On Crying and Catharsis

^{6 Tevet 5776 | December 18, 2015}

Parshat Vayigash

Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Director of Spiritual Development

Advanced Kollel: Executive Ordination Track Class of 2018

Parshat Vayigash is high drama. In it, the epic Yosef narrative reaches fever pitch. Yehudah begs Yosef not to hold Binyamin captive lest it kill their father. Yosef, unable to contain himself any longer, reveals his true identity and stuns his brothers into silence:

So Yosef continues to speak, absolving the brothers of their crime of selling him so many years prior, for it was God's work that they were doing. And he beckons them to quickly bring their father down to Egypt where he, and they, may reside and be cared for through the remaining years of famine. Finally, words wear thin, tears well up, and Yosef reaches out for an embrace.

Through cathartic cries and kisses, the chasm of alienation, resentment, and embarrassment is bridged, and the brothers find their way toward speech.

The next big moment of reunion is equally dramatic. With God's sanction, a huge entourage of Yaacov's entire family and all of their belongings, head to Egypt. Decades separated, with Yosef presumed dead, father and son finally meet again when Yaacov arrives in Goshen. The excitement leading up to this moment is palpable.

Tears, hugs, intense and overwhelming emotion characterize the moment. Father and son fall into one another's embrace and cry and then cry some more. The inconceivable has come to pass.

Intuitive and reciprocal as this peak emotional experience seems to be, commentators with a fine ear for language read it quite differently. Says Rashi:

Noting the singular form of the verbs used in Bereishit 46:29--וַיִּפֹּל (he fell) and וַיֵּבְךּ (he wept)--the midrash argues that only one party disintegrated emotionally and wept abundantly, Yosef. As for Yaacov, he was busy dutifully reciting the Shema. Twenty two years of mourning and suffering for this beloved son, and he could not shed a tear upon seeing him. What a shocking and troubling demonstration of emotional paralysis.

What was the nature of this numbness? Perhaps this was the response of a traumatized, scarred heart crusted over from so much pain and disappointment, no longer able to feel with ease. Perhaps it was a calculated act of restraint by a father whose demonstrations of affection for this child got him into trouble before. Much chassidic and mystical thought suggests otherwise. The recitation of the Shema, on this view, was a conscious act of sublimation on Yaacov's part. Lest he be carried away by overpowering love for his son, he piously submitted to God, affirming that the devotion of his heart--"כל לבבו"--belonged on high and not to his son of flesh and blood. The MaHaRaL, Rabbi Yehudah Loew ben Betzalel, articulates this well:

The Kotzker Rebbe and the Gerrer Rebbe agree. To be pious is to privilege one's relationship with God--actively, even forcefully--above one's relationship with any human being, no matter how intensely and passionately one is bound to them. Yaacov, on this model, becomes another Avraham, another "knight of faith," sacrificing filial relationships on the altar of the divine. The moment of reunion is nothing short of akeidat Yosef (the binding of Yosef).

One akeida, though, seems more than enough for one tradition to contend with. The sublimation of human love to divine love unfortunately led and continues to lead to so much heartbreak and so much violence. Rather than strip our spiritual teachers of tears, and deny them human attachments, it would seem that a good cry and a tight connection to others is precisely what we need to ground compassion and balanced righteousness.

Perhaps Yaacov's dry eyes ought not be viewed as emblems of stoic sublimation, but rather as indicators of emotional exhaustion. Perhaps Yaacov did not cry not because he wouldn't, but because he couldn't; because he had been crying for so long already. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (on Bereishit 46:29) lyrically suggests just that:

What a poignant counter-narrative is presented here. Yaacov did not cry because had spent his entire life crying. There were simply no more tears left to shed, having spent so many years weeping over his unbearable loss. The shocking reunion with his son was for him the blessed culmination of a treacherous emotional process that had run him dry. (The Shema was not a denial of emotion but an expression of gratitude.) For Yosef, though, whose life of luxury in Egypt distracted him from his own traumatic break from his family, the reunion marked just the beginning. It was the rupture that he needed to awaken fully to his emotional recovery. The tears flowed because they had been stymied until now.

To be fair, the gate of tears opened to Yosef from the moment that he spotted his estranged brothers in Egypt (see Bereishit 42:24) and would continue through the death of Yaacov (see Bereishit 50:17). Over and over again, eight times in all, we hear of the bechi, the weeping, of Yosef. All that pent-up pain of 22 years finally found release, and he simply could not stop crying. His encounter with his father, climactic as it was, was one very large part of this catharsis.

The story of Yosef's tears and Yaacov's dry eyes, then, is not a story of the sacrifice of emotions per se, but is rather a meditation on the many pathways people take to cope with and to heal from pain.