The Torah is famously restrained in its emotional language. Abraham walks toward the binding of Isaac in silence; the text offers no access to his inner turmoil. Emotional depth is usually supplied by midrash rather than scripture. And yet, there is one striking and deliberate exception: Joseph weeps – not once, but eight times. His tears are persistent, recurring, and narratively emphasized. They demand interpretation.
Why does Joseph cry?
Nachmanides understands Joseph’s conduct as a carefully constructed educational process. Joseph does not seek revenge; he seeks “teshuva” – not merely regret, but moral repair.
Classical Jewish thought defines repentance as the ability to face the same ethical test and choose differently. Joseph recreates the original scenario: a vulnerable younger brother from Rachel’s lineage. Will the brothers once again abandon him, or will they stand up for him?
Judah’s response – his willingness to sacrifice his freedom for Benjamin and for their father, Jacob, marks a dramatic moment of ethical transformation. Responsibility replaces indifference; empathy replaces rivalry. This is a genuine moral achievement.
Yet the Torah refuses to conclude the story here. Joseph continues to cry. This persistence suggests a deeper insight: Moral correction does not automatically lead to emotional reconciliation.
The brothers are capable of protecting Benjamin, but they may still be unable to truly love Joseph – to accept him not as a ruler nor as a benefactor but as an equal brother. Joseph senses that the old envy has not been fully uprooted.
From its opening chapters, Genesis identifies envy as the most destructive force between siblings: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. Hatred often follows envy, but envy itself is more corrosive. It is the inability to bear another’s success, difference, or perceived chosenness. Violence, the Torah teaches, begins not only with aggression, but with unresolved comparison.
This tension resurfaces after Jacob’s death. The brothers approach Joseph indirectly, inventing a message from their father: “Your father commanded before his death…” This fear reveals that years of generosity have not erased their suspicion. And Joseph weeps again, realizing that he is accepted functionally, but not relationally. He is needed, but not fully trusted; included, but not fully embraced.
Only in death is Joseph finally integrated into the collective memory of his people when his bones are carried by the next generation. Recognition arrives too late. The tragedy is not that the brothers failed morally but that they failed emotionally.
When moral repair isn’t emotional repair
This biblical insight speaks powerfully to Israeli society after October 7.
That day must be understood not only as a security failure or a political rupture but as a moment of collective trauma – an event that shattered basic assumptions of safety, trust, and moral order.
Collective trauma operates differently from individual trauma. It fragments shared narratives, intensifies fear, and often revives dormant rivalries within the wounded community itself. In such moments, societies instinctively seek internal culprits in order to restore a sense of control. Joseph’s tears illuminate this dynamic with unsettling clarity. He understands that trauma, if left unprocessed, does not heal relationships; it corrodes them.
The biblical narrative thus warns that without intentional spaces for mourning, meaning-making, and moral listening, collective trauma can quietly regenerate envy, suspicion, and social fragmentation long after the immediate danger has passed.
In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, Israeli society displayed extraordinary solidarity: mutual aid, volunteerism, shared grief, and collective responsibility. Yet as time passes, old fractures resurface – political, religious, ethnic, and ideological. Suspicion returns. Competing narratives harden. Envy and resentment quietly re-enter public discourse.
Joseph teaches us that the true test of social cohesion is not during emergency – but after. Can a society remain united without a common external enemy?
Can it tolerate internal difference, success, and disagreement without reverting to blame? Can it move from functional cooperation to genuine civic trust?
This is where a pedagogy of consolation becomes essential. Consolation is not denial, and it is not forgetting. It is the creation of moral and emotional space where pain can be acknowledged without hierarchy, where vulnerability is not a weakness, and where the “other” is encountered not as a threat, but as a fellow bearer of trauma. Such pedagogy insists on listening before judging, on mourning before mobilizing, and on repairing relationships rather than merely restoring efficiency.
Joseph’s tears model a different kind of leadership – one grounded not in power or control, but in emotional courage and moral patience.
Rachel’s tears, echoing through the prophet Jeremiah, identify the deepest cause of national catastrophe: baseless hatred. Yet she also embodies hope – the promise that return and repair are possible.
If destruction is born of hatred, redemption will be built through gratuitous love – not sentimental affection, but civic, ethical commitment. Love that remains, even when unity is difficult. Love that resists envy. Love that insists on seeing the other as a brother.
This is the task of our generation. Not merely to stop hating but to learn how to love.
The writer is the head of the Sal Van Gelder Center for Holocaust Research & Instruction at Bar-Ilan University.