DO WE HAVE A TRULY PERCEPTIVE EYE?

One of the teachings that open the second perek of Avot deals with the idea that we are under constant observation:

הִסְתַּכֵּל בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, וְאֵין אַתָּה בָא לִידֵי עֲבֵרָה, דַּע מַה לְּמַֽעְלָה מִמָּךְ, עַֽיִן רוֹאָה וְאֹֽזֶן שׁוֹמַֽעַת, וְכָל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ בְּסֵֽפֶר נִכְתָּבִים

Contemplate three things, and you will not come to the grip of transgression: Know what is above from you: a seeing eye, a listening ear, and all your deeds are inscribed in a book.

This teaching, by Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, may be the subject of more blogposts on Avot Today than any other mishnah in Avot. Yet there is always more to be said about it.

I recently found myself reading a profound comment by Rabbi Norman Lamm, quoted in Foundation of Faith, a compendium of Avot-related thoughts by Rabbi Lamm compiled by his son-in-law Rabbi Mark Dratch. The quote opens by framing the mishnah within humankind’s quest to restore itself to the state of blissful spiritual innocence that existed before we tasted sin and the knowledge that flowed from it:

“When our first ancestors sinned, they lost their spiritual vision and instead were confined to their material views. If we are to live lives that are decent and blameless and genuinely Jewish, then we must reverse the process”.

This is a magnificent ideal for which to strive—but the question remains: how to achieve this? Rabbi Lamm answers this by listing the three means of surveillance spelled out in our mishnah. Focusing on the seeking eye, he continues:

“Perhaps what [the Rabbis of the Mishnah] referred to is not, as is the usual interpretation, a heavenly, angelic or divine eye, but a higher human eye They perhaps meant to tell us that there is something lema’alah, something higher and nobler mimkha [literally ‘from you’], which issues from the deepest recesses of our selfhood, and that it: an ayin ro’ah, a seeing eye, a spiritual vision, a new way of looking at the world”.

The idea that the “seeing eye” that watches and assesses our every word and deed is actually our own heightened perception of ourselves is profound. But is it valid?

People who act badly, commit crimes and fail to confirm to basic standards of morality do not normally regard themselves as being bad in themselves, and it is a common human reaction for a person, when faced with his or her wrongful act, to seek to excuse or justify it. This suggests that the heightened perception of ourselves which Rabbi Lamm describes is something that we can all switch off when we wish to do so.

Another challenge to the heightened perception hypothesis is that it assumes that we are fully aware of what we do any why we do it. This denies scope to the operation of the human subconscious. Can we meaningfully perceive and respond to our own assessment of elements of our actions and thoughts of which we are unaware?

Having said all this, there remains something deeply appealing about Rabbi Lamm’s idea with respect to our own rational thought processes regarding acts as yet uncommitted and words as yet unsaid. The thought of how we might view them objectively, and measure them against higher standards than those imposed by our own desires and preferences, might well deter us from committing a wrong—which after all is what the mishnah is about.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.

Are we all really pagans?

Following on from my previous post on being watched, I recently read this passage, which stopped me in my tracks:

It is childish, and pagan, to anthropomorphize God as an “eye in the sky”, watching our every move. It is more mature to focus on our mental and spiritual awareness of the reality of God in our lives.

Admittedly I have taken this passage out of context, but its meaning is clear and it troubled me nonetheless. Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi (Avot 2:1) teaches:

הִסְתַּכֵּל בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, וְאֵין אַתָּה בָא לִידֵי עֲבֵרָה, דַּע מַה לְּמַֽעְלָה מִמָּךְ, עַֽיִן רוֹאָה וְאֹֽזֶן שׁוֹמַֽעַת, וְכָל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ בְּסֵֽפֶר נִכְתָּבִים

Contemplate three things, and you will not come to the hands of transgression: Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a listening ear, and all your deeds being inscribed in a book.

I am uncomfortable with the suggestion that this Mishnah is a childish anthropomorphism and I do not believe that R’ Yehudah HaNasi intended it as such, either. He is inviting us to conduct a thought experiment, at any moment when we might be tempted to do contravene Jewish law or the moral standards that accompany it: we can ask ourselves to imagine that we are being watched by the God who is also our judge.  If, at the point of sinning, we can “focus on our mental and spiritual awareness of the reality of God in our lives”, this would indeed demonstrate a greater maturity on our part. But, in general, which is the more direct route to stopping us when we are in “about to flout” mode?

….. ….. ….. ….. ….. …..

The quote above comes from Rabbi Anthony Manning’s halachic analysis in Reclaiming Dignity (Mosaica 2023) at p.237.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook click here.

Our children are always watching

In the opening mishnah of the second perek, Rebbi (Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi) teaches:

הִסְתַּכֵּל בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, וְאֵין אַתָּה בָא לִידֵי עֲבֵרָה, דַּע מַה לְּמַֽעְלָה מִמָּךְ, עַֽיִן רוֹאָה וְאֹֽזֶן שׁוֹמַֽעַת, וְכָל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ בְּסֵֽפֶר נִכְתָּבִים

Contemplate three things and you will not come to the grip of transgression: Know what is above you—a seeing eye, a listening ear, and all your deeds being inscribed in a book.

This teaching clearly caught the imagination of R’ Jonathan Muskat, Rabbi of the Young Israel of Oceanside and the author of this piece (“Our children are always watching”) which was recently posted to the Times of Israel. There he writes:

There is a mishna in Pirkei Avot that scared me as a young boy. The mishna states that, “ayin ro-ah, v-ozen sho-ma-at v’chol ma-asecha ba-sefer nichtavin.” There is an eye that sees, an ear that hears and all of our deeds are written in a book. God is watching everything we do. We constantly live under a microscope. This thought can be so frightening and paralyzing that we may tend to ignore it. But sometimes we are reminded that we are being watched, not by God, but by our children. Very often, we don’t even realize how the smallest things that we do as parents can be so impactful on our children.

My initial reaction was that this comment had nothing to do with Rebbi’s teaching at all. The mishnah was surely focusing on how we should cultivate God-consciousness as a means of reducing and ideally eliminating the possibility of doing something wrong. The reference to children watching us was cute but only tangentially relevant. My second thought was quite different.

Rebbi lived some eighteen centuries ago, at a time when people in general—and not just Jews—had a far greater sense of God-awareness than we do today. He lived in an era in which lives were far more closely linked to their immediate environments than ours are today, a time when people’s perceptions of cause and event, of reward and punishment, were sharper and more immediate than they are now. We can imagine how much easier it is to be aware of God in a society which the main events of one’s day are so much more closely related to one’s survival than they are today: growing and harvesting crops, animal husbandry, preserving one’s water supply and making one’s own clothes. Heaven hung directly above their heads and they were acutely aware of it.

In modern society we have surrounded ourselves with so many man-made distractions: the average American, I once read, has about five hours a day in which he or she is neither working nor engaged in domestic chores. Much of that time is taken up with the pursuit of leisure and/or pleasure, if the scale of the entertainment and recreation-based industries is anything to go by. In theory a practising Jew would spend most or all of that time learning Torah and contemplating divine matters, and this aim can be fulfilled by those who are fortunate enough to be supported in their full-time learning—but it would do no-one an injustice to suggest that most of us do not reach that level, at least on a daily basis.

But if we no longer succeed in keeping God in mind 24/7 as we go about our lives and remember that He is watching us, we still have the children. In the case of our own children, we know how impressionable they are and how quickly they mimic our actions and (sometimes embarrassingly) our speech. We are also aware of other people’s children too. An example that springs to mind is that of the adult who happily crosses the road against a red light when no-one watches him, but who will take care to cross on the green, or to use a pedestrian crossing, if small children might get the wrong idea and copy him with tragic results.

Children are not God. But R’ Akiva reminds us (Avot 3:18) that we are all created in His image, and that includes the children who carefully note what we say and do. Maybe this is why R’ Shimon ben Yehudah (Avot 6:8) lists children among those things that are befitting not only to the righteous but to the world at large.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook click here.