Esau Wept Three Tears and Israel Paid for Them

One of the most uncomfortable teachings in the Midrash Rabbah tradition concerns a moment many readers pass over quickly: Esau weeping when he learns his blessing has been given to Jacob. The plain text says Esau burst into wild and bitter sobbing (Genesis 27:34). He was robbed, as he understood it. His brother had come in disguise and taken what was his by birthright. And he wept.

Rabbi Elazar counted those tears with terrible precision. Esau the wicked, he taught, shed three tears from his eyes. One from his right eye, one from his left eye, and the third belonged to both eyes together, as it says in Psalm 80:6: you wet their bread with tears, a third part thereof. He noted that the verse says a third, not three. Rabbi Berachiah agreed, interpreting even more narrowly: Esau shed only one-third of a tear. Rabbi Avin and others said that the Great Assembly brought this before God as a complaint: Master of the Universe, because of the three tears -- or even the fraction of a tear -- that the wicked Esau shed, you gave him control over the entire world, and you gave him peace in this world. When will you see the suffering of your own children, whose eyes overflow with tears every day, as it says, My tears have been my food day and night (Psalms 42:4)? Have mercy on them, if only a little.

The logic is devastating in its honesty. God is not accused of forgetting Israel. God is accused of being so faithful to the consequences of a single moment -- a father's blessing, a son's tears -- that even Esau's grief earned rewards that cascaded through history. If a fraction of a tear from Esau purchased generations of Gentile dominion over Israel, what does that say about the accounting system of the cosmos? What does that say about the weight of a tear?

Now read alongside this the teaching about Psalm 124, the psalm of ascent traditionally sung by pilgrims climbing to Jerusalem. The midrash connects it to Jacob -- specifically to the tradition that Jacob slept at the very spot where the Temple would one day be built, and that from this experience came the term Israel Saba, the elder Israel, meaning Jacob as the grandfather of all the tribes. The psalm is a song of gratitude for protection and deliverance: had it not been for the Lord who was on our side. A psalm of very near escape. We almost did not make it. But we did. The Lord was on our side.

What the midrash assembles, by placing these texts near each other, is a map of Israel's relationship to history. Jacob dreamed at the place where the Temple would stand. His son Esau wept tears that bought the nations their power. The same family produced both the foundation of prayer and the tears that funded Israel's exile. This is not a comfortable inheritance. It is an honest one.

The psalm David wrote -- which the midrash ties back to Jacob -- is sung going up to Jerusalem, which means it is sung precisely in the motion from exile toward home, from the dominion of Esau toward the house of God on the hill where Jacob slept. The ascent is possible because God was on their side. But the reason an ascent is needed at all is because Esau's tears were real and they were heard. God does not operate a system that ignores consequences. Esau wept and the world remembered. Israel weeps and the world forgets. The Great Assembly's complaint, preserved in the Midrash Aggadah tradition for over a thousand years, is not answered in the text. It simply stands there, in the open, an unanswered accusation hurled at heaven by the people who kept climbing the mountain anyway.