Man is a tree in the field. A tree exists on two planes. There are the parts that are above ground – the trunk, the branches, the leaves, the fruits. But much of the tree is subterranean. The roots are invisible. Counterintuitively, what actually determines the health of the tree is not what we can see above the surface. The depth and robustness of the roots are the real indicators of the health and vitality of the tree. Our Sages compare someone with big accomplishments but weak fundamentals to a tree with majestic branches but brittle roots. It seems impressive, but it is actually quite weak and vulnerable. A gust of wind can uproot the entire enterprise.
In the sacred mission of building man, we can never neglect the roots. Only with strong roots can the tree endure. This demands that we discover what is going on within us on a subterranean level. We have to burrow beneath the surface and engage in the dark and confusing art of root self-discovery. We have to uncover what is truly going on within us, a maddening and perilous venture. Our teacher is the sad, tragic, and shocking episode of the brothers, Cain and Abel. Adam and Eve bore these two sons – along with three sisters – while still in the Garden. The two sons chose professions, Abel became a shepherd and Cain a planter. Both brought offerings to God, Cain brought mediocre fruits, Abel offered the choicest of sheep. Abel was more dedicated in his offerings, and God accepted Abel and his offerings, but rejected Cain and his. Cain was understandably despondent and crestfallen.
The narrative takes a surprising turn: “And God said to Cain, ‘why are you distressed and why are you crestfallen? Behold, if you improve you will ascend.’” Cain was dejected and God tried to comfort him, but His words apparently fell on deaf ears: Cain rose up and murdered his brother. Humanity got off to an ignominious start with the first fratricide.
There are a lot of different angles to ponder in this disturbing episode. In this essay we will focus on God’s Comfort to Cain. He tells Cain: “Why are you distressed and why are you crestfallen? Behold, if you improve you will ascend.” What sort of comfort is this? Why is God questioning the reason for Cain’s despondency? Good rejected him and his offering! Is there anything more upsetting than being rejected by God? The source of Cain’s depression is plainly obvious. Instead of God accepting his offering, it was rejected. To exacerbate the sting of rejection – God accepted the offering of his younger brother. What is the meaning of God’s words to Cain – why are you despondent and why are you crestfallen?
A second question. After God inquires about the reason for Cain’s despondency, He adds: “Behold, if you improve you will ascend.” What is the relevance of this point? Cain was smarting about the rejection of the past – when God rejected him and his offering – the future is irrelevant to Cain’s despondency. God’s comfort seems to be addressing a different subject. Cain was depressed about what happened, and God comforted him about something else entirely – that in the future he can do better. How do we understand God’s seemingly off-topic response to Cain’s morose melancholy?
The answer to these questions relate to the most important yet confounding question of our lives. God created us and placed us here to do something. What exactly that is is hard to pin down. On a general level – the answer to our life-mission is the Torah: We have to adhere to its rules, regulations, guidelines, instructions, directions with meticulous fastidiousness. But each one of us is unique and has a unique life-mission, different from every other person who has ever existed. That mission – the goals we must accomplish, the character traits we must fix, the flaws we must rectify, the shortcomings we need to remedy – relates to our particular Soul and its roots and origin. Every Soul emanates from a different aspect of the original Soul of Adam and was entrusted with a different aspect of the mission of humanity. We are each responsible for our part – and we are flying blind. We arrive in this world with absolutely no clarity in this matter. We have no road-map to follow, no prophetic guide to ask, no clairvoyant gurus who can provide us with reliable instruction. How do we identify our life-mission? Our life-mission is an undiscoverable, impenetrable, indecipherable black box; a riddle wrapped in a mystery, hiding inside an enigma.
To further aggravate our problem, we are predisposed to avoid acknowledging – and certainly dwelling on – our flaws and shortcomings. We seem to have an intractable aversion to consider the fact that we have faults. The notion of our imperfection gnaws at us. We lash out defensively at the very notion that we are imperfect. We are sent here to fix our flaws. That is a critical element of every person’s life-mission, and knowing what you need to fix is indispensably vital for designing your life. Without it, how do you know what you need to do, what you need to work on, what you need to fix? Yet this critical piece of information is hidden by default – when you arrive in this world you are totally ignorant of it, the roots of the tree are hidden – and merely thinking about it causes you pain. For someone serious about fulfilling their life-mission, knowing what you need to do is gold. Once you know you have a plan – a roadmap – for what you need to do. But like gold, you start off with nothing, it’s notoriously hard to find, and to find any of it, you will need to dig beneath the surface. The gold that we covet is buried deep within us, under a thick substrate of biases that prevent us from seeing our flaws. Consequently, we are blind to our flaws and ignorant of our mission.
How exactly do you find out what your life-mission is? How do you find what you need to fix? How do you discover the nature of the roots of your tree, buried so deeply beneath the surface? You may need to resort to creative and unorthodox methods. If you cannot access them directly, perhaps you can access them via indirect means. The great Rabbi Yisrael Salanter offered a counterintuitive method based upon the verse in Psalms: “When the enemies ascend upon me, my ear shall listen.” Your enemies can serve as valuable intel for your life-mission. They will tell you things that your friends won’t. When your enemies ascend, your ear shall listen. When enemies talk about you, you ought to listen carefully – they may be proffering you gold.
The roots of our tree may be obscured from us. But other people don’t have as hard of a time to identify our flaws. Our friends though may hesitate to tell you. We get defensive and antagonistic when people enumerate our flaws. Friends don’t want to upset us, and they may withhold them from us. Plus, friends tend to see us in a positive light and tend to focus on our qualities. They may not be assembling a catalog of our flaws. Enemies may be invaluable for us. They are always on the lookout for our flaws. And they want to rankle us. Enemies are an overflowing goldmine. When enemies talk about you, you are best advised to listen very carefully to what they have to say. They may be bestowing the cherished – golden – information that you need to know if you are desirous of actually fulfilling your life-mission.
What about failure? Acknowledging our failure is as difficult as acknowledging our flaws. It pains us. When we fail we tend to pin the blame on others – to blame God, to blame our parents, to blame our therapists, to blame the government, to blame the weather, to blame everyone but ourselves. But the truth is that failure is also a small window into that black box, a peek into those elusive roots. Failure may be indicative of a flaw that we must fix. Thus, truly understanding how and why we failed provides a path to discover what we need to do in our lives.
This is what God was telling Cain. Unlike Abel, your offering was rejected. It was rejected because it was subpar – it was from the inferior fruits, it was not with a high degree of self-dedication. God said to him: “Why are you distressed and why are you crestfallen?” There is no reason to be dejected. Your rejection was a priceless hunk of gold. You are now empowered to know what you need to work on. Now you know what you need to improve – “Behold, if you improve you will ascend.” God’s rejection of Cain’s offering was a little peek behind the curtains, beneath the surface, into that maddening black box. God’s rejection of his offering was a great gift, a reason to celebrate, a beam of light illuminating the abyss of uncertainty. With his rejection, Cain was given a window into what he needs to do to fulfill his life-mission. He was rejected because of his subpar offering; to fix it he must be more generous, more dedicated, with a higher degree of devotion and self-sacrifice. If you improve you will ascend. You now know what you need to do to ascend, to rectify your flaws, to perfect yourself, and to realize your potential.
That was God’s message to Cain. Instead of blaming God or your brother, look inwardly. Realize that this episode can be existentially beneficial – you were given gold – you now know what you need to perfect. With this attitude there is no reason to be despondent, this is not a cause to be crestfallen, you know your life-mission, you know what you need to improve in order to ascend.
Cain was rejected by God. There is no greater form of rejection. It plunged him into an existential depression. The whole world was a dark, cold, menacing, abyss. God was not desirous of him. God chose his brother and rejected him. But Cain misread the situation. God revealed to him that he was not irredeemably rejected. There was nothing inhibiting Cain from being completely embraced by God. God was equally desirous of him as He was of Abel. Cain had a path to ascend, he just needed to fix, to tweak, to upgrade, to improve. That revelation is a reason to rejoice exuberantly, not to be sullen and despondent. Flaws are fixable. Identifying the flaws that need to be fixed is half of the work.
God revealed to Cain that his rejection – is failure – was an outside window into what lurks within, and for us it is a total reframe on failure. When we fail, we – like Cain – instinctively look for external culprits to blame. Failure is depressing. It deflates us. It causes anger and dejection. We may wonder why it is so unfair? What does God hate us?
God Himself showed Cain a different way to process failure. Instead of looking for others to blame; instead of lapsing into a bout of melancholy and depression; instead of being grumpy, cantankerous, and crestfallen, realize that you have uncovered some gold. The gold may be encrusted with a painful layer of shame, but it is to be preserved and cherished. We need to discover what we need to fix. It is absolutely imperative that we identify the flaws that we need to remedy. Absent that knowledge, we are totally handicapped in our efforts to achieve our life-mission. How do we find out that precious data? How do we access those subterranean roots? If we are gifted and brave enough to burrow deep down into the depths of our innards, we can find out directly. But it’s much easier to be attuned to the variety of ways that the gold sometimes sneaks up to the surface. We must train ourselves to perk up and listen very carefully when our enemies speak about us. When we fail we are strongly advised to not follow Cain’s playbook. Instead of responding with anger, instead of looking for others to blame, instead of lashing out, instead of falling into depression, we can reverse engineer our failure to discover what flaws within us prevented us from succeeding. It’s not the external factors: It’s not Abel’s fault; it’s certainly not God’s fault. If we improve we will ascend. With this attitude, dead-ends are part of the roadmap. Failure can reveal what is happening underneath our labyrinthine layers, and with what we discover we can design our life-mission. Failure yields precious, irreplaceable gold.