Who cries the most in the Torah? The obvious answer to that question is Yosef who cries throughout his life up to and including the moment in this week’s parasha when his brothers return to Egypt after having buried their father Yaakov which was shortly after Yosef cried when he stood at Yaakov’s deathbed at the beginning of the very same chapter.
Yosef cries far more than any other character in Scripture. His tears indicate someone with strong emotions and someone who acknowledges those emotions and who expresses himself at moments of fear or grief or joy or confusion or regret. This is somewhat counter-intuitive because Yosef is perhaps the least impulsive person we encounter in the Torah. As a young shepherd he dreams of agriculture and years later successfully relocates his family to Egypt where the sheaves of wheat that bowed to him in his dream become the source of unprecedented power that he accumulates for Pharaoh. He dreams of his family bowing to him and lives to see his dream fulfilled. He overcomes the temptations of the solicitations of Potifar’s wife (with the Torah hinting at his inner turmoil in the most subtle of ways only) and builds a family with an Egyptian wife presented to him by Pharaoh.
When he is in power, Yosef rejects the opportunities to seek retribution on his brothers and instead postpones a reckoning with them until their teshuvah is demonstrated. He is a model of moral restraint. Even his grain policy is characterized by long-term thinking: he saves surplus during the years of plenty in order to survive the years of famine.
The only apparent exception to Yosef’s record of self-control are his repeated tears. How can someone whose emotions are so open and expressive be a model for self control and restraint?
I have come to realize, however, that the contradiction is illusory. Feeling emotions, naming them, and even expressing them outwardly through tears is not in any way incompatible with self control. On the contrary, an honest reckoning with one’s own feelings and emotional responses to stimuli, is indispensable to the task of exercising moral responsibility for our reactions.
Yosef’s brother’s jealousy of Yosef leads to their silence וְלֹ֥א יָכְל֖וּ דַּבְּר֥וֹ לְשָׁלֹֽם rather than any articulated or expressed anger or jealousy. When Yosef begs for mercy in the pit, they make themselves numb to his cries as they eat their lunch. This constructed callousness did not make them strong. By suppressing their emotions they handicapped their capacity to claim moral responsibility for their emotions, desires, and impulses. In contrast, Yosef cries, and then he chooses when and how he will act.
Freud is known for highlighting something that Yosef understood: feelings we refuse to acknowledge do not stay buried. They find other, often more destructive, ways of expressing themselves.
We sometimes think our failures come from feeling too much. In my experience, they more often come from not realizing what it is that we are feeling. It is so much easier to correct a behavior than to confront a feeling that fills us with shame or that we are embarrassed to acknowledge even to ourselves. But only feelings that we confront can ever be brought under ethical discipline.
The Torah is not interested in self-knowledge or psychological insight per-se, but in the moral responsibility that this insight can make possible. Esav, another big cryer in the Torah, is a helpful contrast to Yosef. Esav cries bitterly when he learns that Yaakov has stolen their father’s blessing. But Esav turns his strong emotions and tears into permission to plot his brother’s murder.
I once had the privilege of learning with Rabbi Simcha Krauss on the yahrzeit of his teacher, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Rabbi Krauss explained how Rav Soloveitchik had utilized the technical language of lomdus – conceptual and analytical Talmud study to show that a life of mitzvah observance and obedience to halakhah must be animated by a vivid emotional life.
We sometimes think Judaism cares only about what we do: actions, rules, behaviors. But the Torah consistently assumes that religious actions are meant to cultivate particular inner states. Mourning, for example, isn’t just sitting low and removing shoes; it’s grief. Joy on a festival isn’t just eating special food; it’s simcha.
That’s why, when a holiday arrives, shivah ends. Not because grief disappears, but because the Torah recognizes that we cannot inhabit two contradictory emotional worlds at the same time.
Halakhah, Rav Soloveitchik asserted, assumes emotional honesty. It is physically possible to sit on the floor without shoes while also eating meat and drinking wine for seven days observing both shivah and the holiday. But the ma’aseh ha-mitzvah – the mitzvah act – is meant to overlap with a feeling – which represents the kiyum ha-mitzvah – the fulfillment of the mitzvah and, on that plane, rejoicing on a holiday and mourning the death of a close relative are completely inconsistent.
Judaism doesn’t ask us to stack emotions on top of one another. It asks us to be honest about which emotional posture we are inhabiting right now and, at times, it asks us to prioritize one of multiple conflicting emotions.
As we turn this afternoon to Sefer Shemot we are introduced to a character who is consumed by fear that he never names and by anxiety that he never describes. Pharaoh is terrified that the Hebrews living in Egypt will grow in population until they cannot be controlled and will prove disloyal in wartime at the very same time that he is worried about their departure from Egypt. Those are contradictory fears that have not been sufficiently scrutinized. Someone who is in touch with their emotions can interrogate them and then decide how to calibrate a reasonable and ethical response. Pharoah never acknowledges his fear and the feelings he does not express are instead expressed in cruelty and oppression.
Pharaoh expresses no fear and thinks he is acting with wisdom הָ֥בָה נִֽתְחַכְּמָ֖ה ל֑וֹ but is truly acting with folly. He hardens his heart and thinks he is acting with strength as he in fact leads his kingdom to ruin. Even before the first Hebrew has been enslaved, Pharaoh is enslaved to his own unarticulated and unacknowledged fear.
Sefer Bereishit ends with a model of deliberate and considered leadership that is possible in the aftermath of a truthful contending with our deepest feelings. Sefer Shemot begins with a model of rash and reckless leadership that is inevitable when our deepest feelings are suppressed.
As each one of us exercises leadership, within our families, our professions, and our community, we need to do so with self awareness and self knowledge. At times, we may be tempted to ignore unpleasant, embarrassing, or shameful emotions and that path cannot lead to the sort of moral responsibility that the Torah expects of us. At times we may be tempted, like Esav, to believe that strong emotions permit any behavior that can momentarily relieve our distress. That path too, is not the way of the Torah.
We are unlikely to ever become Pharoah-like villains. But most of us do know what it means to harden our hearts, to stop listening, to stop feeling, to stop asking what we are actually reacting to. All of us can take a moment, quietly and alone, or in private conversation with a trusted friend or therapist and ask “what am I feeling that I have not yet allowed myself to name?” Until we name it, we cannot choose how those feelings act through us sometimes in harmful or self-defeating ways.
Yosef cries and acts with freedom. Pharaoh hardens his heart and becomes captive to his fears. The Torah teaches us that emotional honesty is not a weakness, but a precondition for every moral choice we are called upon to make. Only the feelings we are willing to acknowledge can be governed; the ones we deny will govern us. And that, as we move from Sefer Bereishit to Sefer Shemot, is the difference between freedom and slavery.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 