Dec 28, 2023
by R. Gidon Rothstein
Parshat VaYechi
Crying, the External Expression of Strong Emotion
In verses three and eleven of chapter fifty, HaKetav VeHaKabbalah cites an interpretation of R. Solomon Pappenheim not in line with our usual one, with interesting results. Verse three uses the verb of bechi, crying, to describe the Egyptians’ reaction to Ya’akov’s death.
R. Pappenheim relates the word tomevucha, confusion, points to a few verses where that is true, and says that crying in voice and tears reveals inner turmoil. Nor is it voluntary, he says, it is an irresistible urge to offload extreme emotion, happy or sad (people cry while laughing, cry at weddings).
Two factors determine whether crying involves tear, sobs, or both: the makeup of the person and the cause of the crying. Children cry with their voice rather than tears (he says; kids today must not have gotten the memo), happy crying is tears without sound, and others have both.
Mourning Is Also Inner Turmoil
Verses ten and eleven bring up evel, mourning. R. Mecklenburg again relies on Pappenheim, who thought it was not a language of sadness and eulogizing, as most read it. To him, the word signified confusion, inability to be in one’s fully right mind, similar to mevuchah, the word he thought similar to bechi, crying.
With mourning, the cause has already occurred and cannot be changed, the mourner is just unable to order his or her thoughts properly and as usual.
Sadness and mourning do generally come together, R. Mecklenburg concedes, and Tanach therefore interchanges them, but yagon, sadness, happens in one’s heart (emotionally, he means), where mourning is primarily a matter of being stuck in our thoughts about the person who is lost, unable to focus elsewhere.
[We today think of grief as an emotion, too; I think R. Mecklenburg is pointing to the course of the two, where sadness is just sadness, while mourning has a ruminative component, the mourner constantly thinking about the deceased.]
It means mourning is more easily overcome by force of will, the reason halachah sometimes requires those who have suffered a loss to nonetheless focus their thoughts on mitzvah obligations (mourners must pray, for example, must put their mourning aside long enough to
