20-20 Blindsight

It’s midnight in the desert and I am standing guard at a post. My partner, Corporal Shahar, is fighting his eyelids, trying to stay awake patrolling gazelles and the occasional Ibex.   

I am trying to see. They had turned off the main lights a few minutes ago, so now there is nothing in sight. A kilometer outside the training base, I am limited to my ears.   

My commander comes. He gives me some funny-looking binoculars I never saw before and tells me to wake up Ofer before he did.   

I fastened these glasses around my head. They were infrared binoculars. A new world opened up. Animals darted back and forth not more than a meter from me. A jeep riding the perimeter came into full view. Seeing the moon in bright green was a new experience.   

Naturally, I did what anyone would do. I tiptoed to Corporal Shahar as he slept, and yelled “BOOO!”  

Watching him swing his fists left and right into the air was also a new experience.   

Opening Your Eyes with a Filter 

It is amazing that by restricting our vision, we see more. I went from full range of sight to only peering through two very small holes placed in front of my head. Doing so enabled me to see 20/20. This contraption restricted my sight to the infrared spectrum, but I could see it all.   

We do the same during the day. At work, I can see my friend. He has glasses. He is wearing a grey shirt. His fingers are on a long black keyboard. He is telling me to stop staring at him.   

At every moment, there are more than a million audio and visual signals bombarding our senses. Unless we filter or restrict what we decide to see, we will not see anything.   

That is the key to a happy life. Every morning, we recite a blessing thanking Hashem for giving sight to the blind.   

It is the filter He gives us that enables us to see. What if we expand this filter to our brothers and sisters?  

Free Hate 

The word we use for senseless hatred is sinat chinam. The literal translation is free hate.  

What is free? Anything you do not have to do anything for in order to get. Baseless hatred is when we refuse to filter out things in others that we do not like. We choose not to blind ourselves to what we think are bad traits in others. This often leads us to filter out their good qualities.   

As a result, we draw the wrong conclusion and lose the chance to serve Hashem and make a friend. This leads us to sin and sorrow.   

We are commanded to judge your fellow favorably, not to hate your brother in your heart, and to love your neighbor as yourself.   

To do that, we must reverse our filter.   

We must train ourselves to filter out what we see as bad, and dig as deep as we can to find something good, and only see that in a fellow Jew.   

It is our mission in life to cancel out every impulse to pass negative judgment on a fellow Jew. We are commanded by our Creator, our King, to see only good things in our brothers and sisters.   

Every Jew has a piece of Hashem inside him or her. Even if someone is not doing things that make it easy to see their innate goodness, it is there – and it is up to us to find it.   

This is the key to happiness. We can bring Hashem’s light to this world every time we see a Jew by saying to ourselves the first moment we see him, “I love you. You are a son of Hashem. He loves you.”  

Try it.   

The next time you see someone wearing a tattoo, look for something good in him and ignore the rest. The next time you see someone who rubs you the wrong way, look for something positive and force yourself to disregard anything else.   

The next time you meet someone for the first time, only acknowledge those inner voices saying good things about him.  You will be happier. Hashem will bless you. You are making teshuva for all of us.   

In our daily Tachanun prayer, when we ask God for mercy, we implore Him to forget the sins of our national past. In rectifying the sin of free hatred and replacing it with free love – offering our love for nothing in return, we are making the best argument for our Father to disregard the past.   

If we can fix this sin, we can bring Redemption closer and merit the reversal of the tragedy that baseless hatred caused thousands of years ago.   

Imagine – a change in your attitude can redeem the entire world for every Jew!  

You do not need to be the Prime Minster to make such an impact!  

If we refuse to see the bad in a fellow Jew, Hashem willing, G-d will refuse to see the bad in us.   

*** 

David Ben Horin is the writer and trader for Endurance Investing & Trading Daily. He lives in the Jezreel Valley with his wife and children, lots of Jews, Arabs, and the occasional shepherd.