הבל

Abel is the first victim of violence between brothers, and the first blood that cried out from the ground. The second son of Adam and Eve, a shepherd, he brought to God from the firstborn of his flock and from their fat, from the choicest, and his offering was accepted. And precisely for this good his brother envied him and killed him, in a deed that opened the chain of blood of human history.

The Torah tells almost nothing of him, no speech and no deed, only that he brought from the best and was murdered. His very name, 'Hevel,' is a word of nothingness, of a passing breath, as if hinting at a life cut off before its time, before it could say its word.

Yet his blood was not silent. 'The voice of your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground' (Genesis 4:10), and the Sages expounded 'blood' in the plural, his blood and the blood of his unborn offspring. Every murder, the Torah teaches, does not slay one person but whole worlds that could have come from him.

What do we learn from him? That the innocent victim is not forgotten, and that his blood 'cries out from the ground' until justice is done. Abel teaches the infinite value of every life cut short, 'your brother's blood,' his and his generations', and that the tradition does not pass over innocent blood in silence, but carries its cry forever.