":"2019-09-05T18:01:37","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T01:01:37","slug":"cain-and-abel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2008\/06\/cain-and-abel","title":{"rendered":"Cain and Abel"},"content":{"rendered":"

From her yeshivah digs in Jerusalem, Gella Solomon (of Nogah Chadash<\/a>) writes to me of an aggadic <\/em>commentary she’s recently composed on the story of Cain and Abel (or transliterated, Qayin and Hevel). Her midrash<\/em><\/a>, narrated by Cain is deeply humanistic — Cain expresses himself and his experience of fratricide in human terms that easily resonate with our experiences of desire and disappointment. But at the same time, G. Solomon leaves Cain within the world of midrash and its poignant exegetical suggestions, within the world of myth where Cain remains fully aware that he is a character being used as a homiletical device. Within this setting, Solomon lets Cain explain himself, his actions, his set up.<\/p>\n

Here is how Solomon has Cain describe his relationship to his brother with special attention to his eponymous name, Hevel, which has the literal meaning of “breath” connoting a sense of his “fleeting” and impermanence:<\/p>\n

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 added. Added to be My Brother.<\/p>\n

To see what I would do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read more.<\/a> (link, Beyond the Near<\/em>)<\/p>\n

With the essential role Cain must play in the narrative, can he actually have free will. This is a playful suggestion Solomon makes — but from Dwayne Hoover’s revelation in Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions<\/em> to Nobusuke Tagomi’s epiphany in Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle<\/em>, the self-awareness of imaginary characters is a postmodern trope that resonates. As Authors we can give our characters a tselem elohim<\/em> (an image of their creator) — and our characters in turn reflect whatever creative spirit we possess to our readers. When we write, when we dream we are in a state of communion with those that we are dreaming. Our imagination gives them life and if the myth of their life can be transmitted, it can endure long after we’ve ceased dreaming them.<\/p>\n

Solomon’s reading of Cain also reminds me of the sympathetic reading of Judas Iscariot in the second century Gospel of Judas<\/a>. In that second century work, Jesus asks Judas to turn him into the Romans, since “betrayal” is not really possible for a supposedly living god whose determination of all events must preclude the free will of betrayal. In the Gospel of Judas, Judas is the most beloved since only the most trusted lover of a god could be entrusted with the most painful job of assuring his capture and execution. In this reading popular with early Christian Gnostics, Judas is written in a sense similar to Abraham ready to offer up his son Isaac.The theme of child sacrifice within biblical and post-biblical christian narratives is more fully explored in Jon D. Levenson’s excellent Death and Ressurection of the Beloved Son: Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Strangely enough, the gnostic sect that appreciated and possibly authored the Gospel of Judas were Sethians – a sect the predated Christianity and traced the lineage of their spiritual authority to Adam and Eve’s third son, the one born to replace the murdered Abel — Seth. In Sethian traditions, aspects which in other common traditions are seen as failures (e.g. the transgression of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) are seen rather as necessities in an unraveling emergence of divine transformation.<\/p>\n

Solomon doesn’t make mention of Seth in her midrash, though his absence could I think easily be remedied with a perusal of the extant midrashim on the significance of Seth, as well as the more recent discoveries of ancient lost gnostic works such as the Apocalypse of Adam<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From her yeshivah digs in Jerusalem, Gella Solomon (of Nogah Chadash) writes to me of an aggadic commentary she’s recently composed on the story of Cain and Abel (or transliterated, Qayin and Hevel). Her midrash, narrated by Cain is deeply humanistic — Cain expresses himself and his experience of fratricide in human terms that easily . . . → Continue reading: Cain and Abel<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,2],"tags":[48,49,50,34,47],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mythology","category-yiddishkeit","tag-gnostic","tag-imagination","tag-sentience","tag-midrash","tag-emergence","odd"],"yoast_head":"\nCain and Abel • Aharon's Omphalos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2008\/06\/cain-and-abel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cain and Abel • Aharon's Omphalos\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From her yeshivah digs in Jerusalem, Gella Solomon (of Nogah Chadash) writes to me of an aggadic commentary she’s recently composed on the story of Cain and Abel (or transliterated, Qayin and Hevel). 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There is one \"head\" for each of the following facets: cogitation, imagination, memory, and estimation.[ref]paraphrasing Midrash haBeur, translated in Yemenite Midrash: Philosophical Commentaries on the Torah, edited\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Music"","block_context":{"text":"Music","link":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/category\/art\/music"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/8245225690_15c0588051_b_905.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/8245225690_15c0588051_b_905.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/8245225690_15c0588051_b_905.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/8245225690_15c0588051_b_905.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1742,"url":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2003\/01\/update-2003-01-24","url_meta":{"origin":138,"position":2},"title":"update 2003-01-24","author":"Aharon N. Varady","date":"January 24, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"My hair is shorn. These protein strands have been growing since they were last cut in 1998. I had no appreciation of how much lighter my head would be with short hair. Length of shower time has also been reduced. Overall, I am satisfied with the results. So is Dad.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reports from the Front"","block_context":{"text":"Reports from the Front","link":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/category\/adventure"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5,"url":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2006\/01\/jews-in-the-bayou","url_meta":{"origin":138,"position":3},"title":"Jews in the Bayou","author":"Aharon N. Varady","date":"January 20, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Fruity Jews in the Woods, or just plains Jews in the Woods, is the name of a community which is getting larger, that meets and organizes collectively over the internet via a listserve and wiki, and gathers together once or twice a year for Shabbat at a rural retreat of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Judaica"","block_context":{"text":"Judaica","link":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/category\/yiddishkeit"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":929,"url":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2010\/07\/two-maps-published-for-a-scholar-of-medieval-french-history","url_meta":{"origin":138,"position":4},"title":"Beyond the Omphalos: Three Maps of Late Medieval France","author":"Aharon N. Varady","date":"July 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"When late last year my friend Dr. Allan Tulchin asked for my help preparing two maps for a book on the history of the Protestant Church in medieval France, I was so happy to oblige. I love maps and I love historical research. Preparing these maps would exercise my mapping\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reports from the Front"","block_context":{"text":"Reports from the Front","link":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/category\/adventure"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Pages-from-9780199736522-Tulchin_Page_11.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Pages-from-9780199736522-Tulchin_Page_11.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Pages-from-9780199736522-Tulchin_Page_11.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Pages-from-9780199736522-Tulchin_Page_11.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3080,"url":"https:\/\/aharon.varady.net\/omphalos\/2020\/08\/escutcheon-for-a-sanctuary-of-the-jewish-imagination-in-the-land-beyond-the-river-sambatyon","url_meta":{"origin":138,"position":5},"title":"Escutcheon for a Sanctuary of the Jewish Imagination in the Land Beyond the River Sambatyon","author":"Aharon N. 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