Parsha Re’eh: See God’s ‘ordinary’ blessings

By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California

See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse (Deut. 11:26).

The question is almost too obvious: Who in their right mind would choose the curse? Yet the Torah insists on presenting both options as if the choice were genuinely in doubt. Apparently, human beings have a remarkable talent for missing the obvious.

The name of the parsha itself offers the first clue. Re’eh — “See.” Not “think,” not “feel,” not even “believe.” See. The capacity to notice is the precondition of blessing.

An old yeshiva story makes the point better than any sermon. A rebbe held up a large blank sheet of paper with a single black dot in the center and asked his students what they saw. “A black mark,” they answered in unison. “Nothing else?” he pressed. Silence. “I’m surprised,” he said. “You have completely overlooked the most important thing — the entire sheet of paper.”

We are experts at fixating on the black dots of life: the disappointment, the slight, the unexpected bill. Meanwhile the white space — the ordinary, unspectacular blessings that actually sustain us — goes unnoticed.

Last week’s parsha already warned us: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3). Bread keeps the body upright. Meaning keeps the soul from collapsing. Frankl learned this the hard way in the camps: the will to meaning outranks both Freud’s pleasure and Adler’s power. Without it, even abundance feels like scarcity.

And scarcity of vision turns even blessings into curses. Wealth is the classic example. The same bank account that can fund a scholarship or quiet a neighbor’s panic can also buy isolation, anxiety, and the peculiar unhappiness that only the very rich seem able to afford. Andrew Carnegie once observed that laughing millionaires are rare. Howard Hughes offers an even starker illustration. One of the wealthiest men of the twentieth century ended his days in self-imposed isolation, terrified of germs, surviving on a narrow diet, and cut off from almost every ordinary human pleasure. The fortune that should have enlarged his life instead contracted it to a handful of darkened hotel rooms. Money is neither sacred nor demonic; it is simply dangerous in proportion to our inability to see past it.

The Torah therefore does not merely command generosity; it trains perception: “You shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother… you shall open your hand to him” (Deut. 15:7–8). An open hand requires an open eye first. Tzedakah is not primarily about the transfer of funds; it is about the refusal to let another person’s need remain invisible.

The same discipline of seeing appears in the dietary laws scattered throughout the parsha. Kashrut is not a culinary obstacle course designed to keep the kitchen interesting. It is a daily practice of discrimination — learning to distinguish what may enter the body from what may not. If we cannot train the eye to notice the difference between the permitted and the forbidden on the plate, how will we notice the difference between blessing and curse when the stakes are higher?

Even the laws of the tithe and the sabbatical release of debts push in the same direction. They force us to look up from our private ledgers long enough to notice that the land, the produce, and ultimately the money itself are not absolute possessions. They are held in trust. The person who cannot see this will eventually treat both people and property as commodities — and then wonder why the blessing has somehow turned sour.

So the practical advice of Re’eh is deceptively simple. Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole. Notice the white paper. Practice the small discriminations of kashrut and the larger ones of tzedakah. And when the black dots inevitably appear — as they always do — remember that they occupy only a fraction of the page.

If we can manage even that much seeing, the blessing is already half-chosen.