The World Says You're a Jew. Now What?
7 min read
6 min read
6 min read
One Hebrew word is the key to Steinbeck's novel, and to escaping our family's past.
In anticipation of Netflix’s 7-part East of Eden, I reread John Steinbeck’s classic novel, a modern epic loosely based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Even the title comes from Genesis: after killing his brother, Cain “dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden” (Genesis 4:16).
The book carries a powerful message that is surprisingly Jewish, and it turns on a single Hebrew word. Here’s what you need to know, with no spoilers:
Set in California’s Salinas Valley, where Steinbeck grew up, the book follows two generations of the Trask family from the American Civil War to World War I. Like Genesis, it is a story about fathers who favor one son over another, and the brothers who pay the price. In each generation a father’s love is unevenly given, and the pattern of Cain and Abel begins again. Steinbeck even gives each pair of brothers the initials C and A: Charles and Adam, then Cal and Aron.
Adam Trask, the book’s central figure, who bridges the family’s two generations, inherits his father’s fortune and his brother’s resentment. He moves west with his beautiful, cruel wife Cathy and raises twin sons, Cal and Aron, with the help of Lee, his Chinese-American servant, who becomes the book’s moral center.
One of the questions the book explores is also a major theme of the family narratives of the Torah: can we break the chain of family dynamics, or are we inevitably trapped by them? Genesis asks it again and again, suggesting it is one of the core questions in each of our lives. After Cain and Abel come Isaac and Ishmael, then Jacob and Esau. Finally come Joseph and his brothers. Jacob loves Joseph best and gives him a coat of many colors, and his jealous brothers nearly kill him.
The story of Genesis is one of the Jewish people overcoming sibling rivalry to form a cohesive nation. Isaac and Ishmael bury their father together. Esau runs to embrace Jacob. And Joseph forgives the brothers who sold him into slavery: “You intended me harm, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20). The chain of intergenerational dysfunction can be broken. Can the Trask family do the same?
Steinbeck wrote East of Eden for his own two small sons, who were living with their mother after a bitter divorce. Woven into the plot is a way out of the biblical trap, for them and for all of us. It comes from a close reading of a single verse, and Steinbeck gives it to Lee, the Chinese-American servant.
Midway through the novel, Adam listens as his neighbor, Samuel Hamilton, reads the story of Cain and Abel aloud. God accepts Abel’s offering and rejects Cain’s. Then, before Cain kills his brother, God warns him that “sin lies at the door… and you shall rule over him [i.e. over sin]” (in Hebrew, ve-atah timshol bo; Genesis 4:7). Was it inevitable that Cain would be overcome by sin and murder Abel?
Lee is so troubled by the verse that he brings it “a learned rabbi” and spends two years studying Hebrew. What they find is a discrepancy in how one word, which Steinbeck spells timshel, has been understood. The King James Bible renders it “thou shalt,” a future-promise of triumph over sin. The American Standard Version renders it “do thou,” a command to defeat sin. But the literal Hebrew, Lee insists, means “thou mayest”: a choice.
“It might be the most important word in the world,” Lee says. “That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’”
In reality, Steinbeck’s Hebrew was not perfect and scholars generally agree that grammar alone cannot settle the ambiguous meaning of the verse. However, in interpreting the verse as “thou mayest,” Steinbeck was on firm ground with rabbinic interpretation and how Jewish tradition has understood this story for over a thousand years. Mankind is given free will and the choice to be righteous or evil is in his hands.
The Talmud (Kiddushin 30b) teaches that God said, “I created the evil inclination, and I created Torah as its antidote.” It reads the end of our verse as a promise of free will: “if you wish, you shall rule over it.” Rashi, the great 11th-century commentator, sums it up in four Hebrew words: im tirtzeh titgaber alav, “if you want, you will overcome it.”
We all struggle with the family legacy we are born into -- seemingly a divine sentence beyond our control. Steinbeck’s message, and Judaism’s, is that we are not bound to repeat the mistakes of our parents and can choose a different path. Whatever family story we were born into, we are not sentenced by it.
Lee carries the moral heart of East of Eden and its biggest idea, one Steinbeck took from the Bible: timshol. Thou mayest. The choice is yours.
