The Torah of Tears

^{10 Av 5779 | August 11, 2019}

Rabbi Tali Adler

Class of 2018

Most people have a story of the first time they saw someone they thought was immune to tears break down and cry. The main character in the story varies: sometimes it is a parent, other times a grandparent, a rabbi, a teacher, or a coach. Sometimes the setting is as mundane as a particularly difficult fight, other times as devastating as a funeral. But while these details vary, the emotional valence of the moment usually stays the same. In relating the story, people consistently describe the same feelings: helplessness at being unable to do or say anything to stop the tears, and fear at seeing someone we had thought of as eternally strong in a moment of devastating pain.

Sometimes, though, the feelings are different. Sometimes, when time has passed and the experience has had time to settle, we begin to feel gratitude at having been allowed to see this person at their most human and vulnerable. And sometimes, when the crier is particularly important to us, we feel regret at never having been allowed to see them cry before. Sometimes, upon reflection, we realize that in seeing this person cry, we have learned something about how to cry ourselves.

Eikhah Rabbah, the most comprehensive compilation of midrash on Lamentations, records story upon story of tears: those of humanity, those of angels, and those of God. In a story that echoes the human experience of seeing a parent cry for the first time, Eikhah Rabbah describes the angels’ reaction to God’s tears at the Temple’s destruction:

Like many children who see their parents cry for the first time, Metatron, the archangel, first tries to try to stop God’s tears. Metatron begs to be allowed to cry in God’s place. The pain of crying is more bearable than the horror and helplessness at seeing God cry. God, however, rejects Metatron’s request and demands to be allowed to cry. Tears, God teaches Metatron, are sometimes necessary. Sometimes even God—perhaps sometimes especially God, who witnesses, and perhaps is responsible for, all the pain of the world—needs to cry.

While in this story it is God who teaches about the importance of tears as the angels look on, Eikhah Rabbah tells another story about God crying in which God learns from humanity about how to cry. In this story, God looks on at the devastation of the Temple and, as the Jewish people are led into exile, asks the angels how human kings behave when people they love die. The angels answer, describing how human beings mourn: they deck the doors in sackcloth, they overturn the beds, they rip their clothing, they sit silently and alone. At each answer, God replies: “I will do so as well.” Finally, God asks once more:

In this story the dynamics are reversed. Rather than presenting a God who knows how to mourn and angels who are overwhelmed by the sight of God’s tears, this story presents a God who is devastated but needs examples of human mourning in order to understand what to do with God’s own grief. Whereas before God modeled crying to lesser beings, here God must learn how to cry from lesser beings—from human beings, who habitually experience sorrow. In this story, knowledge of someone else’s tears is not overwhelming. Instead, that knowledge is a welcome gift, teaching others—in this case, God—the power that tears can have for mourners.

These stories present us with two ways of responding to someone else’s tears. In the first, like many people who see their heroes cry, the angels respond with terror and paralysis, and God must insist on His own right to cry. The second story, however, insists that other people’s tears do not always have to be frightening, and can be something to learn from. The “how” of mourning is not intuitive. Like so many other human activities, to do it well, we need someone to model it for us first. In a world like ours in which tears are so often considered a sign of weakness, it can be difficult to find a robust model of how to mourn. Without such a model, we become trapped, unable to truly feel our pain, to vent it in tears—but equally unable to avoid it. In such a world, when those we love and respect allow us to see them cry, they are actually giving us a gift, a lesson in how to move through grief when we inevitably meet it ourselves.

Tisha B’Av, in its best form, is a day when we do not need to be afraid of tears. It is a day when parents teach their children how to cry, how to expose and embrace their pain. On Tisha B’Av, a day of communal mourning, we cry openly because we believe that in the face of a world filled with pain, knowledge of how to cry—the Torah of tears—is a gift that human beings need to survive.

May we be brave enough this Tisha B’Av to allow our tears to flow without shame. May we be brave enough to learn—and to teach—how to cry.