Rabbi Brad Levenberg
This past weekend, I spent time with friends on Figure Eight Island near Wilmington, North Carolina, friends whose history with the island reaches back many years. During a Shabbat afternoon bike ride around the island, our host pointed to different houses and told me about the people who had once lived there, the families who had moved away, and the newer residents who had taken their place.
When we arrived the day before, I saw the houses and marveled at the architecture. But as the stories accumulated, I began to see something else: I saw the traces of lives that had unfolded behind those windows. I saw homes that had held celebrations and disappointments, relationships that had deepened, and seasons that had come to an end. The island itself didn’t change during our visit, but the way I saw it sure had.
Our Torah reading this week comes from parashat Re’eh, which opens with Moses declaring, “See, I place before you today a blessing and a curse.” We often read those words as though blessing and curse wait for us at the end of the road, the consequences of choices already made. But Moses actually challenges us to focus not just on the end of the sentence but on how the sentence begins: before he speaks about choosing, he speaks about seeing.
We often encounter the world through the stories we already know and the conclusions we’ve already drawn. Yet every so often, someone points toward what was there all along and gives us the chance to see it differently: a familiar person becomes more complicated when we learn what they’ve carried, or maybe a place we’ve passed a hundred times becomes meaningful when someone shares the story hidden within it. Even an old problem can look different when we approach it with a question we haven’t asked before.
The instruction Moses places before us may not be about making a choice; it may actually be a challenge to look again and to remain open to the possibility that what we first saw wasn’t all there was to see.
Re’eh. See. Because sometimes the blessing isn’t found in changing what’s before us but in discovering what’s been there all along.
Shabbat Shalom.
