In my darkest, angriest, and most betrayed moments, I keep coming back to this: a better world is possible.

I feel angry.
I feel afraid.
I feel frustrated.
I feel betrayed.

Yesterday, our country experienced a domestic terrorist attack on the Capital of the United States encouraged by the President of the United States.

I never imagined I would have to write a sentence like that in my life. It is heartbreaking.

The universe feels like it is full of chaos, unordered, full of swirling darkness. Perhaps this is what it was like at the beginning of creation. But we know that we are co-creators of our reality with God. We have been given free will to make choices about what we do in the face of that chaos.

I have been thinking a lot about Cain and Abel. These two brothers, ostensibly the only siblings in existence, the third and fourth humans on the planet. They had enough to eat, enough space, and something to do with their time and energy. What more could they want?

And yet, Cain becomes distressed and jealous. He sees what Abel has, a unique relationship with the Divine, and becomes overwhelmed. The Torah does not tell us why Cain’s offering was not accepted, we can only make guesses. Upon seeing that distress, God speaks to Cain and says (Bereshit 4:6-7):

וַיֹּאמֶר ה׳ אֶל־קָיִן לָמָּה חָרָה לָךְ וְלָמָּה נָפְלוּ פָנֶיךָ׃ הֲלוֹא אִם־תֵּיטִיב שְׂאֵת וְאִם לֹא תֵיטִיב לַפֶּתַח חַטָּאת רֹבֵץ וְאֵלֶיךָ תְּשׁוּקָתוֹ וְאַתָּה תִּמְשָׁל־בּוֹ׃

And the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you distressed, And why is your face fallen? Surely, if you do right, There is uplift. But if you do not do right, Sin couches at the door; Its urge is toward you, Yet you can be its master.”

This is a warning to Cain. Understand your distress but do not let it control you. If we were to unpack Cain’s unspoken feelings, we would see the overwhelming jealousy that appears on the surface, or, what Or HaChaim says is a feeling of superiority. These feelings overtook him and the result is that he murders his brother.

God is telling us, as humanity, that letting those negative feelings fester, allowing the pressure to build, and permitting it to take over is having “sin lying in wait at the door.” The urge is there, for all of us, but we can still do the right thing. We have a choice.

Cain chose to do the wrong thing.

Cain asks the question that echoes out throughout the ages, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The answer is yes.

What we saw yesterday is the manifestation of the Cain worldview. Selfishness and violence brought forth from lies and jealousy. Lies heard and willingly believed.

Cain had a choice. We all have a choice.

We are in the midst of darkness and chaos and we must choose a way forward.

A colleague of mine, Rabbi Emily Cohen, tweeted this yesterday:

“This week we’re at one of our lowest points. It’s horrifying and it seems like there’s no way out. But we know how the story ends. It ends with movement from narrowness into wandering and from there to the promise of a better future.

We’ve been here before. We can rise from it.”

This week’s Torah portion is Shemot, the beginning of the end of our time in Egypt. Mitzrayim, the ancient name for Egypt, one our rabbis understood to mean, “in the narrow place.” It is derived from the word צר, tzar, meaning narrow. Our portion begins with a Pharaoh who did not know or learn history.

We are deep in the dark and narrow place.

Once we left Egypt, at the foot of Mount Sinai, Moses left to receive the Torah. Soon, the people became afraid, not so unlike us, and desired idols.

In the Torah, the idol was a golden calf. We have made people, ideologies, and greed our idols. The risk is always there, crouching on the other side of the door. The pressure to lose faith is always there.

The fear, overwhelming and all-consuming, is the source of Cain’s jealousy, of the people’s desire to make an idol.

Aaron, the caretaker of the people, is approached to make this false god. And he too had to make a choice.

On the surface, Aaron acquiesced. He instructed them on the next steps and began the process. The commentators try and save him by telling us that he was stalling. Hoping and praying that Moses would come and save him. Rashi tells us that when Aaron says , as quoted by the Torah, “Tomorrow shall be a festival of the Lord” it is because “tomorrow and not today, for [Aaron] hoped that Moses might return before they would worship it [the calf].”

We are constantly looking for someone to save us. To rescue us from the decisions we make and the situations we choose to ignore.

There is no one coming to save us.

We have to take responsibility, not blame.
We have to make the right choices, not stall.
We have to seek justice, not revenge.
We have to raise up each other, not tear down.
We have to be honest with ourselves, not lie.

It is our responsibility to grasp hands and pull each other up. That is the task and it will not be easy.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs quoted this line from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel yesterday:

“O Lord, we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage. We must continue to remind ourselves that in a free society all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, all are responsible.”

Much of our country has spent the past year reflecting. We are not the lies we told ourselves.

We are a society in which Black, People of Color, and Indigenous people have to fight to exist. And when our country grappled with this over the summer, the police violently opposed them. When white terrorists attacked the Capital, there was no meaningful opposition. We have to own that truth about our country.

Our fight for justice is on trial, our kindness is being examined, our inhumanity is in sharp relief.

And yet, there is hope.

The universe was created from chaos.
Cain faced justice and humanity did survive.
We made it out of the narrow place to the promised land.

We can make it out of this time by facing it with honesty and integrity.

In early 2016, I wrote this for a sermon I gave, as I was interviewing for a rabbinic position, about another mass shooting:

“…we must recognize the complex world we live in and that there are no simple answers, but that there is always something we can do to help.

With love and knowledge, we can empower each other. We can share our visions of a world without violence, we can raise our voices and use our votes. With love and knowledge, we remind each other that there is hope. Hope that we can live in a better world.”

In my darkest, angriest, and most betrayed moments, I keep coming back to this: a better world is possible.

Hold that truth close, let it warm you in cold moments, let it soothe the aching pains, let it brighten you in these dark times. It may not always feel like enough, but it is nevertheless true.

There is work to be done. It is on all of us to do it.