What do the first murder in a lonely field, a civilization erased by a flood, and a family torn by sibling betrayal all have in common? We often treat these as separate episodes of biblical drama, but from Cain to Yosef, they are symptoms of a single underlying fault line—one that begins quietly, long before blood is spilled or social order collapses.

Envy.

The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks often observed that the Torah’s great moral failures follow a chillingly predictable pattern. Cain was not merely angry; he was embittered by a world in which another’s offering was accepted while his own seemed overlooked. The fracture began not in his hands, but in his heart—in the silent comparison that turned disappointment into resentment. Likewise, the generation of the Flood met its fate because of chamas. Though often translated as “violence,” the Sages emphasize a subtler meaning: the petty, repeated taking of items so small they fell below the value of a perutah—the smallest coin—and were therefore legally unprosecutable.

This “legal” immorality reveals something unsettling for our own time. Societal collapse rarely begins with dramatic,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)