Seeing Clearly in an Age of Fearmongers
Re'eh 5785
When I first started thinking about this week's parsha, I thought that everyone talks about the opening pasuk. I figured I’d try to dig into something less obvious, a corner that doesn’t get as much attention. The parsha is packed with mitzvos from eradicating idolatry, the laws of mourning, the blessings to the curses at Har Gerizim and Har Eival, and even which fish we’re allowed to eat. Yet, every detail seems to circle back and tie itself to that first pasuk:
ראה אנכי נתן לפניכם היום ברכה וקללה
See, this day I set before you blessing and curse.
The Torah presents things in stark terms, blessing or curse, with the key word being Re’eh, to see. Our task is to see what is in front of us, to stay awake to what’s happening around us, and to recognize God’s message as it applies to us as individuals. Like a good teacher giving one lesson, each student takes away something different, and that’s how it’s meant to be.
A prophet is called a Chozeh, a seer, someone who can perceive what lies beyond the visible. Prophecy ended in 313 BCE, which makes it almost impossible to be a false prophet in the classic sense. The category should have closed. Yet every time I glance at the news, scroll through a blog, or listen in on public debates, I’m reminded that we’re swimming in false prophecy. Maybe there are genuine prophets out there, but what’s far easier to find are the pretenders, people who see a skewed reality. Some proclaim the imminent arrival of Mashiach and a sweeping renewal of society, while others predict the collapse of Judaism if a certain policy is enacted. One camp sings the praises of a trend, the other condemns it as a plague. I’ve met people convinced they’d usher in redemption, while others state with the same confidence that Israel is about to collapse. So far, both groups are wrong.
I think of these false prophets as fear-mongers. If you don’t know one, count yourself lucky. The false prophet is the one who convinces people he alone holds the truth, that the rest of us are too blind or uninformed to draw our own conclusions. Isn’t that the very definition of fearmongering?
Cambridge puts it this way: “the action of intentionally trying to make people afraid of something when this is not necessary or reasonable.”
I would be remiss not to mention the timely words of Rabbi Berel Wein zt’l, who passed away this past Shabbos. Space doesn’t allow for his full essay, but its essence is clear. He warned that the danger of the false prophet is as alive today as ever. Charisma, utopian promises, and even seeming proofs don’t make a message true. History is littered with dreamers of dreams like Marx, Stalin, Hitler, and countless others, all who promised a “new order” and dragged millions into blood and ruin.
Rabbi Wein stressed that the Torah gave us a simple test: if a prophet or ideology pulls us away from Torah values, it’s false, no matter how compelling it sounds. Jewish society, with its deep hunger for meaning, is especially vulnerable to false prophets, religious and secular alike. His bottom line was blunt: the Torah’s command to ignore them is not ancient history but a warning as urgent as ever.
We still meet people who build entire worldviews on anxiety, claiming the outside is too dangerous and life as we know it will crumble if we step beyond their lines. Others swing the other way and wave off every warning sign as hysteria. Both approaches distort the Torah’s message.
Much of our suffering takes place in our minds, through anticipation of the worst possible scenario. As one wise man quipped, “My life was filled with troubles—most of which never actually happened.” Fear drains our strength even before anything occurs. Strangely enough, when the dreaded event finally arrives, the fear often fades, because reality is never as terrifying as imagination. Fear grows in uncertainty and feeds on what hasn’t yet happened. Experience, though, teaches that most fears pass without harm.
The Ramchal writes that creation’s purpose is to bring good to humanity. Trust means believing that good will come, even if it doesn’t arrive in the form we imagined. Fear creeps in when we insist that God’s good has to look the way we expect. The task is to rise to the level of Nachum Ish Gamzu, who said gam zu l’tovah, this too is for the good, without needing to script how salvation would play out. That kind of faith unhooks us from the illusions that keep us from living fully.
The Nesivos Shalom teaches that Hashem’s communication is woven into the fabric of reality itself. Every event, personal or national, carries a message for anyone willing to look closely. We don’t need fearmongers to scare us into obedience, nor cynics to flatten everything into coincidence. What we do need is the courage to see things as they are, without panic and without denial.
Chazal tell us there’s a heavenly voice that rings out each day, even though no one hears it outright. We aren’t able to catch it with our ears, but we can sense it in the world around us. In those moments, if we’re honest and attentive, we begin to grasp what God is asking of us, each in our own way.
It’s easy to get pulled into endless debates about the pros and cons of society’s hot-button issues, speaking from experience. The cognitive dissonance can feel almost physical, impossible to ignore. What’s harder is looking the prophets of our day in the eye and naming them for what they are. You can’t stone them, but you can refuse to give them power. You can tune them out, strip them of relevance, and rise above the noise long enough to hear what God is actually saying to you. That’s how you live with clarity and intention.
When the Torah describes the punishment of the false prophet, it says he spoke dibbur soro. Rashi explains this means words that never existed and were never created, pure invention, something God never told him to say.
That’s the warning for us too. We need to guard our own clarity, to be sure our thoughts aren’t leading us down invented paths. We have to check that our perspective is grounded, that we’re not letting ourselves, or others, convince us that someone else is out to harm us when really we’re just spinning stories.
Brené Brown writes in Manifesto of the Brave and Brokenhearted:
“There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers than those of us who are willing to fall because we have learned how to rise. With skinned knees and bruised hearts; we choose owning our stories of struggle, over hiding, over hustling, over pretending. When we deny our stories, they define us. When we run from struggle, we are never free. So we turn toward truth and look it in the eye. We will not be characters in our stories. Not villains, not victims, not even heroes. We are the authors of our lives. We write our own daring endings. We craft love from heartbreak, compassion from shame, grace from disappointment, courage from failure. Showing up is our power. Story is our way home. Truth is our song. We are the brave and brokenhearted. We are rising strong.”
That, in the end, is the path of faith. Derech emunah bacharti.
Re’eh teaches us to live with two simple categories: bracha and klala. Our task is to choose the path of blessing, and that choice plays out on the road each of us walks as individuals. The way forward is through emunah, the path of faith. Worrying, by contrast, is a treadmill. It promises progress while it only marches us back to the same place we started.
Faith moves us forward. It begins when we accept what is, imagine what could be, and absorb the messages around us as they were meant for us personally. There are many paths of faith just as there are many types of human beings. Fear is what insists on sameness, demanding conformity as if that’s the only way to survive. But that road never arrives anywhere, because it ignores the way we were created to live.
Respecting our differences is an act of faith.
The Talelei Chaim writes that we’re asked to use our seichel, our intellect, our power of thought, to make a deliberate choice in how we approach life and what it throws our way. The danger comes when we act on gut reaction or emotional impulse. In that state we’re not really discerning at all, just drifting with whatever pull feels strongest in the moment.
Re’eh calls on us to become thoughtful, thinking people. There’s a place for following the heart, for cultivating sensitivity and compassion and Ekev leaned on that theme. But Re’eh presses us to sharpen the mind, to weigh things carefully, and to let intellect lead.
The Kedushas Levi dwells on the word hayom, today. He explains that each day Hashem grants us a new clarity, a fresh understanding that we didn’t have before. Every day we’re given the chance to receive the blessing again.
He adds that choosing the path of Torah is choosing the path of blessing.
It takes me back to when I first started shidduchim. My father told me I should map out where I wanted to be in twenty years. It sounded wise in theory, but in practice it was overwhelming. I remember speaking to one of my teachers at the time, Rav Moshe Aharon Friedman at the Mir. He cut it down to two years, at the same time reminding me that the plan shifts every single day. You need to know the direction of the long road and you also have to adjust constantly, because every day brings its own renewed bracha.
When we think about nevuah, it’s important to remember what Chazal teach: a chacham is greater than a navi 1. The Ramchal explains that a wise person lives in a constant state of thought, always engaging the intellect. A prophet, on the other hand, isn’t necessarily a chacham. His understanding only reaches the level he grasped while in that fleeting state of prophecy2.
Clear thinking is essential, but intellect on its own is never enough. Human wisdom has limits, and history is littered with brilliant minds who reasoned their way into disaster. Torah asks us to root thought in something higher. Without that anchor, even the sharpest seichel becomes just another tool for self-deception. True wisdom is when reason and faith hold hands, when our thinking is sharpened by Torah, and our faith is deepened by thought.
Rav Yeruchem Levovitz, the legendary mashgiach of the Mir, writes3 that when we’re hit with doubts or events too tangled to make sense of, our instinct is to analyze from every angle. We turn over each possibility, imagining outcomes, trying to force an explanation. What almost never crosses our mind is that maybe this isn’t a puzzle to solve at all, but a test, a nisayon. Why insist things “shouldn’t be this way” and invent reasons to prop up our view? Maybe it was always meant to be this way, and we’ve been mistaken until now. The point is, the confusion itself is the nisayon.
He illustrates with the phrase we often say, originally said by Iyov: Hashem natan, Hashem lakach - God gives and God takes. If we define God as His unconditional giving role, then it’s naturally hard to understand how it could make sense that He is also a taker. But if we don’t rationalize His giving in the first place, then the taking also resists reason, and we’re left feeling disconnected from the process, in place of clarity. Either way, the entire experience is a test. Rav Yeruchem compares it to teasing a child with candy and then taking it away.
Rav Yeruchem explains further that when a prophet comes with a message, we shouldn’t automatically brand it false, but neither do we need to let it sway us. At Har Sinai, we were handed the straight path, so our task is to keep walking straight. We were given the ultimate truth, the Torah and that’s always our anchor. If someone, or something, tries to pull us away, we shouldn’t engage, instead we must hold course.
Rav Yeruchem teaches that if even once in our lives we saw things with total clarity, like a flash of lightning illuminating the horizon in the middle of a storm, that moment is enough. We may not always connect to our personal Har Sinai moment. However, we can try to return to it in times of doubt and darkness. We don’t need to wade into the shadows to test if they’re real or if they hold a new way forward. We should reconnect with the light that was already shown to us, the light that never left.
Rav Moshe Dovid Vali explains at length4 that this principle is the foundation for the rest of the parashah. It shapes how we mourn a loved one, without losing ourselves in grief. It guides how we eat, how we carry ourselves and how we walk the path of kedusha.
The world was created to be a dwelling place for God. Our task is to make that vision real. By seeing the world and choosing the blessing amongst the uncertainty. It may be easy to drown in the hopelessness and helplessness around us, but the key is to ignore the loud voices of fear. Doing so allows us to live as proud, active Jews who bring light wherever we go.
Bava Basra 12a
Sod HaMerkava, Klach Pischei Chochma 7
Daas Chochma U’Mussar vol. 2, maamar 49
Mishne Lemelech
Thank you for this!!
“Much of our suffering takes place in our minds, through anticipation of the worst possible scenario,” is something that hits home for me.