 | The Torah Cycle begins again. As our ancestors have done for thousands of years, the turning of Torah's scroll aims to teach us partly by eliciting our questions. But for many centuries, one question apparently was too dangerous to the patriarchy for most to ask – which is why we must. |
| Recent Divrei Torah on this portion: • Creation and Our Sacred Orchard (2023) • Take Two: Meet the Midrash (2024) |
Because this year's SoulSpa (Saturdays 10:00am) will uplift women's voices, this first Dvar Torah of 5786 poses a feminist question that history was too afraid to ask.
"Never let a good answer get in the way of a good question," I learned long ago. Yet there's an obvious question about this week's Torah portion that's all about beginnings that nearly all of our ancestors were too afraid to ask (or at least write down):
Who was Cain's wife?
Why this question, and why should it need particular courage to ask?
According to Torah, God created the first humans: אדם / Adam from the ground (אדמה / adamah), and Eve (חוה / Havah, source of "life") from Adam's side. After the Garden of Eden, God launched Adam and Eve into the Real World, where they had two sons: קין / Cain and הבל / Abel. Cain murdered Abel, and God exiled Cain to wander (Gen. 4:16-17):
"Never let a good answer get in the way of a good question," I learned long ago. Yet there's an obvious question about this week's Torah portion that's all about beginnings that nearly all of our ancestors were too afraid to ask (or at least write down):
Who was Cain's wife?
Why this question, and why should it need particular courage to ask?
According to Torah, God created the first humans: אדם / Adam from the ground (אדמה / adamah), and Eve (חוה / Havah, source of "life") from Adam's side. After the Garden of Eden, God launched Adam and Eve into the Real World, where they had two sons: קין / Cain and הבל / Abel. Cain murdered Abel, and God exiled Cain to wander (Gen. 4:16-17):
| וַיֵּ֥צֵא קַ֖יִן מִלִּפְנֵ֣י יהו''ה וַיֵּ֥שֶׁב בְּאֶֽרֶץ־נ֖וֹד קִדְמַת־עֵֽדֶן׃ וַיֵּ֤דַע קַ֙יִן֙ אֶת־אִשְׁתּ֔וֹ וַתַּ֖הַר וַתֵּ֣לֶד אֶת־חֲנ֑וֹךְ וַֽיְהִי֙ בֹּ֣נֶה עִ֔יר וַיִּקְרָא֙ שֵׁ֣ם הָעִ֔יר כְּשֵׁ֖ם בְּנ֥וֹ חֲנֽוֹךְ׃ | Cain went out from before YHVH and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. Then [Cain] built a city, and named the city after his son Enoch. |
Hold on. If the only people on Earth at that time were Adam, Eve and Cain, who was Cain's wife, and how could Cain need a city?
These questions are huge because no rational answer aligns with Torah's text. If Torah is complete, then in exile Cain had nobody to fear and couldn't have a wife! (Incest with Eve was impossible because Cain was exiled from her.) But if there were others for Cain to fear and marry, then Torah couldn't be complete in its story about creation!
An obvious conundrum, yet Judaism's canonized midrashim (stories), meforshim (rabbinic interpretations) and Talmud don't mention it at all. None of the greats from the late Dark Ages, medieval life or the Renaissance hinted at it Like Sherlock Holmes' "dog that didn't bark," this question's absence from mainstream Jewish life says a lot about what Jewish life was like back then: apparently some questions were too dangerous to ask.
But we moderns want to know. And if we can't even ask – if we get the idea that asking is wrong or unfaithful – then what kind of faith is that? Are we so simple, or our spirituality so brittle, that any question should be beyond the pale?
I stand with Elie Wiesel: "No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and I would say, no faith is as solid as a wounded faith." A faith that can't withstand challenge isn't worth much. We have nothing to fear from our questions, but we have much to fear from not asking them.
So we must ask: How could Cain have a wife?
One brave soul in Jewish history did ask and wrote down his answer – but it was too loaded to make it into the Jewish canon for almost 1,000 years.
Sa'adia ben Yosef Gaon (892-942 CE), one of Judaism's greats, reasoned that there is no Torah basis to dispute that Cain had a wife. It therefore followed that Torah could not be complete! The only logical explanation was that Adam and Eve had other children: daughters! But, Sa'adia Gaon continued, Torah rarely named women... because... they were female.
Yes, 1,100 years ago, someone said the quiet thing out loud: Torah began patriarchal, male-centric. By leaving early women unnamed, Torah left out half of the story and half of our collective strength. But this answer was too dangerous to the patriarchy, so it was left on mainstream history's cutting-room floor.
It took until the 19th century to pick up where the Sa'adia Gaon left off. Italian rabbi Yitzhak Shmuel Reggio (1784-1855), influenced by Enlightenment values, offered that Adam and Eve's boys needed to have had sisters, and incest was not yet taboo. In the 20th century, another Italian rabbi, Moshe David Cassuto (1883-1951), agreed and then tried to sweep the whole issue under the rug: "All of the exegetes, from ancestral days to our days, said the same thing."
No, they didn't. Most had been too afraid to ask, because too much was at stake.
Even the first Jewish denomination's feminist compendium of Torah interpretation, the Reform Movement's The Torah: A Women's Commentary (2008), didn't go there. It set out to "bring the women of the Torah from the shadow into the limelight, from their silences into speech, from the margins to which they have often been relegated to the center of the page – for their sake, for our sake and for our children's sake." But of Cain's "wife," the Women's Commentary had only this to say:
These questions are huge because no rational answer aligns with Torah's text. If Torah is complete, then in exile Cain had nobody to fear and couldn't have a wife! (Incest with Eve was impossible because Cain was exiled from her.) But if there were others for Cain to fear and marry, then Torah couldn't be complete in its story about creation!
An obvious conundrum, yet Judaism's canonized midrashim (stories), meforshim (rabbinic interpretations) and Talmud don't mention it at all. None of the greats from the late Dark Ages, medieval life or the Renaissance hinted at it Like Sherlock Holmes' "dog that didn't bark," this question's absence from mainstream Jewish life says a lot about what Jewish life was like back then: apparently some questions were too dangerous to ask.
But we moderns want to know. And if we can't even ask – if we get the idea that asking is wrong or unfaithful – then what kind of faith is that? Are we so simple, or our spirituality so brittle, that any question should be beyond the pale?
I stand with Elie Wiesel: "No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and I would say, no faith is as solid as a wounded faith." A faith that can't withstand challenge isn't worth much. We have nothing to fear from our questions, but we have much to fear from not asking them.
So we must ask: How could Cain have a wife?
One brave soul in Jewish history did ask and wrote down his answer – but it was too loaded to make it into the Jewish canon for almost 1,000 years.
Sa'adia ben Yosef Gaon (892-942 CE), one of Judaism's greats, reasoned that there is no Torah basis to dispute that Cain had a wife. It therefore followed that Torah could not be complete! The only logical explanation was that Adam and Eve had other children: daughters! But, Sa'adia Gaon continued, Torah rarely named women... because... they were female.
Yes, 1,100 years ago, someone said the quiet thing out loud: Torah began patriarchal, male-centric. By leaving early women unnamed, Torah left out half of the story and half of our collective strength. But this answer was too dangerous to the patriarchy, so it was left on mainstream history's cutting-room floor.
It took until the 19th century to pick up where the Sa'adia Gaon left off. Italian rabbi Yitzhak Shmuel Reggio (1784-1855), influenced by Enlightenment values, offered that Adam and Eve's boys needed to have had sisters, and incest was not yet taboo. In the 20th century, another Italian rabbi, Moshe David Cassuto (1883-1951), agreed and then tried to sweep the whole issue under the rug: "All of the exegetes, from ancestral days to our days, said the same thing."
No, they didn't. Most had been too afraid to ask, because too much was at stake.
Even the first Jewish denomination's feminist compendium of Torah interpretation, the Reform Movement's The Torah: A Women's Commentary (2008), didn't go there. It set out to "bring the women of the Torah from the shadow into the limelight, from their silences into speech, from the margins to which they have often been relegated to the center of the page – for their sake, for our sake and for our children's sake." But of Cain's "wife," the Women's Commentary had only this to say:
Where did [Cain's wife] come from? The writer is unconcerned with the question, another clue that this is not history but a myth attempting to account for the beginning of humankind and its consequences.
Maybe so – perhaps even probably so – but with all due respect, the Women's Commentary missed the point. Continuing to write women out of that story, sacrificing the question on the altar of so-called liberalism, does nothing to rectify 3,500 years of patriarchy. And it does nothing to call us into Torah's timeless journey in which we must never let an answer get in the way of a good question.
After all, it's by our questions that we build a culture of seeking, ethics and community. It's by our questions – and a free-wielding culture of questions, at that – that we truly make Torah our own for our generations and the next ones.
That, I think, is one of the ways we become truly #StrongerTogether.
After all, it's by our questions that we build a culture of seeking, ethics and community. It's by our questions – and a free-wielding culture of questions, at that – that we truly make Torah our own for our generations and the next ones.
That, I think, is one of the ways we become truly #StrongerTogether.
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