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Oh, So Blind: Improving Your Spiritual Vision – By Pinchas Winston
I WAS ONCE speaking to a group of people who weren’t sure about God or Torah. Most of them had been passing through Jerusalem and were met at the Kotel by someone who convinced them to attend a class on Judaism. The others were beginners who came on their own. My goal was to show that it was worth taking the time to check out Torah.
At one point in the discussion, I asked, “What’s more logical, to believe that Torah was given by God at Mt. Sinai or not to believe it?”
This was the first time that I had ever thought of asking such a question, especially to such a group. I don’t even know where the idea came from. It just occurred to me that many of the people sitting opposite me and speaking with such authority were probably misinformed about what they were arguing against, so it would be necessary to set them straight.
This reminds me of a segulah people say to find lost objects, based on a midrash. “Rebi Binyomin said: Everyone is assumed to be blind until the Holy One, Blessed Is He, enlightens his eyes…” This means that we are blind to certain realities until God decides to make them obvious to us.
I’m reminded of another incident that occurred when I was teaching a group of three couples in the home of one of them. Two couples had limited Torah backgrounds and rarely questioned what I said. The third couple liked to learn, but only on their own terms. They frequently took exception to something I said, especially if it implied they should increase their observance even a little bit.
Once this couple took me to task for something I said, which the others had taken for granted as true. I was asked, “Why do you say THAT?” as if I had merely given my OWN opinion, which could be challenged and even refuted. I could see that the others, while not getting involved, were waiting to see how the discussion played out.
The problem was that my comments were based on years of learning, a tapestry of ideas and sources that would have taken the rest of the night to quote, distill, and explain. But if I DIDN’T immediately respond confidently, it would look as if I were backing down from my point, which would surely have an adverse effect on everything I would teach in the future.
I froze for a moment, and felt all eyes on me. My brain, which I tend to rely on for EVERYTHING, wasn’t responding. And that’s when, all of a sudden, this statement just flowed from my mouth, from where only God knows:
If you knew what I knew, you would say the same thing.
The brilliance of the statement, for which I take NO credit, became evident to me only later as I drove home. It basically said that everything I offered was well based in Torah sources, but they were too long or complicated to go through at that time. It also implied that the only reason some class members felt a need to argue was because they hadn’t seen the same sources.
The bottom line was that it wasn’t something they could argue about, and so they didn’t. In fact, from that point onward, they even seemed MORE respectful. I was extremely grateful for the siyita d’shemaya.
Now back to the group from the Kotel, to which I asked the initial question. The consensus was that it was more logical NOT to believe that Torah came from God at Mt. Sinai. So I went to work. Forty-five minutes and one long, heated discussion later, I asked the question again. This time, quite reluctantly, many had changed their view, and they KNEW the implications of their change of mind.
How did it happen?
By asking a bunch of pointed questions, and those questions are what this book is about.
