I have been working on a new curriculum for an adult education class on dreams and visions. At the same time, I have been undergoing successive cataract surgeries.

As you may know, an eye surgeon won’t do both surgeries at the same time. They do one eye, make you wait a week or two, and then do the other. I had the second surgery a week ago.

And so while I am thinking about dreams and visions, I am also enjoying a new ability to see, in a way I never have.

I began wearing glasses in the fifth grade, and needed them at least a year earlier. I remember how frustrated I was by the inability to see well, and how helpless I felt. Glasses changed everything. Not perfect, but an acceptable step in the right direction.

Over the years I became accustomed to improved yet imperfect vision. Now, after some five decades and two simple surgeries, the world is clearer and brighter than I had imagined. Glasses can compensate, but they are not the same as simple, clear vision.

I stepped out in the middle of the night this week to encounter stars I haven’t seen. Instead of a small blur, the Pleiades cluster was, for the first time, individual stars. I felt enlightened, seeing something so old in a new way.

In the Torah portion we read this week, both Abraham and Hagar suffered from vision problems. But for them, the issue was not the quality of their eyesight, but rather their state of mind.

Abraham‘s wife Sarah had decided that Hagar must leave the camp; Sarah worried that Hagar‘s son Ishmael might try to hurt her son, Isaac. And so Hagar took her son, a skin of water and some bread, and walked out into the wilderness.

When the water ran out, she sat and wept. But an angel of God appeared, and told her to look up. Doing so, she realized that a well of fresh water stood just before her.

Years later, Abraham was instructed by God to take his son Isaac up onto Mount Moriah, and sacrifice him there. As he lifted the knife over his son, an angel called his name twice, and Abraham looked up and saw a ram tangled in a thicket, which he could sacrifice instead of Isaac. (There is a midrash that says the ram was placed there by none other than Sarah herself, perhaps atoning for her treatment of Hagar and Ishmael.)

We use words for sight to explain understanding. We call exceptionally insightful people visionaries, seers, clairvoyants. We say that they are enlightened.

But sometimes our vision is clouded, not by physical limitations but by stress, fear, or anger. A psychologist will tell you that in those moments our field of vision becomes narrowed, as if we are wearing blinders, and we literally cannot see what is around us.

Unfortunately, my improved vision has not made me more insightful. In an odd way, it has complicated my life. I can now see things clearly that are far away, but need glasses to see close up. The opposite of my former state.

My hope is that, like Abraham and Hagar, my changed vision will allow me to see the world and people around me with greater clarity and understanding. And perhaps, help me remember the limitations of physical vision and concentrate on greater understanding.