We learn from the Torah about the power of the eye. In the book of Bamidbar (Numbers), God informs Moses that he is going to die and instructs him to bestow the special qualities of leadership upon his student Joshua, enabling him to lead the Jewish people. Moses then gave Joshua a lot more than what God told him to give. The commentaries remark that Moses gave him with a "good eye." This doesn't mean that what he gave, he gave with a good eye, but rather that he actually gave Joshua a "good eye." This was one of the special qualities that Moses granted to Joshua, empowering him to become the next leader of the Jewish people.
In the previous Torah portion, we read the story of Balak and Bilaam and how they plotted to destroy the Jewish people. Occurring almost forty years after the Exodus from Egypt, the intense drama of the splitting of the Red Sea had apparently waned and they were less intimidated by the Jews. All they knew was that an entire people was wandering around in the desert, approaching the border of Israel, with the intention of conquering the land. They had to come up with a plan.
Balak and Bilaam did, however, remember one thing from the past. When Amalek had attacked the Jews after the splitting of the Red Sea, almost four decades earlier, the Cloud that followed them had absorbed all of his arrows and he was unable to harm the Jews. Realizing that conventional warfare didn't work against the Jews, they needed a different tactic. Bilaam was famous for his ability to cause harm through the curse. A partnership was formed between the two when Balak sent messengers to Bilaam asking him to curse the Jews, and offered to pay him handsomely for his services. Their strategy? Penetrate the Jewish people through the "evil eye."
Commentaries on the Torah describe how Balak took Bilaam to a mountaintop in order to show him the very edge of the Jewish camp. He was already trying to affect them negatively with the evil eye.
It is significant to point out that this section in the 'Torah begins, "And Balak ben Tzipor saw..." The Torah could have used a different phrase like, "he heard," but the emphasis is on the idea of sight, highlighting a problem with vision. Their desire was to harm the Jews thorugh the power of vision, specifically through the evil eye.
What is the antidote to the power of the evil eye? We have to go back to the story of Yaakov and Yosef. Before Yosef was born, Yaakov suffered greatly while living in the house of his father-in-law, Lavan, the father of Leah and Rachel, and was unable to leave. However, something changed when Yosef was born to Rachel. With the birth of Yosef, Yaakov was able to say to Lavan, "I have done what I needed to do, now let me go." The commentaries explain that Yaakov was able to say this because Yosef was born possessing a special quality against the evil eye. The Talmud explains that for his entire life, Yosef, never looked at something that wasn't his. He simply closed his eyes to things that were none of his business. This was the secret of his success in overcoming the test of temptation regarding the continuous advances of Potiphar's wife. His power was hidden in the fact that he guarded his eyes by not deriving pleasure from looking at things which didn't belong to him.
When we see something that belongs to someone else and start to contemplate his situation, we need to quickly stop ourselves: It is none of our business what others have or how they acquired it. When a person doesn't derive enjoyment from something, it has no authority over him. Yosef's special quality against the evil eye was due to his ability to guard his eye from taking pleasure from things that didn't belong to him.
There is additional information to consider. Who was Bilaam? The Talmud states that Bilaam is identified in the Torah as Bilaam ben Beor. Yet, it also states that Bilaam was actually the son of Lavan. THerefore, we can conclude that Beor was none other than Lavan himself. Furthermore, as Lavan's son, Bilaam had the same evil eye. From the moment Yosef was born, Yaakov sensed the power of Yosef against Lavan's evil eye. As a result, he no longer feared Lavan and felt secure to leave.
Rebbe Nachman teaches that there are seventy nations in the world, each associated with a specific bad trait. Bilaam's soul encompassed all seventy nations, and due to this, he was saturated with the bad character traits of the entire world. When he wanted to harm someone, he used the power of his eye.
It might seem as though there is no way to be saved from this type of power. However, on a deeper level, we see that Yosef possessed the special quality against the evil eye because he never "fed" his eye on something that didn't belong to him. In fact, refinement of the eye in this way puts a stop to the power of each of the seventy bad traits that exist in the world. Bilaam had within him every single trait that each nation celebrated as its own. They were channeled through the power of his evil eye, bursting out to cause damage to the world. The way to combat the influence of these bad traits is by guarding our eyes, or if we do look, to look with a good eye. We need to realize that the eye has tremendous power and adjust our habits accordingly to this fact.
We mentioned earlier one of the definitions of a good eye: Moshe Rabbeinu gave to Yehoshua more than what God told him to give. The same should apply to us when we see that someone else has something good or nice. We need to pause a moment and then say to ourselves, "If it were up to me, I would give him ten times as much." Perhaps we see someone driving a nice car or our neighbor buying new furniture for his home. "Where did he get that?" we might think. Stop this type of thinking with a good eye: "If he is buying it, he obviously needs it. If only I had the power to help him buy something even nicer."
There are many other things, in a similar vein, that we can say to ourselves, because the bottom line is that it is none of our concern what is happening to the next person and his possessions. After all, these type of negative thoughts come directly from our own negative traits, which we need to uproot. It is not for naught that we have negative personality traits, we were born with them. The waste is when a person doesn't work to refine them in his lifetime. If we accustom ourselves to this kind of work, then we experience the exhilaration of transforming and refining our physicality into spirituality. In fact, this is the whole purpose of our lives. God gave us life for this very reason.
King David writes in the book of Psalms: The days of our years among them are seventy years... (Psalms 90:10), corresponding to the seventy nations and each of their negative traits that are entangled within us. These are what we must strive to refine and purify.
Translated from a Hebrew talk given in Tsfat, 1998. TZADDIK Magazine archive, Chanukah 5760 / 1999.
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