Drash of the Week – Parashat Ki Tavo
Vision/s

By Rabbi Shawn Fields-Meyer

The human eye – a tiny organ with multiple parts – serves us every waking moment of every day. Think of a beautiful natural site you observed recently; without your eyes, you would not have that memory, that inspiration. Or a time when you barely avoided a collision. Without this tiny organ – your eye – you might have risked your life.

And yet, the eye is also very limited. Science tells us that many energies exist, but escape our human vision. And in fact, most of the eye can only see black and white; only a small portion can see color.

But that limited eyeball with its many component parts is not the only eye that we have. Think about this week’s Torah teaching:

And Moses called all of Israel and said to them, "You have seen all that God did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, to all his servants, and to all his land; the great trials which your very eyes beheld and those great signs and wonders. Yet until this day, God has not given you a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear…And then you arrived at this place.

Deuteronomy 29: 1-6

Moshe says, on the one hand: “you have seen”. You have seen God’s miracles in Egypt and the wilderness. You have seen – with your very eyes – history unfolding and times changing.

“Seeing” often implies physical seeing, but sometimes we mean it non-physically: “understanding”, that is, mind’s eye. The physical eye takes the picture and the mind’s eye considers/recalls/contextualizes/assesses it.
Which is more astonishing?  One eye provides simple sight; the other, intellectual vision.

But in our parasha, Moshe describes another eye: the one that sees God.

We all have this eye: it imagines the miracles; it sees continual creation; it visualizes healing. This is the eye of the soul.

Each morning we gaze with this eye. We bless: baruch atta Adonai, Elohaynu melech ha-olam, pokeach iv-rim – Blessed are You…who opens the eyes of the blind. Thank You, God, for the ability to physically open our eyes in the morning. And thank You, God, for miraculously "opening our eyes" – to knowledge, comprehension, ideas, music, arts. And thank You, God, for being pokeach ivrim – for giving sight to the blind. Today our souls are awakened to the possibility real love, real agony, real healing. To the wide spectrum of community. To the capabilities of the spirit.

Thank You for these eyes– the eyes that really see, the ears that hear. And the hearts that know.