Parshat Re’eh: Nobody Can See It For You

Okay, there’s a grammar thing at the start of this parsha that I couldn’t unsee once somebody pointed it out. And the longer I’ve looked at it, the more it feels like it was written about me in particular.

The first word is ראה. “See”. Singular. Just one person. Me, look.

Then the next words, I’m putting a blessing and a curse in front of you, turn plural. All of you.

So it’s a strange little sentence, and I think on purpose. One person sees. What’s placed in front of everyone, together. The offer goes out to the whole room at once, but the looking is on each of us, one set of eyes at a time. Nobody can do my seeing for me.

See what, exactly

Here’s the full line. ראה אנכי נתן לפניכם היום ברכה וקללה. See, today I’m putting a blessing and a curse in front of you.

Two tiny words carry the whole thing for me.

The first is today, היום. This isn’t some one-time fork in the road I picked back at Sinai and now I’m stuck with the result. It’s in front of me today. And tomorrow, it’s back. Every single day, both roads, right there on the table again. Which, honestly, is the most hopeful thing I know, and I’ll come back to it.

The second is that the command isn’t choose. Not yet. It’s see. Before I can choose anything, I’ve got to actually notice there’s a choice in front of me at all. And most days I don’t. I’m on autopilot from my first diet soda to lights out, and I only catch it afterward, that there were a dozen little forks in the day where I could’ve gone the other way and didn’t even see the sign.

Re’eh is Hashem tapping me on the shoulder before anything else. Hey. Wake up. Look. There’s a choice here. There’s always a choice here.

The autopilot problem

This is the part that lands closest to home for me.

I almost never pick the worse road on purpose. I don’t wake up and decide to be short with the people I love most, or to check out at my own dinner table, or to say the sharp little thing I’ll be replaying at two in the morning. It just happens. On autopilot. In the half second before I even noticed there was a choice.

A few weeks back I flew halfway around the world to meet my grandchildren, a trip I’d make a hundred times over. And even there, in the middle of something I’d waited so long for, I’d catch my mind drifting. Reaching for my phone. Half somewhere else, when the whole point was to be right there in the room. That’s how sticky autopilot is. It’ll reach for the very moments you crossed an ocean to be present for.

I’m not proud of that. But it’s exactly why the first thing this parsha asks of me is just, see. The gap between the thing happening and me choosing how to answer it is tiny, and it slams shut fast, and if I’m not looking I sail right past it. I’ve come to think half of becoming a slightly better person is just widening that gap by one second. Long enough to catch the two roads before my feet pick one on their own.

I don’t get a vote on the first feeling. The flash of anger, the urge to snap, the pull to go numb, that shows up on its own. But there’s a beat right after it, and in that beat there’s a fork. And the whole parsha is standing there, gently, saying, please, just see it.

Open the hand first

There’s a line later I think is secretly about this same thing, and it changed how I understand a lot of my own stuckness.

The Torah’s talking about giving to someone who’s struggling, and it says פתח תפתח את ידך. Open, you shall open, your hand. It doubles the word. And then it adds a line I try to love. Don’t let your heart feel bad when you give.

Look at the order, though. It doesn’t say wait until the heart feels generous, and then the hand will open. It says open the hand. The heart gets sorted out second.

That’s backwards from how I’ve always run. I want to feel it first, feel warm and giving, and then act on the warmth. But the Torah’s telling me to move the hand and trust the heart to catch up. And here’s what gets me, that’s basically the thing that pulled me through the low stretches in my own life. I didn’t wait until I felt like getting up. I got up. And a lot of the time the feeling came chasing after the action instead of leading it.

I’m not going to fix it, and I’m doing it anyway

Right in that same part of the parsha is one of the most honest pesukim in the whole Torah. כי לא יחדל אביון. The poor will never cease from the land. Which is a wild thing to plant right next to now give. I’m basically being told, up front, this will not be solved. Not by me, not in my lifetime. Fine. Now open your hand. I find that freeing, and I did not expect to. Because the thing that stops me from doing good is almost never that I don’t care. It’s that little voice going, what’s the point, it won’t fix anything. The drop in the bucket feeling. And the parsha looks right at that voice and says, yes, it’s a drop, and yes, the bucket has a hole in it, now go pour your drop in anyway.

I don’t have to solve the whole thing to be allowed to help with a piece of it. That all-or-nothing math, where if I can’t fix it then I might as well do nothing, is a very sneaky way to end up doing nothing and feeling almost holy about it. Re’eh says pour the drop.

The one time joy is a commandment

Let me share where the parsha lands for me. After all the blessing and curse and choosing, it ends on the festivals, and it says ושמחת בחגך. You shall rejoice on your chag.

Rejoice. As a command. Which always sounded impossible to me, because you can’t order a person to feel happy. But I’ve stopped hearing it as an order to feel. I think it’s the same move as the open hand. Go do the things joy is built out of. Show up. Sit at the table. Sing even when I’m not in the mood, eat the meal, be with the people. Put myself in the room where joy is even possible, and stop waiting to get struck by it out of the sky first. Some of the most joyful nights of my life did not start with me feeling joyful. They started with me dragging myself somewhere I didn’t feel like going, because it was the right thing or just the thing on the calendar, and the joy met me there once I finally showed up.

When the curse is all you can see

Being utterly honest about something before I wrap up, because a mental health series that only ever talks about wandering minds and gratitude would be quietly avoiding the thing that matters most. The parsha says look, there’s a blessing and a curse. But there are weeks when the curse is the only thing on the table. Weeks when a person looks and looks and cannot find the blessing anywhere, no matter how hard they try. And it would be a lie to tell that person to just choose better, just see the good, just snap out of it. That is not what any of this means, and I would never say it to you, partly because I have been closer to that darkness, and more recently, than I tend to let on at a Shabbos table.

If you know that feeling, if some quiet part of you has started to wonder whether the people you love would somehow be lighter without you here, I want you to hear this from someone who has been close to that darkness and found the way back. That is the curse talking, and the curse is a liar. It is the same liar that convinced the spies that Hashem hated them while the sea was still drying on their shoes. It rewrites your whole history. It swears the dark is permanent and the blessing was never real. It is wrong on both counts, and it is wrong about you.

And here I have to take back something I said at the very start. I told you nobody can do your seeing for you. Most days that is true. But when the curse has blacked out the entire table, that is exactly the moment to let somebody else look with you. Call a friend. Call your rav. Call a doctor. Call a crisis line and let a kind stranger sit with you in the dark for a few minutes. You were never meant to find the bracgha alone in the pitch black. Someone standing beside you, pointing and saying it is still there, I can see it, hold on, is not weakness. Right then, it is the whole mitzvah.

The bracha is still on the table. I promise you that it is. Some nights you just need another set of eyes to help you find it, and reaching for those eyes may be the bravest looking you ever do.

What I’m trying this week

None of this is me having it figured out. It’s a list of things I’m bad at and would like to be a little less bad at. If any of it is yours too, we can work on it together. I want to actually see the fork. To catch one moment this week, just one, in the half second before I react, and notice there are two roads. I’ll miss most of them. Catching one is a start.

I want to open the hand before my heart is ready. Do the kind thing, the generous thing, the get out of bed thing, and let the feeling show up second for once. I want to pour the drop. To quit holding back until I can fix the whole thing, because I never will, and that was never the assignment. And I want to treat simcha like something I show up for, not something I stand around waiting to be handed. Get in the room. The feeling knows where to find me.

And here is the part I keep coming back to, the most hopeful thing I’ve got. I think the bracha is on the table today. And if I miss it today, if I sleepwalk through the whole thing and pick wrong at every fork, it is back on the table tomorrow. I don’t have to have seen it yesterday. I just have to look now.

That is a G-d who keeps setting the choice back down in front of me, patiently, no matter how many times I have walked right past it. So I am going to try to look. And on the days I can’t, I am going to ask someone to help me look. I hope, wherever you are, you will let someone help you too.

If any of this is sitting close to home, please reach out. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. In Israel, ERAN’s emotional first-aid line is 1201. Wherever you live, a local crisis line, your doctor, or one person you trust is a good place to start. You do not have to see it alone.

Mental Health in the Parsha is a weekly series about the emotional wisdom hidden inside the Torah portion, and what it can offer us right now. These thoughts are meant for reflection and conversation, not as a replacement for professional mental health care.