Re'eh: the invisible
The parsha opens with רְאֵה: re'eh: see! It then proceeds to instruct the reader to see a blessing and a curse that is laid before him. It instructs us to see something that is not visible. These pronouncements would be unintelligible to a machine, the machine would detect an error: one cannot see blessings or curses ... or the future.
Clearly, this re'eh does not mean the usual eye-retina-optic tract-occipital cortex vision. Perhaps re'eh is better translated: imagine, generate the image. There is no object to be seen, only memories, ideas, dreams that can be synthesized into a vision.
The mishna yomi ( daily mishna cycle ) this week includes 2:9, the mishna in which Raban Yochanan ben Zakai asks his five students to describe the דֶרֶךְ יְשָׁרָה שֶׁיִּדְבַּק בָּהּ הָאָדָם , the true path to which a person should cleave. Rabbi Shimon answers: הָרוֹאֶה אֶת הַנּוֹלָד. haroeh eth hanolad, one who sees the offspring, presumably the products, of her actions. Again, the vision of what is not (yet) there. This is a synthetic vision that combines experience, calculation and honesty. A process that recognizes the complexity of the consequences of actions and realizes how what is born differs from what is conceived.
This week's New York Times book review mentions a new book by Eric Kandel, a Nobel prize winning neuroscientist whose lectures I attended as a medical student. I often recall one lecture that he gave entitled: "Seeing is believing but touching is the real thing." The lecture dealt with the complexity of the visual pathway in the brain. The points of sensation of light in the retina are processed into lines and the lines are turned into faces. Vision is always an amalgam of what is there and what we think should be there. The nervous systems inputs into the process block most humans from perceiving reality. Walter Isaacson says that Leanardo Da Vinci was able to represent the true fuzziness of edges, presumably how things really are - devoid of the neuroprocessing that simplifies the world for most us.
The distortion of physical reality that constitutes vision ( as we experience it) serves our daily lives very well, presumably better than a purer picture. But we should not distort what we see as the consequences of our actions, the blessings and the curses.
Clearly, this re'eh does not mean the usual eye-retina-optic tract-occipital cortex vision. Perhaps re'eh is better translated: imagine, generate the image. There is no object to be seen, only memories, ideas, dreams that can be synthesized into a vision.
The mishna yomi ( daily mishna cycle ) this week includes 2:9, the mishna in which Raban Yochanan ben Zakai asks his five students to describe the דֶרֶךְ יְשָׁרָה שֶׁיִּדְבַּק בָּהּ הָאָדָם , the true path to which a person should cleave. Rabbi Shimon answers: הָרוֹאֶה אֶת הַנּוֹלָד. haroeh eth hanolad, one who sees the offspring, presumably the products, of her actions. Again, the vision of what is not (yet) there. This is a synthetic vision that combines experience, calculation and honesty. A process that recognizes the complexity of the consequences of actions and realizes how what is born differs from what is conceived.
This week's New York Times book review mentions a new book by Eric Kandel, a Nobel prize winning neuroscientist whose lectures I attended as a medical student. I often recall one lecture that he gave entitled: "Seeing is believing but touching is the real thing." The lecture dealt with the complexity of the visual pathway in the brain. The points of sensation of light in the retina are processed into lines and the lines are turned into faces. Vision is always an amalgam of what is there and what we think should be there. The nervous systems inputs into the process block most humans from perceiving reality. Walter Isaacson says that Leanardo Da Vinci was able to represent the true fuzziness of edges, presumably how things really are - devoid of the neuroprocessing that simplifies the world for most us.
The distortion of physical reality that constitutes vision ( as we experience it) serves our daily lives very well, presumably better than a purer picture. But we should not distort what we see as the consequences of our actions, the blessings and the curses.
posted by Sheldon Goldberg at 10:41 AM
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