Waiting out famine in Canaan, Yakov sent his sons to Egypt to obtain provisions, but they were arrested and imprisoned by their long-lost and unrecognizable brother Yosef.
Held in prison, they speculated how they’d wound up in such a precarious situation:
וַיֹּאמְרוּ אִישׁ אֶל-אָחִיו, אֲבָל אֲשֵׁמִים אֲנַחְנוּ עַל-אָחִינוּ, אֲשֶׁר רָאִינוּ צָרַת נַפְשׁוֹ בְּהִתְחַנְנוֹ אֵלֵינוּ, וְלֹא שָׁמָעְנוּ; עַל-כֵּן בָּאָה אֵלֵינוּ, הַצָּרָה הַזֹּאת – The brothers lamented to each other, “We are guilty! For what we did to our brother… We saw his suffering! He pleaded with us, and we ignored him. We have brought this on ourselves!” (42:21)
But when we review the entire episode as it unfolded, there is no record of any such conversation to that effect. The story simply narrates what they did to him, with no record of Yosef’s cries or pleas, no mention of his suffering.
What were they remembering?
R’ Shlomo Freifeld suggests a frightening answer.
Sight is not an exclusively visual faculty. Our eyes govern the physical aspect of perception, but there is also a mental and emotional component; the way you process optical inputs. A deficiency in the physical element will result in blindness, but lacking the mental component results in functional blindness, if only in figuratively.
That’s what the brothers realized years later in a miserable jail cell.
We don’t need the Torah to tell us that if we were standing there observing this traumatic episode unfolding, we would have seen Yosef crying and begging them to stop their madness.
Instead, the Torah speaks to us with deafening silence. In their eyes, Yosef was trouble, an upstart pretender, a threat to be removed. It was settled in their minds, they had to be decisive.
But in other words, powerful emotions had clouded their senses. Caught up in the heat of the moment, any sound he made fell on deaf ears; the Torah records events as they experienced, with his silence.
Only in hindsight, sitting in jail years later, could they take stock of the terrible ordeal as it truly unfolded; they had been blind to the cries of their brother.
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?