The 2nd blessing before (and immediately preceding) the Sh’ma sings the praises of Torah, and expresses the hope that Torah permeate our lives in every way. It then offers this beautiful, if also cryptic wish: “Make our eyes shine through Your Torah.”

One might imagine that this is describing the “glint in the eye” of a person enjoying the power of faith and divine knowledge embodied in Torah. But in fact that’s not really what the phrase means.

We can come to a better understanding if we refer to another prayer in our siddur, part of “Nishmat,” recited on Shabbat morning. There we read:

“Could song fill our mouth as water fills the sea

And could joy flood our tongue like countless waves

Could our lips utter praise as limitless as the sky

And could our eyes match the splendor of the sun

Could we soar with arms like eagle’s wings

And run with gentle grace, as the swiftest deer,

Never could we fully state our gratitude….”

This is an elegant apology for the fact that we can never adequately thank G-d for all that G-d does for us every day. Each of the phrases refers to an aspect of the human ability of speech (including grace, elegance, “soaring” rhetoric, etc.)

But what does “could our eyes match the splendor of the sun” mean? What kind of human ability is that?

To understand this, we need to know something about medieval concepts of optics. Today, we know that light enters our eye and eventually stimulates our optic nerve. Our ancestors did not understand this. They assumed that our eyes functioned like flashlights. The more light emanated, the stronger our eyes were, and the more we could see, the more there was about which to feel gratitude.

Going back to the prayer before the Sh’ma, we can understand the elegance, indeed the brilliance, of this expression. What we are asking G-d to do is help us use Torah to “shine a light on the world” so that we will see the world in a particular way.

And what is that “way”? It is a way to understand the landscape of our lives as a world of mitzvot waiting to be done, a world of “tikkunim,” corrections, to prepare the world as the “kingdom of G-d” (malchut shamayim), and an endless cascade of miracles.

Rabbi Robert L. Wolkoff