Tears of Angels: Part Two: Marc Gafni
The way that deepening happens in Biblical myth study is almost always by posing a question. Sometimes even a seemingly technical or structural question can fling the door open to the next layer of meaning. So it is in this discussion. ”Why is it,” query the masters, “that Rashi adds in this piece of mythical information about the tears of angels only at this late point in the story?” Isaac is old. This archetypal event happened in his childhood — why not mention it then? Why doesn’t Rashi, in his interpretation, of the earlier event tell us about the fallen tears of angels?
The Emotionally Intelligent
The mystical answer is very deep and simple, so open up your hearts to let it in. The text is alive — it reflects the reality of its characters. When Isaac was young and the tears of angels fell in his eyes, he was totally oblivious to them, buried as they were in the recesses of his unconscious. He needs to shut the tears up in his unconscious. That is the only way he can survive the pain.
Remember the movie Forrest Gump? It’s a movie about emotional intelligence. Forrest certainly does not have an off the charts IQ, but he has natural wisdom about life and people. He is emotionally intelligent. Jenny — his love and occasional girlfriend — has a very high IQ, but she is emotionally retarded.
We are not quite sure why she is so emotionally disconnected till one scene fairly late in the movie where she is walking with Forrest past the house in which she was raised. All of the sudden she stops, takes off her shoes and begins throwing them at the house of her father. She then breaks down for the first time, crying uncontrollable as Forrest holds her. We are not sure what this is all about until we remember an earlier scene at this same house. Jenny is pictured there as a young girl with golden locks, running from her father’s house trying to lose herself in the corn fields. Something is amiss in her face, but not a tear in sight, and no obvious sign of any crisis, so when the scene happened we weren’t sure what to make of it. Now, it all fits together and a tear rolls down our cheeks. We realize that Jenny was sexually abused by her father.
Her tears now are for that moment buried in her history.
Every time we cry, we cry for all the times we never cried before.
But then in our internal conversation, we ask ourselves another question. If she was abused, why didn’t she cry when she was a ten year old girl? Why wait till she is well into adulthood?
The answer presents itself in our consciousness almost immediately. She could not have cried then. For her, to allow the trauma to enter her conscious awareness would have created pain that would have destroyed her. For her to recognize what had happened would have made her wrong. She lacked the ability at ten years old to distinguish between her father being wrong and her being wrong. Her tears would have destroyed her fragile world. So, like with Isaac, the angles cried for her even as she was consciously oblivious to their tears.
Why does Rashi not tell us of Isaac’s tears of angels when he was young? Because Isaac is himself unaware of them. The Midrash is but an echo of Isaac’s own internal conversation. As long as Isaac remains disconnected from his tears of angels, the text will not mention them. The text has now become enormously important because there is a central underlying theme which is being treated in the story. When is it important to cry my tears of angels, and when should I just let them go and leave them alone? This is probably the most important question for any person who has been in therapy or done some kind of formal psychological work. When is it enormously important to go and dig up the past; to access all your early traumas; to cry the tears that you never cried before? Framed slightly differently, when is it vital to connect deeply with your tears of angels and when is it better to just let them go?
marc gafni
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