The God Who Cries (Rosh Hashanah II 5785)
The God Who Cries
When did we start crying in private?
When we were infants, you and I, we cried out because we wanted something. We cried out on the expectation that a caregiver would hear us and respond to our cries. We cried to be held and cared for. Crying out was intended to draw someone near to us.
For most of us, thank God, care was closeby. It is a heartbreaking fact of the human condition that infants without caregivers will stop crying. Crying out is about drawing near.
Moses cries out as an infant in a basket, and is found by a princess who will become his adoptive mother. She names him Moshe from Mashah, to draw out. He cries; she draws him near.
Even more precisely, to “draw close” in Hebrew is karav - the same root as the word korban, a sacrifice in the Temple. The Temple service was about drawing closer to God. It is no wonder, then, that the service of the Temple could be replaced with the service of the heart.
When grew a little from our infanthood, we learned to cry because we were sad. We would graze our knees, or be surprised by a loud sound, or we lost something or - God forbid - someone, and we cried tears. Others were drawn to us by our tears: parents and carers, or another adult nearby, or even our childhood friends. They would reach out to touch us. Tears were a social glue. The tears said: “I am sad and I need someone to recognise that I am sad.” The arms of the other said: “I see that you are sad. I recognise you. I am here for you.”
But it is not, according to our tradition, only humans who cry tears of sadness. Eikhah Rabbah (Pet. 24), classical midrash on the Book of Lamentations, speaks of God crying in the wake of the destruction of the Temple.
At that time, the Holy Blessed One cries, and says:
"?אוֹי לִי! מֶה עָשִׂיתִי Woe to Me! What have I done? I brought My shekhinah, my dwelling-presence, down for the sake of Israel - and now they have sinned, and I have returned to My original place. Chas v’shalom, I will become a source of laughter and mockery to the Nations and the Peoples.”
God has lost something in this story. God has made Godself vulnerable in relationship with Israel, and been betrayed, and had to retreat in some way from that drawing-close-relationship. And God’s very pride and reputation are at stake.
It is all very human-coded language. Have we not all been in positions where we have made ourselves vulnerable, exposed, raw, and found ourselves in tears?
Mourning and betrayal and hurt pride are all such complex reasons for crying, when compared with the crying out of the infant. And yet, when we grew up, you and I, and our reasons for crying became more complicated, we also learned to feel ashamed of our tears. Perhaps we were told “big kids don’t cry”, or its insidious cousin, “boys don’t cry”. We grew up, and we put away our toys, and we put away our tears, too. Somewhere along the way, we started crying in private.
But the private realm was not the world in which we cried by nature. This was learned behaviour; it was taught to us.
Because somewhere along the way, our society forgot that tears are social glue. In the words of a scholar of crying - I know, I am also amazed that it exists - Professor Ad Vingerhoets says: “Crying is a social trigger for empathy - a communication system that signals to others ‘I need your help and support’.”
Why would we cry in private if the reason we cry is to be recognised and supported and drawn close?
The story in Eikhah Rabbah of God crying at the destruction of the Temple continues with the angel Metatron, the celestial scribe. Metatron came before the Holy One and fell upon his face. He said to the crying God before him: “Ribbono shel Olam, Master of the Universe - I will cry and you will not cry.”
I, Metatron, will cry for You, so that You don’t have to cry.
It is the wrong answer. Metatron, being an angel, does not understand what God understands and what you and I understand: we cannot do the crying for one another. We cannot simply hand off grief and hopelessness and allow someone else to feel it for us. We can share it - sharing it is the point of crying, after all - but we cannot transfer it.
The Holy One responds to Metatron by saying: “If you don’t let me cry now, then I will go to a place where you cannot enter, and I will cry there.”
God’s response in this story is startlingly insightful about the human experience. God is saying: “I need to be able to cry. If you, Metatron, think you can simply take this need from Me, then I will have to cry in private.”
God, like us, was taught to cry in private. Why? Because of Metatron’s response to God’s tears. Tears are supposed to be about drawing close and expressing need, but when we fail to be that for one another - when we fail to make space for brokenness and understand the role of sharing heartbreak - we drive ourselves and one another into private chambers.
This story has been on my mind this year, because I think I have cried more in front of people this year than I have since childhood. I have seen tears from others that I have never been invited to see before. From the slowly-unfolding news of the massacre of October 7, to the returning of some hostages but not all of them, to the ongoing casualties and horrors of war. I will admit that I often have a hard time reading the Prayer for the Hostages, as important as it is, because it catches me somewhere in a bruised corner of my heart.
There is something important in being able to be bruised, to be a bit broken, and to be together in that.
In our story, God threatens to withdraw to privacy if Metatron cannot recognise the brokenness. But God being in God’s private chambers is not all bad news. The Baal Shem Tov famously teaches this in a story about the shofar. One of his students plans, one Rosh Hashanah, to concentrate on secret meanings and intentions for each blast of the shofar. But the student finds upon the day that his slip of paper is gone, and he cannot remember a single secret meaning. And so the student cries while he simply calls the notes, t’kiah, sh’varim t’ruah. And afterwards, the Baal Shem Tov tells him this:
The kings habitation has many chambers, and there are different keys for every lock - but the master key is the axe, which can open every lock. So it is with the shofar - the secret meanings and intentions are the keys, but the master key is the broken heart. When a heart is broken, a person can enter into all the secret places of God’s inner chambers.
We can be in those hidden chambers with the brokenhearted God when we, too, are brokenhearted. In fact, Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira says: not only can we be there with God, we must be there with God. He writes:
The pain and the grief that a person suffers over himself, alone, in isolation, this can shatter a person... But the crying that a person does together with the Holy Blessed One - this makes a person strong. He cries, and he is made strong.
If anyone would understand this, it would be Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira. He taught his beautiful Torah in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he ran a secret synagogue, arranged weddings, and eventually hid his teachings in a milk canister to be found after the war (the famous Ringelblum Archives). He understood this. Togetherness is vital. When we need to cry, then we have the opportunity to cry with God, to cry in togetherness, and to be made stronger for it.
God knows this, too. Later in that Midrash, God says: “Go and call Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses from their graves, שֶׁהֵם יוֹדְעִים לִבְכּוֹת, because they know how to cry.”
And that, I think, is the heart of it all.
To be able to cry properly means to be with people who know to hold us when we cry. For God, that was Abraham, who mourned even S’dom and G’morrah, and Isaac, whose father held a knife to him, and Jacob, whose tears for his child made his soul sink into the depths, and Moses, who was drawn out of the Nile as a crying infant.
We need to be able to be brokenhearted to understand, to be there for, to hold the brokenhearted. We break together and we heal together.
There is good news. I know it is sad to talk about tears. But the good news is that it’s simple. To be a community that cries together, and cries well together, when tears are needed - that allows ourselves to share in brokenness and heal together - just means showing up.
Let us cry happy tears together as well as sad ones. Let’s laugh together. Come to the B’nei Mitzvah of children you don’t know, because if one comes to enough of them, one starts to recognise the children. Show up for the celebrations and the sadness. Go to the funerals and the shivas and the weddings and the baby blessings. Say “amen” to the Mourner’s Kaddish every week and then ask: who are you saying kaddish for today?
Speaking of “amen”. My teacher Rabbi Sharon Brous published a book this year she called “the Amen Effect”, which has at its heart a very simple premise: that when we say amen to one another, what we are really saying is yes, me too, I see you, I am here with you in this.
So say amen, and yashar koach, and mazal tov, and who are you saying kaddish for today. Show up. Because the best way to cry together is to laugh together, too; it’s to pray together and sing together, and be here and ready when we need to catch or be caught.
The best way to see one another when in need and in pain is to see one another regularly, here, in this room. It is to know enough about the people here to know when they are missing. It is to say “amen” constantly: “amen” to your kaddish, “amen” to your happiness, “amen” to your tears and your laughter and to everything between.
In fact, it is taught multiple times in the Talmud that the reward for someone who says “amen” to a blessing is even greater than the reward for one who says the blessing. To be a witness to someone’s blessing and joy, or their pain and brokenness, is sacred. It is one of the most sacred things we can do.
And, as Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira taught us from the place of utmost darkness, it makes us all stronger.
I hope this is a year with far less need for tears. I hope and pray that it is a year of reconciliation and peace, of sweetness and health. But if the tears need to be cried, dear community, I am grateful that I get to cry them with you. And I hope that you will be here, through laughter and tears, to say to one another, constantly and beautifully: Amen.
Shanah tovah.
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