Vayar — The Eye as the Yesod of Parshas Balak

Parshas Balak — the sidra named for the Moavite king, though its true antagonist is Bilaam (Bilam), the gentile prophet hired to curse Bnei Yisrael — does not open with a deed. It opens with an act of seeing.

וירא בלק בן צפור את כל אשר עשה ישראל

“And Balak son of Tzippor saw all that Yisrael had done” (Bamidbar 22:2). The very first word of the parsha is vayar — and he saw. Before a single curse is loosed, before Bilaam saddles his donkey, before the angel bars the road, the Torah tells us only this: a man looked. And everything that follows unfolds from that one glance. The Sfas Emes, returning to this sidra year after year for thirty-five years, builds his teachings around a single, quiet axis — not what Balak did, but how he saw. The whole drama of Balak is a drama of the eye, and the question of how a person sees is the yesod, the foundation, of it all.

The clue is hidden in the architecture of the parsha itself. It opens with vayar Balak — Balak saw, and what he saw filled him with dread and hatred. And it turns, at its climax, on the same word: “vayisa Bilaam es einav vayar es Yisrael shochen lishvatav” — “and Bilaam lifted his eyes and saw Yisrael dwelling by its tribes” (24:2). Twice the Torah says and he saw: once an eye that comes to curse, and once an eye that is forced open to bless. The parsha is bracketed by seeing. Between those two glances lies its entire teaching.

Two Eyes: Avraham and Bilaam

The Sfas Emes opens his earliest teaching on Balak not with a posuk but with a Mishnah — the one passage that fixes Bilaam in the Jewish imagination forever (Avos 5:19):

עין טובה כו' מתלמידיו של אברהם אבינו ע"ה ... עין רעה כו' מתלמידיו של בלעם הרשע

A good eye (ayin tovah) marks the talmidim of Avraham Avinu; an evil eye (ayin ra'ah), the talmidim of Bilaam the wicked. The Sfas Emes asks the sharp question: what is there to learn from Bilaam that he should have “disciples” at all? A bad eye and a haughty spirit need no teacher — any fool falls into them on his own. And besides, did Bilaam not humble himself, declaring, “If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not transgress the word of Hashem”?

His answer is the key to everything. Bilaam's humility was a strategy. He reckoned his own self-effacement as a favor he was doing for Heaven — look how lowly I make myself, important as I am — and all his lowering was only a crouch before a leap, a way to climb to a higher rung of arrogance afterward. This, says the Sfas Emes, is the inner meaning of how Bilaam describes himself: “nofel u'glui einayim” — “fallen, yet with eyes uncovered” (24:4). Even when he falls, his eye is open and grasping; even his descent is a maneuver. “L'garmaihu avdin” — he acts only for himself.

The tzaddik's lowliness is the opposite. He empties himself not to gain a higher self but to have no self at all in the way — to know that no creature possesses any vitality of its own except the power of Hashem, like an axe in the hand of the one who chops with it. And here the Sfas Emes makes the connection that the whole parsha rests upon: the eye is the mirror of the self. A person crowded with himself — nefesh rechavah, a broad and grasping soul — can see only surfaces, threats, and rivals; he looks at the world and sees what he can take from it. A person who has nullified himself sees through the surface to the inner thing. Avraham draws all his actions after the inner vitality, knowing that everything is only the power of Hashem — and so a good eye follows of itself. The good eye is not a separate virtue tacked onto humility. It is humility, looking outward.

Covering the Eye of the Land

Bilaam's own words betray what truly enraged the nations. He describes Yisrael to Balak with a strange phrase:

הנה כסה את עין הארץ

“Behold, they have covered the eye of the land” (22:5). The Sfas Emes reads ein ha'aretz, “the eye of the land,” as the earthly, physical way of looking — the histaklus chitzonius that gazes at the world and sees olam hazeh standing in opposition to kedushah, the material as the enemy of the holy. That, he says, is exactly the false vision that Bnei Yisrael came into the world to cover over and nullify. For the apparent war between this world and holiness is nothing but achizas einayim — a sleight of the eyes, an optical illusion laid over the truth. In emes there is no opposition: the inner point of every created thing is the vitality of Hashem, and the husk that seems to hide it is only a concealment, not a contradiction.

Bnei Yisrael are the people who illuminate the world so that the seeing should be directed only to the pnimius within every thing — past the shell to the spark, past the yesh to the ayin from which it is drawn. And this — not Israel's armies, not its numbers — is what Bilaam could not bear. It was over this, the Sfas Emes notes, that the nations “became enraged.” What threatened them was not Israel's strength but Israel's vision: a people who refuse to be fooled by the surface of the world.

What the Evil Eye Cannot Reach

This is why the most powerful eye ever turned against the Jewish people came back empty. Bilaam lifted his gaze to find a flaw he could curse, and the Torah records his own confession:

לא הביט און ביעקב ולא ראה עמל בישראל

“He perceived no iniquity in Yaakov, and saw no toil in Yisrael” (23:21). Not because Yisrael had no faults on the surface — but because sin only ever touches the chitzonius, the outer layer. The nekudah penimis, the inner point, remains untouched, and that point is ayin, concealed. The evil eye, which can perceive only yesh, only the external and the tangible, is structurally blind to it. Bilaam stared straight at the inner light of Yisrael and could not see it — because the very faculty that makes an eye “evil” is its inability to look past itself.

That hiddenness is not a weakness; it is the protection. “Hen am levadad yishkon” — “a people that dwells alone” (23:9): set apart, above the reckoning of the nations, above nature and above time. The holy light of Yisrael is concealed davka so that no wicked eye can grasp it and no curse can find a handhold on it. Across the years the Sfas Emes returns to this again and again — the hidden good in Israel's separateness, the untouched core, the light that shines specifically from within its own concealment. A treasure buried where the thief cannot see it is a treasure that cannot be stolen.

The Bucket That Must Descend

How, then, does a person acquire the eye of Avraham rather than the eye of Bilaam? Through the very lowliness that the two prophets divide between them. The Sfas Emes hears it in another of Bilaam's blessings:

יזל מים מדליו

“Water shall flow from his buckets” (24:7) — which Chazal connect to the teaching, “Be careful with the children of the poor, for from them Torah goes forth.” True bittul before Hashem, says the Sfas Emes, is the dli, the bucket: the lower it is let down toward the source, the more living waters it draws up. The deeper a person lowers himself, the closer he comes to the wellspring, and the more he can raise. The vessel fit to receive the mayim chaim of Torah is a person's nullification before the Root.

So the good eye and the lowly soul of Avraham's disciples turn out to be a single thing seen from two sides. The self that empties itself is the self that sees truly and the self that draws abundantly. Humility is at once the open eye and the descending bucket: it lets a person perceive the hidden point, and it lets him draw that hidden point up into the world.

The Curse That Became Mah Tovu

And now the parsha turns. The eye that came to curse is lifted a final time — vayisa Bilaam es einav vayar es Yisrael, “and Bilaam lifted his eyes and saw Yisrael dwelling by its tribes” — and from his mouth comes not a curse but the line a Jew still says each morning on entering shul:

מה טבו אהליך יעקב משכנתיך ישראל

“How good are your tents, O Yaakov, your dwellings, O Yisrael” (24:5). This is the heart of the matter, and the reason — the Sfas Emes notes — that Chazal wished to fix Parshas Balak into the daily Krias Shema. Its yesod is one a Jew must carry every day: that every force of the Sitra Achra, every power that sets itself against kedushah, is utterly nullified before the ratzon of Hashem. Bilaam blessed Yisrael al korcho, against his own will — in the manner of one who “against his will answers amen.” In every generation, schemes are devised against the Jewish people; and in every generation, when a Jew holds firm and walks in emes, those schemes are overturned and made to bless. An eye that is finally made to truly see Yisrael can do nothing else. Forced past its own surface to the inner point, even the evil eye must become a mouth of brachah, and the curse itself comes out as Mah tovu.

To Be a Witness

So the parsha returns us to its first word. Bnei Yisrael are called eidim, witnesses — and a witness is, before anything else, one who has seen. Their task in the world is to look at creation and testify to the hidden King concealed within it: to see, in the very world that pretends to oppose Him, only the inner point of His vitality. That is what the nations cannot do, and what they cannot bear that Yisrael can.

The whole of Parshas Balak hangs on how a person looks. Balak saw, and saw only a threat. Bilaam was made to see, and the seeing broke his curse in his mouth. And the Jew is asked, every day, to inherit the eye of Avraham — to gaze at every thing, every person, and every ordinary moment, and to see the inner point of Godliness hidden inside it. To do that is to cover over the false “eye of the land,” to turn the world's concealed ayin into revealed yesh, to let the living waters flow from the bucket, and to transform every curse that comes near into Mah tovu. The entire sidra is folded into the word it opens with — vayar, and he saw — and the answer it asks of us is not what we will do, but how we will learn to look.

Summary: Parshas Balak opens with an act of seeing — וירא בלק, “and Balak saw” — and the Sfas Emes makes the eye the foundation of the whole sidra, which is framed by sight from Balak's opening glance of dread to Bilaam's closing glance of forced blessing. Two eyes stand opposed: the good eye of Avraham, which is humility looking outward and sees that all is only the power of Hashem, and the evil eye of Bilaam, whose very “humility” was a strategy for self-exaltation. Bnei Yisrael came to “cover the eye of the land” — to nullify the external gaze that imagines this world opposes holiness — and to train the eye onto the inner point (nekudah penimis) within every thing. That inner point is concealed (ayin), untouched by sin and invisible to the evil eye, which is why Bilaam “perceived no iniquity in Yaakov” and why Yisrael “dwells alone,” protected by its very hiddenness. Humility is both the open eye that perceives this point and the lowered bucket that draws its living waters upward. And so the eye that came to curse, lifted and forced to truly see, can only bless — “Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov” — for every force against kedushah is nullified before Hashem's will. Bnei Yisrael are witnesses: those whose avodah is to see the hidden King within creation. The yesod of the parsha is its first word — vayar — and its demand is not what we do, but how we learn to look.