Crying
A Message for Parashat VaYehi 2017
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The Torah described a final encounter between
Yosef and his brothers:
And Yosef’s brothers saw
that their father was dead, and they said…“Your father left a charge before his
death saying, ‘Thus shall you say to Yosef, We beseech you, forgive the crime
and the offense of your brothers, for evil they have caused you. And so now,
forgive the crime of the servants of your father’s God.” And Yosef wept when
they spoke to him. (Bereshit 50:15-17)
Although Yosef had wept several times in the
past, he never seemed comfortable doing so. Whenever he felt the tears coming,
he would attempt to hide them. Yosef left the room to cry when he heard his
brothers talk about him (42:24) and again when he saw Binyamin (43:30). Revealing
himself to his brothers, he cleared out the room before crying with them
(45:2). Although Yosef let down his guard when he cried in his embrace with
Binyamin and his other brothers, he concealed the tears as he wept “upon his
neck” and “upon them” (45:14-15). And his tears in embrace of Yaakov were again
“upon his neck” (46:29), and after Yaakov’s death “upon his father’s face”
(50:1). Earning the reputation of a rational-minded controller, Yosef was
careful to never let his emotions interfere with his thoughts and behavior. But
then, perhaps unexpectedly, the stone-cold façade cracked: “And Yosef wept when they spoke to him.”
Was Yosef’s public display of emotion at that
time a personal failure? I do not think so. I recall a conversation that I had
with a group of 12th Grade boys, several years ago. Over the course
of our discussion, one of the boys remarked that he had never seen his father
cry. The boy seated next to him quickly added that he had not either. As did
the next. And the next. One by one, nearly every one of the thirty boys in the
room revealed to me that they had never seen their father cry. This bothered
me. I felt that their fathers had failed to expose them to “true emotions.”
Hiding behind the veil of “power” and “control,” the fathers had missed the
opportunity to teach their children how to appropriately respond to emotional pain
and discomfort in a healthy manner.
Yosef was a prominent leader. The eyes of an
entire empire were upon him at all times. His thoughts, decisions and
expressions were noticed by all. By publicly exposing his tears, Yosef taught
them a lesson that extended beyond the basic skills of proper decision-making. He taught them how to feel.
Several years ago, a journalist noted the
American people’s changed perception of public crying. When Senator Edmund
Muskie was caught crying on camera during the presidential campaign in 1972, he
unconvincingly claimed it was melting snowflakes. Muskie lost the campaign and
forever remembered that critical moment. He claimed that his tears changed
people’s minds about him, explaining, “They were looking for a strong, steady
man, and here I was weak.” Consider, now, the impressive list of politicians
who have proudly cried on camera in the 21st Century: Barack Obama,
Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, among others.[1]
Crying is no longer seen as an expression of weakness, but rather of humanness.
But is it necessary? Can’t we live and succeed without the interference of
our personal emotions?
In Feeling
Smart, Eyal Winter wrote about the necessary interplay between rational
thinking and emotions. He imagined, for example, a situation where you arrive
at work one morning and find an email message with an offer for employment by
another company. A decision made solely by the rational department of your mind
would begin by compiling an exact list of all the characteristics of your
current job, followed by a parallel list of the characteristics of the newly
offered job. Carefully scaling the advantages and disadvantages of each
opportunity, the next step would be to assign to each characteristic a value
representing the extent of satisfaction or disappointment you expect to receive
from it. Without the help of your emotional mechanism, however, you will
certainly fail at this stage. Although you will have all the facts at your
disposal, the channel to a wise choice will remain blocked. Winter wrote, “Only
close cooperation between the emotional and rational mechanisms can enable you
to arrive at a wise and satisfactory decision.”[2]
Yosef’s ability to expose his emotions late
in his life revealed his impressive growth as a leader. He taught his brothers,
the people of Egypt and all future generations the importance of relating to
our feelings in an honest and genuine fashion.
Let the tears flow! It’s best for your
growth.
[1] Jim Windolf, “It’s Alright to Cry, Dude,” The New York Times,
Oct. 17, 2015.
[2] Eyal Winter, Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think (New York, NY, 2014)), pg. 237-8.