Bereshit: Cain, Abel and the Origins of Fratricide

The story of Cain and Abel is the first recorded murder in the Torah. But the text itself is surprisingly vague about the circumstances surrounding it.This week we studied different perspectives on the story, which reflect how the Rabbis understood violence and the responsibility for preventing it. Hundreds of years before Marx, Spinoza and Freud, the Midrash presents an interesting angle of what leads to murder. It also provides some radical positions on whose responsibility it is to prevent it.


Click here for the audio recording. Click here for the source sheet.