Eyes to See | Rabbi Moshe Weinberger

The Ba’al Shem Tov Hakadsoh was a little boy. He was orphaned at a young age. And in those years, depending upon how wealthy or how poor, that's the kind of a Cheider you would attend. And the Ba’al Shem Tov was in a horrible home. The Cheider was in the Rebbe's house that was broken and ruined, and the wife seemed to always be angry, and the children were disheveled. He was a sensitive child, and one day he just had to run away. He actually cut school one day and he was in the forest and he had fallen asleep. And when he opened his eyes, there was an elderly person he didn't know, standing over him who knew him by name and said: Srulik, Srulik. And he stood up and he said: Srulik, I want to give you a gift. I'm giving you a gift, eyes to see. And the Ba’al Shem Tov said he didn't know what that was, but it turned out to be the greatest gift he ever received in his whole life. He walked back and he went to the Cheider. And now when he looked at his Rebbe, the Rebbe didn't look as angry as he had in the past. He understood that the Rebbe's anger came from the pain of embarrassment and poverty. And he saw that the Rebbe’s wife was really a lovely person and that the kids were great kids. He saw things that he hadn't seen before. He received this gift of being able to see. The eyes are a gift that Hashem has given us. The question is, how do we use our eyes? There's a Torah from one of the great Tzaddikim, the Avodas Pnim from Slonim. You can look at things in two ways. Look at me from the front, not the back. מי שמסתכל על החיצוניות של העולם הזה, A person whose eyes are fixated on the externalities of life, who looks at everything without those eyes of the Ba’al Shem Tov, שהוא בחינת אחוריים, אינו זוכה לראות הפנימיות. You don’t see the פנימיות. You don't see the true inner quality of what you're looking at. ומי ששומר את עיניו מלהסתכל בחיצוניות, But a person who guards his eyes, a person who lives a life of Vayimaen, a person who guards his eyes not to look at things in an external way, the Tzaddik says, זוכה לראות הפנימיות. You begin to see things inwardly in a different way. So the gift that the Ba’al Shem Tov received from that, who he believed was Eliyahu Hanavi, Srulik, I'm giving you eyes to see, a gift of eyes to see, he said, was the greatest gift he ever received. Our eyes, the eyes that Hashem has given us, are the greatest gift that we have. To the degree that we learn to look inward and we guard our eyes from being fixated on those things that we shouldn't look at, that curiosity is pulling us towards, but Hashem is telling us, I gave you a gift. Eyes to see. Look at what you're supposed to look at, and you'll begin to develop these eyes that see things inwardly. You'll be able to see good things in other people that you never saw before. You'll be able to understand the Gemara in a way that you never understood. You'll be able to see everything in the world in a different way, once you have those eyes and you have the gift to see.