Big Heart: Tears of Angels: Part One: Marc Gafni

Blessings and open heart to you holy friends.

I want to share this deep teaching from the inside of the inside with you in several parts, maybe seven or eight different installments.

May it re-open all of our hearts, for who among us has not closed our heart to stop the pain.

Part One: The Angels Cry for Us:

What stands in the way of us becoming great lovers? The blurring of perception. If we can refocus our vision from its blurred state we will become lovers. But what is it that so blurs perception. And what does the mystic do to refocus? He seeks to follow the biography of the love word — ra’ah — perception — through one more episode.

This time our search takes us to the waning years and eye sight of Isaac, son of Abraham. The text tells us, “Isaac was old and he could not see.” See — ra’ah — our code word of perception. Now the first question the biblical myth reader will ask herself is: Who cares?!

So Isaac has an eyesight problem. Let him get glasses! Why should Isaac’s vision in old age matter? Is this information I need to know? Biblical Midrash, or commentary, suggests a strange but evocative answer to these questions. The reason Isaac’s eyesight went bad is that, in his youth, his father attempted to sacrifice him to God. In the last second, his father pulled back and offered a ram in his stead. Not your cheerful father son camping trip. And certainly not the kind of male bonding we would prescribe (or embrace) today. Isaac, suggests the text in its mythic manner, felt himself a sacrifice on the altar of his father’s spiritual ambition. Yes, Abraham loved Isaac, but he loved God more.

Tears of Angels

Strangely enough, in the midst of this very searing trauma, the one thing Isaac does not do is cry. Midrash {Hebrew wisdom tradition} fills in this strange gap by later saying, “When Isaac was laid out on the slab of rock about to be killed by his father, tears of angels fell into his eyes.” When the text tells us of Isaac’s bad sight in his old age, commentator Rashi points to this earlier event: the tears of angels ruined his vision. Vision in this case means perception, as it does throughout the book of Genesis. When Isaac got old, his perception was blurred because his eyes were still brimming with these mysterious angelic tears.

Before we talk about Isaac’s perception and what on earth was so critical for him to be perceiving at the end of his life, let’s spend a moment pondering the very notion of the tears of angels. Tears of angels fall into Isaac’s eyes when he is a child. What might that mean? When we recall that Isaac does not cry during the entire course of his trauma, it begins to become clear. Angels cry for us when we are unable to cry our own tears. When the pain becomes so overwhelming that we are afraid that if we let the tears fall they will drown us, we do not let ourselves cry. But the universe demands some recognition of the pain. It cannot pass without an acknowledgment. And so, the angels cry for us.

marc gafni
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