Only humans produce the latter sort. As Shlomo Hamelech wrote in Koheles: “The one who increases in knowledge increases in pain.”
Only one commandment in the Torah involves crying, though it is not readily recognized as such. For the crying is done by proxy, through the shofar, on Rosh Hashana.
The shofar call is, of course, above all, a call to teshuva, a sort of alarm clock of the conscience, as the Rambam describes it. But Chazal characterized it as a literal cry. While the tekiah is a call to attention, the truah, the central component of the Rosh Hashana shofar-sounds, they said, is either a wailing sound or a series of moans; we incorporate both opinions in our practice today. What, though, is the shofar crying about?
Rosh Hashana, to be sure, is the Yom Hadin, and so we are rightfully uneasy at the implications of that fact. But might there be something deeper to the shofar’s wailing and moaning than simple fear? A haunting Talmudic passage may hold a hint.
In massechta Berachos, we are told of several instances of great Tannaim who became seriously, painfully ill; one was Rabbi Elazar. Rabbi Yochanan, renowned not only for his scholarship but for his ethereal handsomeness, came to visit and found his ill colleague lying in a dark room. He pulled up his sleeve, the Gemara recounts, and light spilled from his beautiful skin into the room. He saw Rabbi Elazar crying and asked him why.
If it was for the Torah he hadn’t been able to study – Rabbi Yochanan reassured the bedridden sage – that is no reason to cry; Hakodosh Boruch Hu judges people not by how much they accomplished but rather by whether they made their best effort. And if it was because of the elusiveness of material success, “not every man merits to sit at two tables” – Rabbi Elazar may not have attained wealth in this world but surely had amassed much reward in the World to Come.
And, continued Rabbi Yochanan, if you are crying because of the death of your children, I have suffered more; ten of my own have perished.
Finally, Rabbi Elazar spoke up. “I am crying,” he said, indicating Rabbi Yochanan’s shining arm, “because this beauty is destined for the dust.”
“For that?” responded Rabbi Yochanan. “For that, indeed, it is fitting to cry.” And the two scholars cried together.
No one with warm blood running through his veins could read that account without a shudder born of the realization of what brought those sages to weep.
We all try to crowd our lives with enough diversions to minimize opportunities for reflecting on our mortality. But serious people cannot forever avoid the thought, and righteous ones make no effort to do so at all.
The late, revered Rosh HaYeshiva of Yeshiva Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin, Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, zt”l, perceived in the act of blowing the shofar a hint to the earliest event commemorated by Rosh Hashana: the creation of man. Shofar-blowing, he observed, involves a force of breath, recalling the animation of Adam Harishon– “And He blew into his nostrils the spirit of life, and man became a living soul.”
The Zohar describes Adam’s physical state before his sin as “shining” with a special splendor – referred to as his “shufra,” or beauty.
It is the precise word Rabbi Elazar used to describe Rabbi Yochanan’s skin. Could it also be… the root of the word “shofar”?
Might the shofar, in other words, be crying out its own name, in memory of the perfection with which our ultimate ancestor was created – squandered by sin, destined for death?
“Shufra!” it may be calling from earth to heaven. “Beauty! The beauty that is a human being, that was once the perfect human being! Now subject to decay!”
For such, indeed, it is fitting to cry. And through our shofaros, we cry together.
Our crying, though, is not an expression of hopelessness. On the contrary, the very recognition of what sin has wrought is, according to our mesorah, the first step toward regaining it, the first step on the road of teshuva. When our regret of our individual loads of sin are total and sincere, we are taught, then we will have utilized our pain for ultimate gain. Even death itself, as Yeshayahu Hanovi foretold, “will be swallowed forever, and Hashem will wipe tears from every face…”
And that same novi describes that day, when death is erased and history ended. “On that day,” he foresees, “there will be sounded a great tekiah.”