The Eyes Have It

By: Larry Gordon

One thing I’ve been familiar with since I was four is eye doctors. I don’t know the medical explanation, but I was born with one uneven eyelid. It’s called a ptosis, which is a drooping of the upper eyelid, and from my earliest years my parents have taken me to eye doctors. I don’t remember much, except the time I spent a week in the hospital to fix my eyelid.

I’m not saying the doctors did not do a great job, but after the surgery, it turns out that one of my eyelids did not close completely while I was asleep. Back when I was a teenager in camp, some of my bunkmates complained that I was ignoring them. The fact of the matter is that one of my eyes was half-closed, so they assumed I was awake, but just not responding. That was a long time ago.

The one thing I did learn from this lifelong ordeal was that our eyes are probably the most complex organ in the human body. Thankfully, this eyelid thing did not really impact my vision very much, but for an entirely different reason I began wearing glasses at about the same age of 4 years.

So, like almost everyone else, I get my eyes checked every year or so. Sometimes my eyeglasses need to be adjusted a bit to make them stronger, and over the years I was introduced to the idea of progressive lenses. If you have them, you understand that they take a bit of time to adjust to.

But then a few years ago, I met Dr. Norman Saffra, and he introduced me to the deep biblical references regarding the role that our eyes play in our lives. Dr. Saffra is a Torah scholar and an extraordinary physician and a man who see very differently than the rest of us. His book, “The Eyes of Isaac: Ophthalmic Care through the Prism of Judaism,” examines, or should I say explores, everything we can grasp about the eyes from a technical as well as Biblical and Talmudic perspective.

Once you read “The Eyes of Isaac” you’ll never look at eyes the same way.

Yitzchak Avinu is one of the few people in the Torah that we learn had an eye condition. (Actually, we’re also told that Bilaam was blind in one eye.) Apparently, Yitzchak could have used an eye expert like Dr. Saffra, if such a medical specialty had been available at the time.

It’s not in his book, but we’re told by our commentaries that Yaakov was able to fool his father Yitzchak into thinking he was his brother Esav because of his father’s poor vision. Some of our commentators also explain that Yitzchak’s poor eyesight may have resulted from possibly several different complications that affected his vision.

One commentary states that the tears of the angels dripped into Yitzchak’s eyes as he was brought to Mount Moriah during the Akeidah. Other commentaries mention that the wives of Esav, who were idol worshippers, would burn incense that damaged their father-in-law’s eyes.

Dr. Saffra’s book starts with the reference to the berachah that we recite every morning that blesses Hashem for “giving sight to the blind.” The next fascinating observation by Dr. Saffra is about those of us who attended yeshiva and how the various types of fonts in sefarim force us to strain our eyes.

Milton Kramer, who lived here in the Five Towns and was my friend for many years, told me he was excused from serving in the U.S. Air Force because of Rashi. Milton passed away a few years ago at the age of 100. He told me that due to the fact that he squinted while in yeshiva trying to read Rashi, his eyesight became strained to the point that he could not pass an eye test to serve in the U.S. Air Force. Milton told me that he did indeed serve and was a bomb specialist stationed in Africa during World War II.

Dr. Saffra points out at the beginning of his book that he feels that the Torah goes into some detail about Yitzchak Avinu’s eyesight problems to teach us to be sensitive to people who have vision difficulties, and the Torah certainly accomplishes that.

“The Eyes of Isaac” gives us a unique understanding about how we as G-d’s creatures can use this unusual ability to see and understand, a description that can be used on a variety of different levels of understanding.

Dr. Saffra points out how the Torah uses references to seeing versus understanding. For example, he points out that right at the beginning of the Torah, it states: “And G-d saw that it was good,” after creating something. That is very valuable insight into the way we see and indeed understand so much.

Dr. Saffra adds: “When G-d evaluated what He had created, He was looking at the physical world, but He saw something nonphysical and that is “the good.” The verse gives us the paradigm for using both our actual and transcendent vision.

In the course of writing this essay, I wrote to Dr. Saffra just to confirm my impression that the eye is indeed the most miraculous and intricate part of the human body. Most of us are familiar with a few terms related to the eyes, such as the retina, the iris, and the cornea that we may remember from our elementary school science classes.

But there are other parts of the eye that most of us have no idea are so vital to our sight. There’s the sclera, the vitreous humor, and the choroid, which we may not familiar with unless we attended medical school.

Norman Saffra is not just your average eye doctor. He’s also a Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine as well as Director of Ophthalmology at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn.

Dr. Saffra takes time off from his Long Island medical practice every year to do volunteer eye surgeries on difficult cases in Israel, and also in other parts of the world.

If you need information about an eye issue and would like to know more, you may find it in this remarkable volume. In addition to Dr. Saffra, there are contributions from other medical professionals as well as rabbinical insights from Rabbi Ya’akov Trump and Rabbi Baruch Fogel.

Dr. Norman Saffra is an eye doctor you want on your side, working for you when you or a family member or a friend needs an expert consultation on anything having to do with the eye or one’s eyesight.

It’s an important book. As the cover says, “Ophthalmic Care through the Prism of Judaism.” After reviewing “The Eyes of Isaac” by Dr. Norman Saffra, if at some point you find yourself discussing a part of the book with a friend, you’ll no doubt find yourself saying something like, “I hope you see what I mean.” n

Read more of Larry Gordon’s articles at 5TJT.com. Follow 5 Towns Jewish Times on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for updates and live videos. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome at 5TJT.com and on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.