Fake Crying Isn't Fake

Some Chassidishe Torah, Maybe

The other day, I was at a shabbos meal, minding my own business, spacing out, when I hear a kid crying. I look up, and I see a boy, about three years old, sitting on his mom’s lap as she’s talking, and he is moaning and sobbing and clearly bothered by something.

Or was he? Because looking closer, he was not actually crying. No tears were being produced. He wasn’t crying. He was making the sounds that crying makes, sure, but he was not genuinely crying, he was faking it, presumably to get his mother’s attention as she tried to make conversation at the shabbos table. 

And my first thought was, admittedly, what a manipulative little monster, faking his emotions in order to get what he wants. He’s not in genuine emotional distress! There are no tears! He’s just learned that crying gets attention, and he wants attention, and that if he makes these noises he gets attention. He’s being dishonest! He’s being manipulative! What a monster!

But wait a second, this is a kid, who was very recently a baby. And why do babies cry? Do they only cry when they’re in genuine emotional distress? When they’re so moved by emotion that that’s the only thing they can do? No, they cry for any number of reasons. Hunger, pain, confusion, and yes, attention. Babies cry because they don’t have any other way of communicating except getting attention by making noise in such a way that they get attention and someone has to intervene. When you don’t have the vocabulary, that’s the only way to communicate.

And when you’re three years old, yeah, you know some words, but you don’t know a lot of them, and you don’t know how to wield them all, and you’re not real great at communicating with adults. You don’t have the vocabulary or the self-awareness to go “hey, Mom, I’m feeling pretty neglected over here, if you could please show me some attention, that would really help me out with my problem” So you fall back on the stuff that works. You cry. Even if you’re not actually crying, you recreate what crying sounds like, because the emotions that you’re feeling, even if they don’t make you genuinely cry anymore, are the same emotions that motivate babies to cry, and not only do you not have the vocabulary to express those emotions, you don’t even have the tears, so you cry out, knowing that even if it’s not really crying, you are in fact, doing the same exact thing a baby does when it cries, saying, please, I don’t know how to express the feelings I’m feeling, so all I have is this, even if it’s not genuine, it is real. And look, maybe the right response from the mom here is to ignore the kid until he figures out how to communicate using his words instead of staying stuck on the level of communication of a baby, but that doesn’t mean that what’s being expressed by this kid faking crying isn’t as real as what’s being expressed by a baby crying.

So there’s really no difference between fake crying and real crying. 

This post is about davening.