The Right Kind of Eyes

A young father once went to his rebbe for chizuk. He was overwhelmed, raising his children on his own, barely holding things together. The rebbe was Rav Moshe Feinstein.

He came to Rav Moshe’s apartment unannounced, the way so many people did, and waited. The Rebbetzin told him it would be a few minutes. Then a few more. Then more time passed, and eventually he had to leave for home, to his children, without ever getting in to see him. He understood. On any given day Rav Moshe was carrying a myriad of matters for the klal. And still, he went home more alone than he had come.

The story of the meraglim, which we read this Shabbos in Parshas Shelach, reminds me of that afternoon. It is about the same thing: the way we look at other people, and what happens when we stop seeing them. Its great tragedy begins as a failure of sight.

Moshe sends them out to scout the land. The Torah says these men were kulam anashim, rashei Bnei Yisrael, all of them men of stature, leaders of the tribes. That is what makes the story so hard to understand. They go, they see, and they come back and break the spirit of an entire nation, leaving the people afraid of their own future.

The first question is what they did wrong. The harder question is how men like that could have fallen so far.

The Sridei Eish, Rav Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto who spent his final years in Montreux, rebuilding his Torah from what the war had left. In Lifrakim, drawing on the Zohar, he describes two kinds of leaders: a menahel and a manhig. A menahel keeps things running. He holds the structure together and executes the plan, and that is no small thing. A manhig does what a menahel cannot: he walks people into a future that does not yet exist. He meets an obstacle not as something that diminishes him, but as something that calls more out of him.

The spies, the Zohar says, were afraid that entering the land would cost them their place. The roles they held in the wilderness might not be waiting for them on the other side. And once a person is guarding his own position, his own future, he turns inward, instead of looking outward at the people he was sent to lead.

You can hear it so clearly when they say it: vanehi b’eineinu kachagavim, v’chein hayinu b’eineihem. We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we were in theirs.

The Kotzker noticed that the sin is not in the first half. Feeling small is human. The failure is the second half: “and so we were in their eyes.” How could they know how they looked to anyone else? They could not. They were so consumed with being seen that they stopped seeing anything at all.

What the spies lacked was not courage. It was a kind of sight: the ability to look at a person and see more than he sees in himself. And it has nothing to do with titles. A parent can be a manhig, or a grandparent, a teacher, an older sibling, a friend. A captain who keeps his team believing when the whole arena has given up on them. Anyone who helps another person glimpse who he might become.

Rav Shlomo Freifeld used to share a vort from the Alexander Rebbe about Dovid. Fleeing from Shaul, Dovid hid in the cave of Adulam, and the pasuk tells us who gathered to him: every man in distress, every man hounded by debt, every man whose spirit had gone bitter. Not anyone’s idea of an army. They had each been broken by their own lives.

And yet the pasuk calls each of them an ish, a man.

Dovid looked at people defined by their debt and their bitterness and saw the person underneath. Chazal call him yefeh einayim, beautiful eyes. Rav Freifeld said it does not mean his eyes were lovely to look at. It means he had the right kind of eyes. He knew how to see.

The spies looked at themselves and saw grasshoppers. Dovid looked at broken men and saw what they might still become.

Which brings me back to the young father.

That night a snowstorm buried the city, and it kept falling into the next day. He was home with his children. Anyone who has been snowed in with young children knows what kind of day that already is. He was spent, still unsettled by the afternoon before. And then the doorbell rang.

It was Rav Moshe, snow still falling behind him, who had come through the storm.

But he did not begin with the conversation the young man had waited all day for. He went to the children first. He picked them up, read to them, got them ready for bed. Only once they were asleep and the room had gone quiet did he sit down to talk.

He had not come to a man in crisis. He had come to a father, and to children, and to a home that had to settle before anyone could think.

The young father was Meir Zlotowitz, who would go on to build ArtScroll. But that night he was none of that yet. He was just a man at the end of his strength.

And what he needed first was not advice.

It was to be seen.

Rav Moshe had walked through a snowstorm to do exactly that.

Most of us will never be asked to cross a city in the snow. We are asked for something smaller and harder: to look at the people in front of us, even on their worst day, and find the ish.