c. 2003 Religion News Service

MOBILE, Ala. _ The images are inescapable.

Bombs exploding in Baghdad. Anti-aircraft fire lighting up the night sky. Tanks trekking across the Iraqi desert.

When children ask about contemporary conflict, Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso turns to a story that’s thousands of years old.

It’s a tale of two brothers, Cain and Abel, recorded in the Book of Genesis. Cain, the elder, worked the soil, while his younger brother tended to the family’s flock. When God looked with greater favor upon Abel’s offering, Cain grew angry and killed his brother.

“I was always fascinated with the Cain and Abel story,” said Sasso, an award-winning children’s author and rabbi at Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis. Citing it as the “first time violence enters the world,” Sasso said she was captivated by what the story included and omitted.

“I was fascinated with trying to imagine what a world would be like without violence,” she said. “Also, it intrigued me to try to understand Cain.”

A few years ago, Sasso sought to do just that as she began to write “Cain & Abel: Finding the Fruits of Peace.”

To write a children’s book that would retell the ancient story, Sasso said she had to “try on Cain’s shoes.”

“If you do that,” she said, you “find they fit all too comfortably.”

Sasso said she was motivated to write the book, which was published in 2001, because school shootings and street violence had become so common.

“I realized that children were seeing violence all around them,” she said, and needed an opportunity to discuss it.

As U.S.-led forces continue their military disarmament of Iraq, Sasso believes parents need to discuss the events with their children.

“I think it’s important to recognize that talking about violence is not going to increase children’s fears,” she said. “Allowing children to keep the feelings of fear and concern about war and violence to themselves is a lot more damaging. Children have questions. They can’t avoid hearing about what’s happening in our world.”

The conversations are important, Sasso said, because what children are “imagining and thinking is far more frightening than what is really happening.”

Children also need to know what’s being done to keep them safe, Sasso said.

“You can’t promise them complete safety,” Sasso said. But parents can offer kids some sense of security by letting them know, for example, that “Iraq is not next door.”

Rabbi Steven Silberman of Mobile’s Congregation Ahavas Chesed said it’s critical for parents to talk to their children about the war.

“I think they will overhear references to warfare throughout the world, and especially in the Persian Gulf,” Silberman said. “If adults pretend that nothing bad is happening, then _ obviously depending on the age of the children _ I think children will be learning just to doubt certain adults.”

Candace Spitzer, minister to children and families at Dauphin Way United Methodist Church in Mobile, said that while it’s crucial to discuss current events with children, it’s also important not to inundate them with reports about the war.

Parents, Spitzer said, should simply ask their children: “What did you hear today and what do you feel about it?”

“Children will be very forthcoming,” Spitzer said.

As important as it is to discuss current events with children, Sasso also emphasized the significance of examining some of the issues beyond the news.

The story of Cain and Abel, Sasso said, is helpful in facilitating that conversation. In light of the story, Sasso said parents might ask their children: “What do you do when life treats you unfairly? … What do you do when you are so angry that your anger turns to hate?. … What are some ways we can imagine to act differently?”

When she reads the story with children, Sasso said she shows a picture of an irate, red-faced Cain and asks children if they’ve ever felt that way.

“Those feelings are very common among children, and among adults as well,” she said. “Here is an opportunity for them to tell someone about it.”

When discussing the current military conflict in Iraq, Sasso said parents should offer their own perspectives as to whether they believe the United States’ invasion was just. While many believe that United States and British intervention was necessary, Sasso said parents can tell their children that in most situations they will encounter, “there are other ways to solve problems.”

Still, Spitzer said that some biblical stories show “righteous indignation.” She cited the Gospel account of Jesus overturning the tables of the temple money changers, men who sometimes cheated when helping in the sale of sacrificial animals. Jesus disrupted their activities, according to the Gospel of Matthew, and told the money changers: “It is written, `My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of robbers.”

“It was the right thing to do,” Spitzer said of Jesus’ actions, “because what they were doing was so wrong.”

At the close of Sasso’s telling of Cain and Abel’s story, she recalls an ancient teaching included in the “Midrash Tanhuma,” a collection of commentary on the Torah.

“In the beginning,” the teaching goes, “God created each tree so that it could yield many different kinds of fruit. Then Cain killed his brother, Abel, and the trees went into mourning. From then on each tree would yield just one kind of fruit. Only in the world to come will the trees return to their full fruitfulness.”

DEA END CAMPBELL