Okay, there’s a grammar thing at the start of this parsha that I couldn’t unsee once somebody pointed it out. And the longer I’ve looked at it, the more it feels like it was written about me in particular.

The first word is ראה. “See”. Singular. Just one person. Me, look.

Then the next words, I’m putting a blessing and a curse in front of you, turn plural. All of you.

So it’s a strange little sentence, and I think on purpose. One person sees. What’s placed in front of everyone, together. The offer goes out to the whole room at once, but the looking is on each of us, one set of eyes at a time. Nobody can do my seeing for me.

Here’s the full line. ראה אנכי נתן לפניכם היום ברכה וקללה. See, today I’m putting a blessing and a curse in front of you.

Two tiny words carry the whole thing for me.

The first is today, היום. This isn’t some one-time fork in the road I picked back at Sinai and now I’m stuck with the result. It’s in front of me today. And tomorrow, it’s back. Every single day, both roads, right there on the table again. Which, honestly, is the most hopeful thing I know, and I’ll come back to it.

The second is that the command isn’t choose. Not yet. It’s see. Before I can choose anything, I’ve got to actually notice there’s a choice in front of me at all. And most days I don’t. I’m on autopilot from my first diet soda to lights out, and I only catch it afterward, that there were a dozen little forks in the day where I could’ve gone the other way and didn’t even see the sign.

Re’eh is Hashem tapping me on the shoulder before anything else. Hey. Wake up. Look. There’s a choice here. There’s always a choice here.

The autopilot problem

This is the part that lands closest to home for me.

I almost never pick the worse road on purpose. I don’t wake up and decide to be short with the people I love most, or to check out at my own dinner table, or to say the sharp little thing I’ll be replaying at two in the morning. It just happens. On autopilot. In the half second before I even noticed there was a choice.

A few weeks back I flew halfway around the world to meet my grandchildren, a trip I’d make a hundred times over. And even there, in the middle of something I’d waited so long for, I’d catch my mind drifting. Reaching for my phone. Half somewhere else, when the whole point was to be right there in the room. That’s how sticky autopilot is. It’ll reach for the very moments you crossed an ocean to be present for.

I’m not proud of that.........

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