Use Your Eyes for Good | Rabbi Doniel Osher Kleinman

There's a well-known concept that when you bump into a pasuk from the week's Parsha in your learning, it's a סימן מן השמיים, it's a sign from Heaven. Your learning intersected with the weekly Parsha, you're doing something right. We have the merit of having a daily Pele Yoetz Shiur in our Beis Medrash. This morning, we opened up Pele Yoetz, and from the hundreds of entries that the Pele Yoetz has, today's entry was ערך ראייה, was the entry about sight, about using your eyes properly. And I took it as a good sign and I figured it's probably a message from Heaven that there's something there that I should share with everybody else. The Pele Yoetz in the entry on sight addresses a question. We see so many things with our eyes. It's inevitable. You walk down the street, it's impossible not to see things. The challenge is הסתכלות, not to focus on it, but ראייה, we see everywhere. And oftentimes, the Yetzer Hara overcomes us and we focus on it, as well. And then we feel bad and we try to pull ourselves away. And within the struggle and within the failure, we can have successes, as well. But the Pele Yoetz says, What can a person do to rectify those ראיות אסורות, those sights that we see or that we focused on that we shouldn't have? And he says something incredible. Just like a person sees חבילות, bundles of sights that you’re not supposed to see, you can see bundles of things that are holy. He says: Next time you pray, take out a Siddur. And even if you know the prayer by heart, look in the Siddur. Read the words. Every letter that you will read is holiness that your eyes are being used for. He says: The next time you go to a Beis Medrash, look at a Torah scholar. If you have a Kollel in your neighborhood, you have a Yeshiva, you have a rabbi, look at him. The Gemara says, Rebbi says the reason why he was smarter than his friends, than his colleagues, is because he looked at R’ Meir's back. Could you imagine if he would have looked at R’ Meir from the front? R’ Yehuda says. He says: Use your eyes for דברים קדושים, use your eyes for holy things. And then he adds something. He says, Another way to rectify, The eyes had pleasure from looking at something, use your eyes in a manner in which they're deprived of a certain pleasure. And he says: Specifically, in the area of sleep. Stay up at night, learning. And the Pele Yoetz says, One of the most famous nights that Yidden stay up learning is Shavuos night. Everybody stays up learning, Batei Midrashos are filled, and people stay up and many of us are tired. Many people work on Erev Shavuos, many people are helping out at home, Erev Shavuos. It's very difficult to stay up all night. The Pele Yoetz says, If you stay up in the Beis Medrash Shavuos, by night, and even when you feel tired, you force yourself and you don't go to sleep, you’re driving sleep away from your eyes, that is one of the greatest ways to rectify the pitfalls of guarding one’s eyes. And it's such a beautiful thought. Instead of spending time mourning the past, we're constructive. We move forward. Not just in the sense of turning away from evil, but doing good. Use your eyes for good. Have an עין טובה, look at somebody positively, learn from a Sefer, pray from a Siddur, Hold those eyes open when you're tired, when you're falling asleep. Stay up and learn Shavuos night, even if it's not your custom. And you'll fill yourself with a קדושה, with a holiness, which will overpower and overcome any impurity that you saw, if you used your eyes for a prohibited thing.