November 15, 2024 / 14 Cheshvan 5785
“Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention” wrote Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman z”l. “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
Blind to the obvious and blind to our blindness…kind of a double whammy!
Each of the two challenging stories which conclude Parashat Vayera revolves around a moment in which the central actor sees, for the first time, something not previously noticed.
A despondent Hagar, out in the wilderness with her banished son Ishmael, suddenly experiences a divine opening of her eyes “and she saw a well of water.” A determined Abraham, knife held high about to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, suddenly experiences a divine staying of his hand; “when Abraham looked up, his eye fell upon a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns.”
Both Hagar and Abraham are apparently blind to the obvious and blind to their own blindness. The well and the ram were there all along. Indeed, they are ‘stimuli that (would) normally attract attention.’ And yet Hagar and Abraham fail to see them.
Rabbi Avraham ben haRambam (Abraham Maimuni, 12/13th century Egypt) understands the ‘eye opening’ as a moment of intellectual and spiritual awareness, an instant in which a person comes to recognize something that they didn’t previously know.
For Hagar and Abraham, that sudden new-found awareness saves the day. Overcoming their ‘effective blindness’ makes the difference.
Among the first blessings recited each morning is this one: Barukha ata Adonai our God, sovereign of time and space, pokeah iv’rim – who gives sight to the blind. It’s a request for the sort of revelatory moment experienced by Hagar and Abraham. May that moment come our way too, and soon!
Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi David
