From Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives, “Weeping as Mystical Practice”:

I shall begin my description of the techniques by focusing on a practice — unnoticed before — that can be traced back through all the major stages of Jewish mysticism over a period of more than two millennia. I refer to the recommendation of the use of weeping as a means for attaining revelations — mostly of a visual character-and/or a disclosure of secrets. …

It is obvious that, for Luria and Berukhim, weeping is an aid to overcoming intellectual difficulties and receiving secrets. It is plausible to interpret the final sentence as referring to a revelatory experience, in which the supernal gates are opened. This text is recommended for a practical purpose; it appears that R. Abraham Berukhim indeed had the opportunity to apply this recommendation, as it is reported that Luria had revealed to him that he would die unless he prayed before the Wailing Wall and saw the Shekhinah. It is then reported:

“When that pious man heard the words of Isaac Luria, he isolated himself for three days and nights in a fast, and [clothed himself] in a sack, and nightly wept. Afterward he went before the Wailing Wall and prayed there and wept a mighty weeping. Suddenly, he raised his eyes and saw on the Wailing Wall the image of a woman, from behind, in clothes which it is better not to describe, that we have mercy on the divine glory. When he had seen her, he immediately fell on his face and cried and wept and said: ‘Zion, Zion, woe to me that I have seen you in such a plight.’ And he was bitterly complaining and weeping and beating his face and plucking his beard and the hair of his head, until he fainted and lay down and fell asleep on his face. Then he saw in a dream the image of a woman who came and put her hands on his face and wiped the tears of his eyes…. and when Isaac Luria saw him, he said: ‘I see that you have deserved to see the face of the Shekhinah.'”

It is clear that the two visions of the woman-that is, of the Shekhinah-are the result of R. Abraham’s bitter weeping: the former a waking vision of the back of the Shekhinah, the latter a vision of her face, which occurs only in a dream. The first one provokes anxiety; the second, comfort.

In my own philosophical experience, perplexity and angst — sacred dread — always precedes revelatory insight, instaratio ex nihilo.

This recalls Nietzsche’s mysterious and beautiful preface to Beyond Good and Evil:

Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.

Beriah is the home of the enveloping alter-subject beloved by philosophers, forever beyond possession or mastery. She is Sophia, the Shekhinah. In Assiyah, she appears through the sefirah Binah. When we approach her dogmatically, she turns her back on us and we despair. When we approach her as she wishes to be approached, she reveals her face, shading the blinding light flooding in behind her.