The Cries That We Keep Inside

There’s a TV series that came out a few years ago in Israel called Serugim.  It deals with a group of 30-somethings who grew up modern orthodox and who continue to practice Judaism traditionally. 

They are in many ways integrated into modern contemporary life and culture.  They work as physicians and accountants and they watch Monty Python movies and Seinfeld. 

But the essential dramatic element is that, in a community where most people are married by that age, they are all single. 

One is the daughter of a rabbi, who is dating a secular archaeology professor.  Another is pining after a doctor who has no interest in her. 

And there’s a character named Amir who is divorced from his wife, who teaches in a girls’ high school and is trying to date, bearing the stigma that divorce sometimes carries in that community.

I want to just describe one scene involving Amir that I found very poignant.  At one point, during a Shabbat service, for reasons I won’t go into, he loses his yarmulke.  He borrows one from an older gentleman that is not the style he usually wears.  He usually wears a small crocheted colored yarmulke but he ends up taking a large white yarmulke typically worn by followers of certain charismatic rabbis.

He’s walking in a park Shabbat afternoon and comes upon a group of guys sitting and singing on a blanket together, all wearing the same white yarmulke that he’s now wearing.  (There’s a lot of humor in the show, by the way.)

They invite him over – come here, brother, join us!  He hesitates at first and then he comes over.  And he starts to sing with them, soulful, mystical nigunim – songs without words.

At one point they ask him to share one of his own melodies.  He hesitates and then he starts.  He’s not the greatest singer in the world.  But while he’s singing, he starts to cry.   And he’s crying while he’s singing, and the men around him join him in his sad melody as the camera fades into another scene. 

There he is, surrounded by total strangers, and somehow the pathos of his life is released and bursts forth.

This morning I want to say a word about the power of the cry when it’s released and when it’s held back.

The scene in that TV show is powerful, I think, because of the universality of feeling pain, navigating that pain, and feeling ambivalent about wanting to conceal it or reveal it. 

If I ask each of us to think about an event, a circumstance, a yearning, an existential reality, an inchoate feeling that makes us want to cry, I imagine that each of us could think of something.

I spoke to a family member once about feeling sad and vulnerable about something and I said, “it’s amazing – I’m surrounded by all these people who seem so balanced and adjusted” and she said, “Don’t confuse the inside of you with the outside of them.”

Most everyone has some inner cry that we sometimes let out.

Like most aspects of human nature, this is nothing new.  There’s a very poignant crying scene in this week’s Torah portion.  Esau, the older son by a few minutes of Isaac and Rebecca, discovers that his younger brother, Jacob, with his mother’s help, has managed to garner the choicer blessing moments before Esau arrived.

He says to his father, upon discovering what happened, “Do you have a blessing for me?”  And Isaac says, “But I’ve already made your brother master over you!”  And Esau says, poignantly, havaracha achat hee l’cha avi barchni gam ani avi.  “Haven’t you one blessing left, father?  Bless me too, father!”

And then the Torah says, vayisa esav kolo vayevk.  Esau wept out loud.

We can imagine the buildup.  When they were children, Esau sold Jacob his birthright in exchange for a bowl of lentil stew.  Now Esau discovers that he will be subservient to Jacob.

And what he wants, in that moment, is a blessing from his father. 

What’s behind the cry that eventually emerges?  Anger at his brother?  Anger at himself for selling the birthright as a child?  Anger at his mother?  The desire of a child to be loved by his mother or his father?  Self-doubt?  Regret over the past?  Concern about the future?

It’s a story, and we’re not given all of the details about Esau’s internal life.

Likewise, each of us is a story.  And we don’t always understand our own internal lives, much less what to share and how to share it. 

I would say, however, that it’s worth at least being aware of the kernel of pain, the confluence of resentment and insecurity and yearning that can sometimes paralyze us.

And it’s worth understanding that if all of that is going on inside of us, then it’s fair to assume that it’s happening inside of others.

What to do, practically, about this is not so simple.  I just want to make a few observations.

It’s striking that the first science to emerge in the West was astronomy and the last was psychology.  First, we explored that which is furthest from us, and then, finally, we began to explore, in any kind of systematic way, that which is actually within us.

If you’re watching Homeland, you know what the character Saul Berenson said at the end of the most recent episode – I promise I won’t give anything important away to those who not up to date.  

He said, basically, that the CIA used to base its intelligence on cultivating relationships on the ground.  Now the government prefers to do drone strikes from the air.  Better to understand what’s happening on the ground before you take action from the air, he advised.

And, I would argue, when it comes to the more normative range of emotion and behavior, our satisfactions as well as our wounds, we should at least be aware that each one of us a three-dimensional story, an ongoing dance between galyui and nistar, hidden and revealed.

While I was thinking of all of this, I read in the NY Times about how fewer and fewer college students are focusing on the humanities.  That means more engineers and computer science majors and fewer English and art majors.  The article pointed out that, given the realities of the economy, students want to focus on those areas that are most potentially profitable.

And that is totally understandable.  However, regardless of what students choose to do professionally, I would argue that they ought to have a profound exposure to the humanities as young adults that hopefully will expand over the course of their lives.  Awareness of history, literature and the arts gives us the capacity to understand our own inner lives better, as well as the inner lives of others.

To give just one example, a Shakespearean soliloquy gives the audience the opportunity to glimpse the inner life of another human being and, perhaps, to understand ourselves better through that experience.

When Hamlet or Macbeth address the audience, that which is ordinarily hidden becomes revealed.

Reading or watching a play by Shakespeare helps us to experience the depth of another person’s humanity – it’s hard to imagine that this experience wouldn’t have an impact on one’s own humanity.

Self-awareness is hard to achieve and comes through multiple sources.  Psychology, cognitive science, the full range of the humanities and other disciplines can be helpful. 

Ultimately, we have to take responsibility for understanding ourselves and for trying to understand one another.

Of course we provide opportunities here for people to dig a little deeper – classes, conversations, socializing.  But it has to feel natural. 

The tears of Esau, of Amir, tears of people we know profoundly and not at all, and our own tears, as well – sometimes emerge and sometimes remain beneath the surface. 

Our tze’akot, our cries, stifled and shared, are part of who we are. 

May God give us the capacity to hear those cries in ourselves and, when invited, in each other. 

On Yom Kippur, there is a prayer that’s part of the Neilah service in which we ask God to take all of our tears, place them in a jar, and judge us compassionately based on these accumulated tears.

I pray that our cries, along with our more positive emotions, will somehow find expression, deepening the melodies that we offer one another, with and without words.

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on November 2, 2013