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What Do You See?

The Torah’s civil laws consistently emphasize the duties and responsibilities humans owe to each other.

In one of them, the Torah considers what happens when you find someone’s animals wandering unsupervised:

לֹא תִרְאֶה אֶת שׁוֹר אָחִיךָ אוֹ אֶת שֵׂיוֹ נִדָּחִים וְהִתְעַלַּמְתָּ מֵהֶם הָשֵׁב תְּשִׁיבֵם לְאָחִיךָ – Do not see your brother’s ox or sheep straying and ignore them – you should return them to your brother. (22:4)

This law is simple and consistent with the Torah’s vision, but its phrasing is unusual.

The law as practiced is about not ignoring someone’s lost animal but is phrased in terms of seeing – לֹא תִתְעַלם / לֹא תִרְאֶה וְהִתְעַלַּמְתָּ.

Why does the law talk about what we see instead of what we ignore?

R’ Shlomo Freifeld teaches that sight is not an exclusively visual function. Our eyes govern a physical aspect of perception, but there is also a mental and emotional aspect, the way you process optical inputs. A deficiency in the physical element will result in actual blindness, but lacking the mental component also results in functional blindness, if only in the figurative sense. 

As the Sfas Emes explains, the Torah does not charge us with a simple instruction against ignoring; there are genuinely things that we don’t see! But the Torah here makes us responsible for the way we look at things, and especially the things in our peripheral vision – the things we see but ignore – לֹא תִרְאֶה וְהִתְעַלַּמְתָּ.

When you change how you look at things, the things you look at change.

In this instance, the person you are helping isn’t even an active participant; your obligation to help exists independently of that person. There is no one on the other side seeking your help here, so it’s an easy one to avoid, and so the Torah warns us against the tendency to ignore our brothers and sisters.

Being unaware or not noticing aren’t good enough excuses. The errors and omissions for things we weren’t paying attention to are still sins that require rectification on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur – שוגג / על חטא שחטאנו ביודעים ובלא יודעים.

Every day, we ask God to open our eyes – פוקח עורים – which takes on new meaning in light of this teaching; it’s a prayer for clarity and perception, and it’s hard to overstate how important that is.

Your eyes aren’t enough when it’s your mind that’s blind.

Is there something you might be blinding yourself to right now?