Lent Day Eighteen

It is Lent and perhaps we are discovering our own emptiness, our own tears.

Joseph weeps and everything collapses. He can no longer control himself, or the scheme that he has devised.

Zornberg (309) says: "there is an intensified sense of the mystery and anarchy of tears."

(311) "From the human perspective, Joseph was einenu, he had ceased to be in the line of sight. From God's perspective, he had been just where he was meant to be, swallowed up, giving and saving life."

..."Joseph's tears, like Rachel's, confirm the value of the einenu. 'Is not value this lack, this hole, which I hollow out before me and which I fill by acts...?'

and she quotes Neher: "Tears are sowing; they are effort, risk, the seed exposed to drought and to rot, the ear of corn threatened by hail and by storms. Laughter is words, tears are silence.... Hope is not in laughter and plenitude. Hope is in tears, in the risk and in its silence." (Neher, Exile of the Word, 236)

There is an abridged version of this chapter at Jewish Heritage On Line http://www.jhom.com/topics/tears/joseph.html
There are a couple of good illustrations, but one I collected years ago is:

Tears: Picasso's "Blue Nude"