EYES TO SEE

Creating Geula  • Part 3
By Prof. Shimon Silman, RYAL Institute and Touro College

Remember how we started off this series—with the story of Rabbi Levi Yitzchok by the river on Rosh HaShana? The chassid he was walking with asked him where we see—in physical reality—the spiritual elevation of the world that takes place on Rosh HaShana. Rabbi Levi Yitzchok leaned over the bridge, stared at the river for a while and then said, “The river is flowing in an entirely different manner!”

Can we model this experience? Can we do something similar, i.e., observe a physical reality, stare at it for a few moments and then see a different physical reality? I believe that a good model for this is the autostereogram, commonly known as “magic eye.” The image is reproduced here in this article and if you stare at it, blank out your vision and focus far off into the distance (instead of on the image itself) you will see a new physical reality—a 3-dimensional image of a deer standing in a field of flowers instead of the original 2-dimensional field of flowers alone. Nothing has changed; we have just opened our eyes to something new that was always there but was “hidden in plain view.”

The Rebbe MH”M told us to do this—to open our eyes to see aspects of the Geula that are already here and visible but that we may not have noticed. In Shir HaShirim, the deer is a metaphor for Moshiach.

Here’s a practical suggestion how to achieve this. If we help another Jew open their eyes, then, measure for measure, Hashem will certainly help us open our own eyes. Right now Rabbi Gluckowsky of Rechovot is running a campaign to raise money for a 10 month old Jewish baby in Israel who is blind. She has a condition known as congenital corneal opacities and needs a corneal transplant. A specialist at Westchester Medical Center is willing to do it and believes it will be successful. Let’s help them do it by giving Tz’daka to this cause at: https://charityforisrael.donorzen.com/causes/ten-month-old-chana-is-blind-her-only-hope-to-see-is-our-generosity

A TORAH GUIDED WORLD

In this final installment of the series, we are going to discuss the possibility of not just observing reality differently, but actually changing reality by looking at it differently. What we know from Part 1 about how to relate to an עלמא דשקרא—a fake world whose reality we cannot see—can be summarized as follows:

We don’t see the reality of the world. What we see is a fake world.

The Torah is the “user guide” that tells us how to relate to this world.

On a deeper level, the Torah is the “source code”—the model that Hashem used to create this world as we see it.

To the degree that a Jew is attached to Torah he is not bound by the laws of nature because the Torah itself is not bound by nature; nature derives from it.

So we are living our lives in accordance with the Torah. But what if we don’t know how to apply the Torah to a certain situation? Questions like that come up all the time.

Not surprisingly, the Torah itself tells us what to do in such a situation. It is in this week’s Parsha, Shoftim: “כי יפלא ממך דבר—when something is beyond your knowledge…”  We are instructed to go to the Shofet. The Shofet, who will judge, decide and give instruction, may actually be any one of several personalities. He may be a Dayan—an individual judge or a group of judges such as the Sanhedrin or a Beis Din, a Rav certified to decide Halachic issues (as in our time), a Shofet as in the time of the Shoftim (Ehud, Yiftach etc.) or even the king.

But even here the issue of seeing reality arises. Does the Dayan see the situation correctly? Are we not back where we started from? It’s a fake world and we never see reality. There is a principle in Halacha that addresses this question: אין לדיין אלא מה שעיניו רואות, the judge can only go by what his eyes see.

We can distinguish two levels in “what his eyes see:”

By the Book: The judge hears all sides of the case, considers all the evidence, interrogates the witnesses etc., and makes his decision based on the applicable laws.

Deeper Wisdom: The judge senses that there is more to the story. Some information may be missing or there may be some distortion of the information. There may even be some deceit. In such a case the judge can continue to investigate and interrogate until he gets to the bottom of it, or he may withdraw from the case and let another Dayan judge it. In the famous story of the two women who came before Shlomo HaMelech, he devised a trick to identify the real mother.

The buck stops with the Dayan. Beyond that, the rest is up to Hashem. Suppose, for example, in a capital case, the defendant is found innocent by a majority of the Sanhedrin and is set free. Then suddenly one of the judges thinks of an argument that might convict him. The Torah says not to reopen the case to hear the argument for conviction but to let the defendant go. Well, what if he really is guilty? Hashem says: Don’t worry, כי לא אצדיק רשע—“The evil man will not be declared innocent in My judgement.” If he really is guilty, Hashem will deal with it. (Mishpatim 23:7, Rashi)

The same Torah with which Hashem created the world to be the way it is, instructs us to rely on the judgment of the Dayan who goes by what his eyes see.

CREATING REALITY

At this point something very powerful happens. We find that a decision of the Dayanim can literally change reality. The famous example mentioned in the Talmud Yerushalmi is that of a 3 year old girl. At the age of 3 a certain physical change takes place in a girl (אין בתולי’ חוזרין). Suppose a girl’s birthday is the 7^th of Adar. Then on that day when she is 3 years old the change takes place. But suppose near the end of the month the Sanhedrin decides to declare a leap year so there will now be a second month of Adar. All of a sudden, the girl is not considered 3 years old—until the 7^th of Adar in the next month. So the physical change which took place earlier in the month is now reversed because of the declaration of the Sanhedrin.

There’s a story of a woman who brought a chicken with a certain physical defect to the Rogatchover Gaon to determine if it was kosher or treif. (It was slaughtered properly, but if an animal is found to have a defect from which it would have died had it not been slaughtered, it is a treifa—not kosher.) The Rabbis standing around all saw it and it was clear to them that it was treif. But the Rogatchover kept looking at it and thinking and checking s’farim until he finally said that it was kosher. The other Rabbis were astounded and didn’t know what to think.

Sometime later the woman came to the Rogatchover to ask him for a bracha for her husband who was diagnosed with a disease that the doctors said he was going to die from. The Rogatchover asked her to describe what was wrong with him. She described it—it was exactly the same thing that was wrong with the chicken. He said to her: You have nothing to worry about. I already made a p’sak din that such a condition does not cause death. Your husband will continue to live.

CREATING THE GEULA

Now we begin to understand why the Rebbe MH”M placed such a great emphasis on having Rabbanim issue piskei dinim (Halachic statements) to the effect that Moshiach has to come and, later, endorsed the p’sak din that Moshiach was already here (חזקת משיח). In fact, it was this latter p’sak din, the Rebbe MH”M said, that caused the nations of the world to make the Swords into Plowshares declaration at the particular time that they did. The p’sak din that was made around that time triggered this (Sicha of Mishpatim, 5752). “The judge can only go by what his eyes see,” and they saw it.

There is a basis for this in the physical world itself. According to quantum mechanics an observer can determine the reality of an experiment that he is performing. This is not an issue of interpreting the results. Rather, the way he looks at it can determine, for example, if the entities he is observing will be particles or waves. This has been verified experimentally on the subatomic scale.

But in Chassidus we say much more than that. In the Tanya, the Alter Rebbe devotes an entire chapter to explain that everything that comes from Hashem is good even if it appears to be a negative thing. If we, the observers, look at it differently, with the emuna that גם זו לטובה—that since it comes from Hashem it is really good – then the reality changes and it becomes a visible, tangible good (Igeres HaKodesh, Ch. 11). This is the content of the Tzemach Tzedek’s famous statement, “Tracht Gut Vet Zain Gut” — “Think good and it will be good.” The Rebbe MH”M gives this instruction frequently.

So it’s not just the Sanhedrin or Rabbanim who can do this. It’s every Jew!

There is a story about Rabbi Meir Shlomo Yanovsky, the Rebbe MH”M’s grandfather (Rebbetzin Chana’s father). There was a plague of typhus in Nikolayev, where he lived. Since they had no medicine for it, they set up a quarantined area outside the city and took the infected patients out there to isolate them. The patients would stay there until they died. Rabbi Meir Shlomo was infected with the disease so he was put in this quarantine.

He had a friend, Reb Asher Grossman, who would come to visit him every morning. He would stand by the window outside Rabbi Meir Shlomo’s room and read Chapter 11 of Igeres HaKodesh out loud and then leave. He did this every day for 30 days. At the end of this time, Rabbi Meir Shlomo got up and went home, completely cured. He later told Reb Asher that every day after he read the chapter from Igeres HaKodesh, Rabbi Meir Shlomo felt a little better—every day better and better until finally at the end of a month he was completely well.

So every Jew has the power to create reality through the Torah. It’s all a matter of having complete emuna in what Hashem says and looking at the world with that view. Knowing that the Rebbe MH”M said that the time of the Geula has arrived, that we are in the Era of Moshiach, that all aspects of the Geula have already begun and that all we have to do is open our eyes to see the Geula, then going out and looking at the world that way makes the Geula a reality in the world.

I know a Chassid who was working on a certain Moshiach project in the 1900’s. At every step in the project he would run into difficulties but he had complete emuna in the words of the Rebbe MH”M concerning the Geula. So he would say גם זו גאולה—applying the concept of גם זו לטובה to the Geula—and everything would work out well.

At the Moshiach Seuda on the last day of Pesach 5712 (1952), the Rebbe MH”M said that the Previous Rebbe would do a “Moshiach Dance” at the Moshiach Seuda. But, he continued, the term “Moshiach Dance” needs explanation. It could mean a dance to greet Moshiach or it could mean a dance with Moshiach—that Moshiach is here and we are dancing with him. So, the Rebbe MH”M concluded, since it’s up to us to interpret it, we will interpret it in a way that’s good for us—that Moshiach is already here and we are dancing with him.

In the sicha of 28 Sivan, 5751 (1991) the Rebbe MH”M made a powerful statement that expresses this concept most clearly:

“The Jew becomes a ‘partner with Hashem’…in bringing the true and complete Geula. In order for Hashem to carry it out completely He needs (so to speak) the participation of every Jew alive as a soul in a body, for it is through our actions and our service that the Geula comes. Hashem needs the Jew to agree to this and even more—that he should want it and announce that not only has the time for the Geula come, but that the Geula is already here, literally.”

Let’s be that partner.