5 min read

God's Tears Shook the Earth Like Thunder

Two divine tears falling into the Great Sea at the memory of Israel in exile make a sound that travels from one end of the world to the other.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Two Tears Into the Great Sea
  2. Why the Earth Trembles
  3. God Weeps for the Destroyed Temple
  4. The Night Weeping of Lamentations

The rabbis asked what causes earthquakes. They offered several answers, and one of them was this: grief.

Specifically, two tears. Specifically, the tears of God.

Two Tears Into the Great Sea

The Babylonian Talmud, tractate Berakhot 59a, redacted in Babylonia around 500 CE, gives the Holy One a memory that operates in the present tense. God remembers the children of Israel scattered among the nations. The memory is not contemplative. It produces action: God lets two tears fall into the Yam Gadol, the Great Sea, and their sound travels from one end of the world to the other. The ground shakes. The sound is enormous. Two drops have done this.

The scale is deliberately impossible. Two tears from a sea already vast, and the effect is the earth trembling everywhere. The Talmud is not trying to produce a rational explanation for seismic activity. It is trying to say something about the proportion of divine feeling for Israel. The grief is not modest. It does not produce a quiet sigh. It produces earthquakes.

This is also a statement about divine presence in history. Exile is not watched from a height of divine indifference. The scattering of Israel causes something in the divine economy that registers physically in the world. The exile has not been forgotten. The evidence is the shaking ground.

Why the Earth Trembles

Berakhot 59a contains several explanations for the same phenomenon and makes no attempt to choose between them. One tradition says God strikes the firmament. Another says God kicks at it. A third speaks of divine movement like a king shifting restlessly on his throne, and the whole structure of creation shudders with the shift. A fourth returns to the tears.

The multiplicity matters. The rabbis are not producing a natural philosophy of earthquakes. They are approaching a phenomenon that frightens people, and they are giving it a context: this is what divine feeling looks like from below. The earth shakes because above it, something is happening that human beings cannot see directly. The variety of explanations reflects the variety of moments when Israel has needed to understand its suffering as something God responds to rather than ignores.

The tear explanation is the most intimate. The kick and the strike are movements of strength. The tears are movements of grief. Berakhot holds all of them as valid expressions of the same truth: the world is not unmoved by what happens to the people of the covenant.

God Weeps for the Destroyed Temple

A tradition preserved in the Ginzberg anthology draws on this same vein. When the Temple was destroyed, God wept, lamenting: woe is me, what have I done? God caused the Shekhinah to dwell on earth for a specific purpose, and that purpose was disrupted by the destruction. The divine presence, which had chosen to inhabit a particular place, found its dwelling torn down. The lamentation is not rhetorical. Something that mattered to God was taken away by force.

The Temple's destruction is therefore not only a tragedy for Israel. It is experienced as a loss inside the divine relationship with creation. This is a tradition that refuses to let the catastrophe be merely political or historical. It insists that the covenant entails mutual loss when it is violated, and that God experiences the destruction as God, which means: with infinite grief.

The Night Weeping of Lamentations

A tradition brought in Rabbi Tanhuma's name, preserved in commentary on Lamentations, takes the verse she weeps bitterly in the night (Lamentations 1:2) and asks who is weeping. Jerusalem weeps for her slain. Jerusalem weeps for the famine. Jerusalem weeps for the terror of the siege. But the verse says bitterly, which the rabbis read as a doubled weeping: two who weep at once.

Rabbi Tanhuma revealed that the second weeper is God. God weeps at night, in the middle of the night, the same watch in which Egypt was struck at the Exodus. What was once the hour of salvation becomes, after the destruction, the hour of divine mourning. The night that once carried rescue now carries grief, and God weeps in it for what was lost.

Psalm 137 is invoked: if I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill. The verse, originally spoken by Israel in exile, becomes in this reading a divine vow. God cannot forget Jerusalem. The tears that fall into the Great Sea and shake the ground are the proof that the forgetting has not happened and will not happen.

Divine GriefEarthquakesTempleExileTalmud
← All myths

From the tradition

Sources

4 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Berakhot 59aTalmud Bavli, Berakhot

And concerning earthquakes. What are these "earthquakes"? Rav Katina said: A rumbling tremor. Rav Katina was once walking on the road. When he reached the entrance of the house of a certain necromancer, a rumbling tremor groaned forth. He said: Does this necromancer know what this rumbling is? The necromancer raised his voice and called out: Katina, Katina, why should I not know? At the hour when the Holy One, blessed be He, remembers His children who dwell in suffering among the nations of the world, He lets fall two tears into the Great Sea, and His voice is heard from one end of the world to the other, and that is the rumbling.

But Rav Katina himself said: He claps His hands together, as it is said, "I also will smite My hands together, and I will cause My fury to rest" (Ezekiel 21:22). Rabbi Natan says: He sighs a sigh, as it is said, "and I will cause My fury to rest upon them, and I will be comforted" (Ezekiel 5:13). And the Rabbis say: He stamps upon the firmament, as it is said, "He gives a shout, as those who tread the grapes, against all the inhabitants of the earth" (Jeremiah 25:30). Rav Acha bar Yaakov said: He presses His feet beneath the Throne of Glory, as it is said, "Thus says the LORD: The heavens are My throne and the earth is My footstool" (Isaiah 66:1).

Full source
Berakhot 59aTalmud Bavli, Berakhot

"And for the tremors." What are tremors? Rav Katina said: An earthquake. Rav Katina was once going along the way. When he reached the entrance of the house of a certain necromancer, an earthquake rumbled. He said: Does the necromancer know what this earthquake is? The necromancer raised his voice and said to him:

Katina, Katina, why should I not know? At the moment when the Holy One, blessed be He, remembers His children who dwell in distress among the nations of the world, He lets fall two tears into the Great Sea, and His voice is heard from one end of the world to the other, and this is the earthquake.

Full source
Berakhot 59aTalmud Bavli, Berakhot

And concerning earthquakes. What are "earthquakes"? Rav Katina said: A tremor of the earth. Rav Katina was once going along the road. When he reached the entrance of the house of a necromancer, a tremor of the earth rumbled. He said: Does the necromancer know what this tremor is? The necromancer raised his voice and said to him: Katina, Katina, why should I not know? At the hour when the Holy One, blessed be He, remembers His children who dwell in distress among the nations of the world, He lets fall two tears into the Great Sea, and His voice is heard from one end of the world to the other -- and that is the tremor.

And this differs with what Rafram bar Pappa said in the name of Rav Chisda. For Rafram bar Pappa said in the name of Rav Chisda: From the day the Temple was destroyed, the sky has not been seen in its purity, as it is said: "I clothe the heavens in blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering" (Isaiah 50:3).

Full source
Pesikta Rabbati 29Pesikta Rabbati

"She weeps bitterly in the night" (Lamentations 1:2). The rabbis asked: who weeps? Jerusalem weeps for her slain, and she weeps for the famine, the horror of mothers who boiled their own children to survive (Lamentations 4:10). But the verse says "bitterly," doubled, two weepings, because Jerusalem is not the only one mourning.

God said: "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill" (Psalms 137:5). And Rabbi Tanhuma revealed something staggering: the weeping in the night is not only Jerusalem's. It is God's. "My eyes will flow with tears night and day, and they will not cease" (Jeremiah 14:17). A human being weeps at night and sleeps by day. But God, "He who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps" (Psalms 121:4), weeps without end, day and night together.

God Himself declared: "Just as Jerusalem is bowed below, so am I bowed above. I have removed My Presence from My resting place." The Shekhinah (the Divine Presence) departed the Temple, and the Temple wept for the departure, and God wept for what He had done, an exile He Himself had decreed.

This is not the end of the story. The rabbis placed Jeremiah and Isaiah side by side, wound against remedy, rupture against healing. Jeremiah cried: "He has set fire to my bones" (Lamentations 1:13). Isaiah answered: "Till a spirit from on high is poured out on us" (Isaiah 32:15). Jeremiah wept: "My sins are bound, wound round my neck" (Lamentations 1:14). Isaiah replied: "They who trust in the Lord shall renew their strength" (Isaiah 40:31). Jeremiah mourned: "Over all this I weep" (Lamentations 1:16). Isaiah answered: "Eye to eye they behold the return to Zion" (Isaiah 52:8).

Every wound Jeremiah opened, Isaiah healed. And the final word was Isaiah's: "Comfort, comfort My people, says your God." The God who wept in the night would one day wipe the tears Himself.

Full source