Shabbat Sermon: Seth or Abraham? with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

Our Torah reading today is loaded with characters who get lots of press: God creating the heaven and the earth; Adam and Eve and the serpent in the garden of Eden; Cain and Abel.  All these stories are well known.  But the character who speaks most powerfully to us now, in our time—in month eight of the pandemic,  in the last month before an epochally divisive election—the person who has the most to say to us now is the one person most of us have  never heard of.  His name is Seth.

Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel.  But Cain killed Abel.  If we pause here, and take this epoch narrative seriously, imagine what it would be like to be Adam and Eve, the parents of this murderously dysfunctional sibling pair.  One child is dead, murdered by your other child.  The other child has blood on his hands and is sent away by God nah v’nad b’aretz, to wander the world.