We, with our messy emotions and tear-streaked faces, tend to project a lot onto the Divine. But Jewish tradition actually gives us some incredibly vivid, even surreal, images of God weeping.
Think about it: When God remembers His children, us, dwelling in misery among the nations, what does He do? According to some traditions, He lets fall two tears into the ocean. And the sound of those tears? It's said to be heard from one end of the world to the other! That’s what we find in B. Berakhot 59a.
And it doesn’t stop there. When God remembers how the Shekhinah, the divine presence, lies in the dust of the earth, He sheds tears hot as fire, tears that plummet into the Great Sea. Other accounts, like the one in 3 Enoch 48:4, go even further, describing how in the hour that God cries, five rivers of tears issue from the five fingers of His right hand, cascading into the Great Sea and shaking the very world!
It's easy to get caught up in the strangeness of the imagery, isn’t it? Rivers of tears flowing from God’s fingers… It's almost dreamlike. But what does it all mean?
Well, these images, as we see in Tree of Souls (Schwartz), attribute very human characteristics to God, even weeping. It suggests a God who isn’t detached and aloof, but one who is deeply affected by the suffering of His creation.
The Zohar, that foundational text of Jewish mysticism, gives us a fascinating reason for God’s tears. The Zohar 1:26b tells us that God's tears roll down to the Great Sea because Moses brought the Torah down in two tablets, but Israel wasn't worthy of them, and they broke and fell, causing the destruction of the first and second Temples.
And in the Prologue to the Zohar 56, we learn that Rahab, the Angel of the Sea, is sustained by God's tears! Imagine that – divine sorrow nourishing a powerful, primordial being.
But there’s more. The falling of God's tears into the ocean is also sometimes given as an explanation for earthquakes. It's all interconnected.
Now, all this might seem to contradict the idea of God as an all-powerful, omnipotent creator and ruler, right? How can a being who is both all-powerful and all-knowing also be capable of helplessness, of needing comfort?
That’s the paradox at the heart of it all. It’s a reminder that even God, in these mystical traditions, isn’t immune to sorrow, to empathy, to the pain of witnessing the world's imperfections. And perhaps, in those tears, there's a profound message for us: to recognize our own capacity for compassion, and to strive to create a world where God's tears might finally cease to flow. As Likutei Moharan 1:250 says... (Well, maybe that's a thought for another time.)
So, the next time you hear the ocean roar, or feel the earth tremble, remember the image of God weeping. It’s a powerful reminder of the deep connection between the Divine and the human, and the profound responsibility we all share to heal the world's pain.