The Mesillas
Yesharim quotes the following Gemara (Baba Metzia 83b):
You laid down
darkness and it was night
(Tehillim 104:20). This refers to a world that is similar to night.
If we hadn’t
heard in the name of the Vilna Gaon that he didn’t find one superfluous word in
the first eight chapters of Mesillas Yesharim we would suspect otherwise
because just two sentences north of this quote the Ramchal says that the
evil inclination literally blinds his eyes and he becomes as one who walks in
the darkness where there are stumbling blocks before him which his eyes do not
see.
And we would be
wrong because the Mesillas Yesharim tells us that the darkness of night can
cause two types of errors in relation to a man’s eye:
- It may either cover his eye so that he does not see what is before him at all (as in there are stumbling blocks before him which his eyes do not see) or
- It may deceive him so that a pillar appears to him as a man, or a man as a pillar.
The Ramchal
tells us that the second error is the worse of the two because it stems from
the distortion of their sight, so that they see evil as though it were goodness
itself, and good as if it were evil, and because of this they strengthen
themselves in clinging to their evil ways.
We are being
told that everything in Olam Hazeh is total darkness. In a literal sense a
blind man is better off because he is not susceptible to the second mistake.
With this
teaching before us we can readily understand how hardcore Leftists, Islamists,
and their like can see wickedness and sheker as goodness and truth.
And we also see
that at the end of the day Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland was not an inversion of
reality. The Mesillas Yesharim makes it very clear that the bottom line truth
of this world is that due to the darkness of night things aren’t as they
seem which describes Wonderland to a tee.
Our world is the
real inversion of reality because it lets us think that things are what they
appear to be.
As we said in EmunahSpeak:
So Who are You Relying on… That
we live lives of misplaced reliance flows naturally from the fact that we have
misplaced reality itself.
Over and
above any improvement computers have brought to the lives of literally billions
of people alive today and billions more who have passed this way in the last
thirty years or so, they have also enriched our understanding of how Hashem
runs His world. The words virtual reality are more than simply a code name
for the digital Potemkin village that holds forth on every computer screen only
to vanish in a nano second with a flip of the switch.
Virtual
reality is also an accurate description of what we carelessly refer to as the
“real world,” the one we physically inhabit.
This is the
Ramchal’s darkness of night brought into the digital age.
So how does one
make his way through the darkness of night with his neshama intact?
Night vision
goggles!
That’s what
Rabbi Avigdor Miller z”l, would say if he were still amongst us. When he gave his aitza on how to navigate
through the sheker laden darkness of the night of this world, night vision
goggles weren’t known to the wider public so he used spectacles/glasses as a
moshal (example) instead.
He taught us
that the one and only way to
exercise one’s bechira (free will) within the darkness of night that is
this world, and land on one’s feet in the process was to see this world through
the words of the seforim (with his two most favored being the Mesillas Yesharim
and the Chovos Halevavos) as one looks through his eyeglasses.
It’s the only
game in town that isn’t rigged against you.
With merely
one’s own eyes to rely on a person can figuratively go over a cliff, and not
even realize it even after hitting the ground.
The irony of
this world, which is enveloped in the darkness of night, is that to the extent that you think it's real, it's not real at all. But
if you see it, or rather see through it for what it actually is, then it’s very
real indeed.
The darkness
that is night is the very antithesis of the phrase, what you see is what you
get.
Or maybe not.
Maybe what you see
is what you get after all if what you see is actually something in your
eyes, because if what you see in this world has substance in your eyes then
that’s what may well pass for substance in terms of your portion in the next.
