Cain, Job, and Moses Walk Into A Bar
The Burden and Uplift of Loneliness From Genesis to Deuteronomy
“Surely, if you do right,
There is uplift (s’et)
But if you do not do right
Sin couches at the door;
Its urge is toward you,
Yet you can be its master.” (Genesis 4:7)
Job again took up (s’et) his theme and said… (Job 27:1)
Thereupon I said to you, “I cannot bear the burden (s’et) of you by myself. (Deuteronomy 1:9)
Throughout the Torah, Moses describes the people as a burden too heavy to bear. The word for load, s’et, has both a connotation of weight and strength. Bearing weights makes us strong. Strength is needed to bear the weight. When Job questions the justice of his plight, he is described as lifting it up, bearing it. Moses cannot bear the burden of the people, but Job who suffers excruciating physical pain and psychological torment shoulders it, anyways. The first time the word s’et appears in the Torah comes in the story of Cain and Abel. Cain, about to slay his brother out of envy, receives a divine warning. He is offered s’et, uplift, if he does the right thing. In fact, he does not do right and thus receives no s’et. How intriguing that s’et can be both a kind of reward (uplift) and an obligation (burden). In the case of Moses, the s’et is there but is too much. With Cain, the s’et is there only in potential, but is foregone.
To state the point as a leitmotif: Cain refuses the weight, Job questions the weight, and Moses shares the weight. The consequence of Moses’s recognition that the people are too burdensome is his decision to delegate power to the courts, to standardize legal decision making and move away from prophetic micro-managing. To save himself from the burden of people, Moses discovers management theory. But let us not forget the primal origins of s’et in the Cain and Abel story. The bureaucratic solution to coordination costs can’t quell the deeper challenges of the human condition: zero-sum competitions for status and dominance, the narcissism of small differences, fratricide. Moses’s ingenious solution to the administration of justice conceals the elephant in the room: injustice.
How heavy is the burden of leadership? How much uplift is there in choosing the right and the good? How heavy is Job’s question about divine justice? The answer to these questions is not quantifiable, but phenomenological. They concern conscience and expectations, not simply size. Thus, the technical solution to Moses’s challenge—setting up an organizational structure—doesn’t help at the level of substance. The magnitude of taking an unwilling and doubtful people to the Promised Land remains even after all the productivity hacks have been deployed. Likewise, Job’s friends can summon all the theological arguments to explain Job’s pain, but none of it helps Job.
In the existential sense, my burden cannot be unburdened for it is the burden of mineness, of being a self. But skillful accompaniment can make my burden easier to bear. Job’s friends fail to accompany him. Thus, his suffering becomes the suffering of loneliness and isolation, in addition to his sheer loss. Cain cannot bear the burden that comes from doing and choosing good, of being a moral agent, and thus reduces himself to impulse, to violence, to base animality. We might say that his envy is itself a symptom of a deeper loneliness. Comparison may be the thief of joy, but it is also the child of loneliness. If Job gives us an illustration of a man whose community abandons him when the going gets tough, Cain shows us the image of those who seek connection in all the wrong ways— “if God would just accept my sacrifice, if I could just get that one thing I covet I’d be fulfilled, right?” The idolatry of vanity metrics, the hedonic treadmill, the view that acquisition and accomplishment will make one whole, are downstream of loneliness. The burden of the self can lead us to isolation or its opposite, connection. Cain ostensibly wants out, but if we read him intertextually with Job, he also wants in, he just doesn’t have any help. He regards his brother as adversary rather than as friend. He is alone, though it is not good to be alone.
Moses is a righteous, humble prophet, hardly an envious murderer, but he, too, strikes a man in haste. He kills an Egyptian task master and is forced to flee. He, too, loses his cool, when descending the Mountain, when standing at the waters of Meriba before a bitter crowd. There is an element of Cain in Moses, as there is in all of us when we act in a fit of frenzy. Moses, it might be said, feels the pain of Job in his own condition of friendlessness. And Moses dies alone. Moses is no pariah. He wears no mark of Cain, but he is differentiated by his veil of light.
So everyone is lonely—Cain (perpetrator), Job (victim), Moses (leader)—and it’s burdensome? Yes. In fact, if we look closely we may see elements of perpetrator, victim, and leader in all three characters, with different inflection. But, Moses—and this is what makes for leadership—overcomes his loneliness, or accepts it, and changes it. He tells the people at the beginning of Deuteronomy that they were too much to bear. He speaks to them while saying it and he puts it in the past tense. The spiritual reason Moses finds a way through is that he stops seeking to feel unlonely. He stops requiring his people to “get him.” He understands the fundamental gap between leader and people, and between person and person, and he makes peace with it. He also finds accompaniment with God. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall fear no evil [loneliness].” The burden of the self not only becomes bearable but becomes a source of uplift when we stop assuming it should be otherwise. But what can give us that clarity, that shift? Sartre and Nietzsche would say that you can get it just by committing to it. But Moses offers a theological approach to the question: we are not alone. God is with us.
During these 9 days of Av, let us consider the loss of the Temple as a symptom of gossip, itself a symptom of loneliness and misplaced desire to bear the weight of the self. For the loneliness that compounds loneliness; for our inability to accept the mandate of our fundamental distinction, and our clinging to the idle chatter of Job’s “friends,” and the base reactivity of Cain, for this I weep.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins