Once on the New Moon of Elul [the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah], the zaddik Rabbi Levi Isaac of Berditchev was standing at his window. A Gentile cobbler passed by and asked him, "And have you nothing to mend?"

At once the zaddik sat himself down on the ground and weeping bitterly cried, "Woe is me, and alas my soul, for the Day of Judgment is almost here, and I have still not mended myself!"

I recently visited a rabbinic colleague who is battling cancer. We had been praying for several months for healing from blood clots, swelling of the extremities, gout, and other conditions that had left him totally immobilized before a chance visit to the emergency room, where an observant physician realized that the real problem was cancer, now in Stage 4. As we visited my friend said, with a touch of sad humor, "For months they were just treating symptoms—the gout, blood clots, swelling of the extremities, they were all caused by the cancer, which they weren't treating at all."

by Kirk Gliebe, Devar Emet Messianic Synagogue, Skokie, IL

Torah: Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17 
HafTorah: Isaiah 54:11-55:5 
Brit Chadasha: John 9:24-41

A recent study involving first-year undergraduate students in the United Kingdom found that 50% of British whites and 53.4% of British Asians were myopic.¹ Myopia, also called short-sightedness, is a common eye condition in which people can see nearby objects clearly, but distant objects appear blurred. Corrective lenses or surgery are needed in order for people to see distant objects clearly. Many of us struggle with the difficulty of physical myopia, but I wonder how many of us honestly admit to our struggle with spiritual myopia, spiritual short-sightedness? From time to time in our Messianic Jewish walk we find ourselves losing our ability to focus on the big picture. The distractions of olam hazeh, this world, leave us spiritually blurry eyed, incapable of picking out the important spiritual details that God desires for us to see so that we might live out our role as his Holy People. What is the solution for this? We must train ourselves to see our world through God's eyes and not our own.