Open My Eyes

“Open my eyes, so that I may see wonders from Your Torah.” An Honest Question Young married man, ask yourself an honest question: how many years have you been fighting the same battle? The same habits. The same falls. The same strong decisions that fade away by next week. You put in real effort, truly and sincerely. And still, something never fully turns around. So we ask: why? Is the effort not enough? Do we need to try harder? More guarding of ourselves, more fences, more forcing? But maybe the whole question of “how much more” is mistaken from the start. The Problem: We Are Fixing the Wrong Person The Book of Psalms says: “Open my eyes, so that I may see wonders from Your Torah.” King David is not asking for new knowledge. He is not asking for more strength, or for more help from Heaven to force himself. He asks for one thing only: open eyes. “Open my eyes” means uncover them, roll away the covering from my eyes. The wonders are already there. The problem is not that the truth is missing. The problem is that the eyes are closed. This touches the root of our struggle. For years we fight our habits, our feelings, our behavior. But we never stop to ask: on whose behalf are we fighting? Who is the “I” that is trying to change? And it turns out that all the effort is aimed at the wrong person. Who Is the Real “I”? Here is the foundation of it all. The Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, opens by explaining that every person has two souls. One is the animal soul, which is drawn from the body and from the world. The other is the divine soul, “truly a piece of Hashem above.” This part has nothing broken in it. It does not need repair. It is truly a divine spark. The simple truth is just as Job said: “From my own flesh I will see Hashem.” From my own flesh, specifically. The deepest inner reality of a person is where the divine sight is found. So what exactly are we trying to fix? The animal soul. All that effort, years of work, are aimed at the outer shell, at the outside of us. No wonder it resists so strongly. You are trying to fix someone you are not. In the words of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, the true “I” is the divine soul, and it is not broken. The problem is not weakness. The problem is blindness. It is a mistaken identification with what you are not. The Answer: Not a War, but Waking Up This changes the way we work on ourselves. It does not mean less effort. It means a different kind of effort. Most of our energy should not go into forcing new behavior onto the animal soul. It should go into “open my eyes,” into deep reflection that shows you who you really are. As explained in Likkutei Torah, a classic book of Hasidic teaching, inner looking, real “seeing,” is itself an act with the power to turn a person around. There is a well-known parable. A man dreams that he is poor, truly penniless, and he suffers in his dream. Then he wakes up and discovers that he is the son of a king. He does not need to work hard to “become” the king’s son. He only needs to open his eyes and stop believing the dream. That is exactly how it is. A person begins to reflect and to see that the divine soul is his true “I.” He does this not with his intellect alone, but through real, deep Hasidic reflection, as the Tanya explains. Once he does, he does not need to “become” a new person. He simply stops believing the lie about who he thought he was. Darkness has no existence of its own. It is only the absence of light. And a little light pushes away a great deal of darkness. Fighting the darkness head-on wears you out. Lighting a candle brings the light back.