Windows of Precious Stone

This week I found myself sitting with the very first word of our Torah portion.

רְאֵה Re’eh. See.

It seems like such an ordinary command.

Except it isn’t.

Deuteronomy is the book of Shema (שְׁמַע) — of hearing, of listening, of paying attention. If Moses is about to launch into a long discussion of commandments, I would expect him to begin with, “Listen.”

Instead he begins with, “See.”

And what he asks us to see is strange in its own right:

רְאֵה אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם הַיּוֹם בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה

Re’eh anochi notein lifneichem hayom bracha uklalah — “See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.” (Deut. 11:26)

Not choose. Not weigh. See. As though the choosing has already happened somewhere inside the seeing.

That single word has been following me all week.

I have been reading Alan Morinis' Everyday Holiness, an introduction to the Jewish practice of mussar. Like many people, I’ve always assumed mussar was mostly about becoming a better person — more patient, more humble, more generous.

It is.

But what surprised me is that mussar doesn’t ask us to eliminate our middot (מִדּוֹת), our soul-traits. It asks us to bring them into balance.

Anger is not evil. Without anger, injustice might never move us. Jealousy is not always destructive, either. Being jealous of someone corrodes the soul. But jealous for — for a child, for a marriage, for justice, for God — can become fierce protection.

Even our most difficult qualities have a place. The question is not whether they exist. The question is whether they stand in right relationship to everything else.

As I was reading this week, I couldn’t stop seeing an image.

I imagined the soul as a stained-glass window.

Thousands of pieces of colored glass, leaded together.

Patience.

Gratitude.

Humility.

Joy.

Anger.

Hope.

Courage.

Compassion.

Truth.

Every piece its own color. Every piece necessary.

Then I imagined something happening.

If one pane darkened, the image failed there — no light could pass.

But if one pane blazed too brightly, the image failed there as well. Not from darkness, but from glare. One color overwhelming all the others.

What struck me was not the colors themselves. It was that the beauty of the window is never found by making one color brighter or darker than the rest. It is found in the relation between them.

I don’t know whether that is a perfect image. I only know I have not been able to let it go.

Then I came back to Moses.

Re’eh. See.

And I realized something I had never quite considered before.

I do not only look at the world with my senses. I look through my soul.

I began to wonder whether that is true for all of us. Whether we never encounter the world directly, but always through the soul we are becoming.

Everything I notice... everything I overlook... every stranger... every blessing... every wound... passes through the soul I am and the person I am becoming.

A window doesn’t merely hold light. It colors everything that comes through it.

Maybe that is why the Torah begins this portion with re’eh. Before asking us to act differently, it asks us to see differently. Or more accurately — to become the sort of people who are capable of seeing clearly.

Which changes the way I hear this week’s haftarah.

Isaiah stands before a city in ruins. He doesn’t deny the rubble. He doesn’t pretend the suffering was not real. And yet he says:

וְשַׂמְתִּי כַּדְכֹד שִׁמְשֹׁתַיִךְ וּשְׁעָרַיִךְ לְאַבְנֵי אֶקְדָּח וְכָל־גְּבוּלֵךְ לְאַבְנֵי־חֵפֶץ

“I will lay your stones in fair colors, and your foundations with sapphires. I will make your windows of agates, and your gates of carbuncles, and all your borders of pleasant stones.” (Isaiah 54:11–12)

I had read that verse many times without hearing it.

The Hebrew word shimshotayich (שִׁמְשֹׁתַיִךְ) is famously difficult. It carries within it shemesh (שֶׁמֶשׁ) — the sun. Many modern translations render it “battlements” or “pinnacles.” Yet Rashi preserves something even more beautiful. He records a reading he found among others — windows through which the sun shines, and set opposite them a barrier of colored glass, for beauty.א

I had to read that twice.

I came to this image on my own, or so I thought. A soul like a window of colored glass, and the light coming through. And here is Rashi, in eleventh-century Troyes, standing in front of the same verse and seeing almost the same thing.

Not one gem. Many. Sapphire and agate and carbuncle, each in its place, and the sun coming through all of them at once.

He promises this while standing in the rubble. I don’t think Isaiah is ignoring reality. I think he has cultivated the kind of soul that can perceive hope without denying pain.

Hope is one of the colors.

So is grief.

So is justice.

So is compassion.

The soul that sees clearly is not the soul without the color of grief... or the color of anger... or the color of longing. It is the soul that has learned how to let every color receive the light.

We are approaching the month of Elul, but we are not there yet. The rabbis knew better than to rush us from the grief of Tisha B’Av straight into self-examination. Instead, they gave us these weeks of consolation — seven of them, one for each week of comfort after the ruin. Perhaps they understood that before we can honestly examine ourselves, we first have to recover our vision.

Before we ask, “What have I done?”

We need to ask, “What have I stopped seeing?”

Have I stopped seeing beauty?

Have I stopped seeing hope?

Have I stopped seeing the image of God in the people around me?

Have I stopped seeing it in myself?

Moses says only one word.

רְאֵה Re’eh. See.

It is not only a command to open our eyes. It is an invitation to tend the window through which we see.

Perhaps that is where re’eh begins. Not with choosing. Not even with seeing. But with tending the soul through which all seeing happens.

Because the world we inhabit is shaped, in part, by the soul with which we inhabit it.

,שבת שלום

Student Rabbi Ben

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א Rashi on Isaiah 54:12, on שִׁמְשֹׁתַיִךְ: “And some interpret it as an expression of a sun (שֶׁמֶשׁ), windows through which the sun shines, and they make opposite it a barrier of kinds of colored glass for beauty.” Rashi records this alongside other readings: Targum Yonatan renders the word as woodwork, and Midrash Tehillim as the pinnacles of the wall. Reference: Rashi. (n.d.). Rashi on Isaiah 54:12 (A. J. Rosenberg, Trans.). Sefaria. https://www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Isaiah.54.12