Tears of Angels: Part Five: Marc Gafni
Unblocking the wells, unbottling the tears, can be a dangerous task. The question is, has Isaac left his genie bottled up too long? When the waters break forth, will they turn to deluge or blessing? The fairy tale talks of the danger of waiting too long to loosen the genie, to cry the tears. We know that there is another danger factor, loosening the bottle too early. The genie was put in the bottle in the first place for good reason. It needed to be somehow contained and controlled. The key is timing. You need to know when you are ready, when you are strong enough, when is the ideal window for quietly unscrewing that bottle top.
That is, until the story with which we began, chapter 27 of the book of Genesis. “Isaac is old and he cannot see; his eyes are dimmed.” Here, Isaac is portrayed as old, tired and, most critically, blurred of perception. Love of course is perception. Thus, to say that his faculty of perception is blurred is to say that he is a flawed lover. His love is not expansive. There is something cramped and congested about its flow. He cannot see. And what does he so desperately need to see?
The Blessing of the Children
This sentence opens the chapter which revolves around the issue of Isaac blessing his sons. In the literary symbolism of the book of Genesis, giving blessing is about loving and perception.
To give blessing is to see and understand my children. It is to love my children, not in a general and sterile sort of way, but from the inside. Love is a soul print perception.
To be a Parent is to give your child the gift of perception. To see your child’s infinitely gorgeous soul print is to is to love your child.
To gift your child daily – with a vision of their own unique beauty, seen in, reflected in your loving face.
Isaac, though, does not understand his children. He needs to pick which of his children will inherit the blessing of Abraham. He picks Esau, but the narrator of the story tells us that Esau is the wrong choice. So Rebecca, Isaac’s wife, steps in. She instructs Jacob, the younger son, to get dressed in the clothes of Esau and to deceive his father into thinking he is his brother Esau. That way Jacob will receive the blessing passed down the generations, from Abraham to Isaac and so on.
The reader is decidedly uncomfortable. Why did Rebecca not simply talk to Isaac and explain to him that he was wrong about Esau; that the blessing needed to go to Jacob? Apparently, for all the love between them, Rebecca was unable to fully communicate with Isaac. Most critically, she could not tell Isaac that his perception was blurred. She could not open his genie bottle for him without the wrath of the genie exploding…she had to devise a plan to retrieve the three wishes without the wrath.
Without a doubt, that is the greatest flaw in vision: to be unable to see that you cannot see. To be unable to see the blurred lines of your very own perception; to think you are seeing clearly when in fact all your images are distorted. Isaac is making fateful decisions which will define his family for generations based on distorted images which he thinks are perfectly clear.
Why?
Explains the Midrash {hebrew wisdom text} in an elliptical, understated, yet brilliant insight, Isaac cannot see because “many years ago, tears of Angels fell in his eyes.” He has not yet worked out the pain of his youthful trauma. His unresolved relation with the archetype patriarch Abraham makes him unable to father his children with the loving insight needed to transmit blessing to the next generation.
Love is perception. Isaac cannot see — his perception is blurred. We can do many things in life with our love faculty of perception impaired. We can build a business, partner with a reasonable degree of success and navigate much of life successfully. But we cannot give blessing to our children. To love our children is to perceive their soul prints, to see them in their unique and infinite beauty, not as our redeemers but as our sacred trust. We cannot love them unless we are willing to go back and cry our tears of angels.
marc gafni
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