What could be worse than when a child kills his parents? And when the parents are more than just names in a newspaper, even if you had no personal connection with them, the horror of the situation is haunting. The news about Rob Reiner, a familiar face since All in the Family, and whose career as both actor and director, along with his seemingly perfect political activism, made him a model of a successful American citizen. Yet, there was obviously an underside to his success, a son with apparently untreatable addiction and mental illness problems.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I was on the board of a national non-profit with an individual with whom I really did not get along, although our contact was limited. I later learned that, when he was away at college, his parents were murdered in their home by a man hired by his two older brothers. It made me look at him with different eyes, and gave me so much sympathy for him, wondering how he could live with that in his past, and excusing his traits which kept us from being friends.

I won’t identify him, but the Reiner killings brought me right back to these earlier ones. And to stoies like that of the Menendez brothers, which 35 years after the crime continue to make the news now and again.

I said yesterday that I was going to write about slavery today, but I will postpone that once again. I am thinking about families and murder.

I guess it explains why the bible starts as it does. There is creation, there is the discovery that all will not be paradise, and immediately there is one brother murdering another. To quote (in a different context) Rabbi Hillel……”All the rest is commentary.”

Patricide has a long history, of course, through royal families throughout the world, where in a sense, for a long time, it was normalized. Maybe we should not be shocked when it happens today, but rather be shocked that it doesn’t happen more often.

So, patricide and fratricide and whatever you call murder of a spouse, are more common than we would like them to be. And often, while they are crimes that show families which have been torn apart, they also show family binding. The Menendez brothers, the two brothers of my former associate, men not working alone, but in tandem. I am often reminded of Jules Feiffer’s play, Little Murders. I should really look at it again, because I don’t remember the plot at all. I know it was abput family dysfunction and that, at the end, the warring father and son find reconciliation, with the mother/wife remarking how nice it is to have the family together again, as her son and husband sit at adjoining windows in their New York City apartment having the time of their lives shooting at random passers-by below. And it appears that, just yesterday, the horrific murders in Sydney were carried out by a father and son working in tandem.

Finally, my appreciation to William Shakespeare for giving me today’s title. It comes from Hamlet of course. I forget, but maybe you remember. Any intra-family murders in that play?