Why did he do it? Perhaps he wanted to remain alone: an only child and, after his parents’ death, the only man. Alone like God and perhaps alone in place of God. Like God, he thought to offer himself a human sacrifice in holocaust. He wanted to be cruel like Him, a stranger like Him, an avenger like Him. And like Him, present and absent at the same time, absent by his presence, present in his absence. Cain killed to become God. To kill God.

Cain, then, in his desire to achieve a kind of transfiguration, tried to disfigure mankind by forcing absolute guilt upon it by his crime. He killed to kill. To destroy what existed. To assassinate man. Any man who takes himself for God ends up assassinating men.

But let us be fair and examine the inverse hypothesis: what if Cain killed for man, to demonstrate that man is capable of usurping the role of death and remain human?

This concept is unacceptable and outside Jewish tradition, in which the deed is what counts. A saint who kills is a killer. A preacher who tortures is a sadist. No man may play with another man’s life. No man ever kills for man—or for God. Every murder is against man and against God. Son of the first man, Cain lost his privileges from the moment he had blood on his hands.

The word brother keeps returning in the text, on the surface a superfluous reminder; we know they are brothers. Yet the word is repeated over and over to stress a fundamental principle: whoever kills, kills his brother; and when one has killed, one no longer is anyone’s brother. One is the enemy.

• • •

This brings us to the leitmotif of this tale: responsibility. The two brothers were responsible one for the other. Neither was entirely guilty or totally innocent; both were, each in his own way, indifferent to the other.

When God asked Cain: Where is Abel, your brother? Cain answered: Lo yadati, hashomer akhi anokhi?—I didn’t know, am I my brother’s keeper? In the spirit of the Midrash, I would suggest that a different punctuation of the verse, eliminating the comma, would change the meaning to: I didn’t know I was supposed to be my brother’s keeper. Indeed, otherwise his reply would be foolish. He already knew that God knew; why, then, would he lie? Why would he sink even lower by adding falsehood to crime? His very reply was an outline of his defense: he could not be judged because he did not know the law, because he was not aware of his responsibility. Now he did know, but it was too late to turn back. Abel was dead and death is as absolute as life.

Which, in the final analysis and judging by the use of the word anokhi (exclusive to God), means that man is responsible for his fellow-man, himself and God. What he does commits more than his own person, his own world.