Shelo Asani Aved

I was scrolling Instagram when I saw him — a Jewish politician doing the thing. The softening. The careful repositioning. The particular contortions a certain kind of Jew performs when they want to be legible in a particular room. Distancing himself from Israel, softening the language around antisemitism, making himself smaller — and different — to earn his seat at the table.

I felt anger first, then something closer to repulsion. And then, almost involuntarily, I recalled a line from the blessings we say every morning.

Shelo asani aved. Blessed are You, G-d, who has not made me a slave.¹

I sat with that for a while. Because what I was looking at wasn’t (just) someone I disagreed with politically. It was someone who couldn’t see beyond the narrative that owned him. Someone performing freedom while living in the narrowest of straits.

Which brings me to Mitzrayim — the Hebrew word for Egypt, literally “narrow places.” Moshe Rabbeinu tells us to “Remember this day” as a daily practice.² Because Egypt is a condition, the self-imposed borders we build out of fear, or the need to belong, or the desire to be the “good” kind — the safe kind, the acceptable kind — and then inhabit so completely we forget we built them.

A slave, in this reading, isn’t someone in chains. It’s someone who can no longer imagine the view from outside his condition. Or who forgot it entirely. “Remember this day…”

Then comes the letter Ayin. In Hebrew, aved (slave) is written with an Ayin — ע — the sixteenth letter, with numerical value 70, meaning “eye.” Two strokes. Two arms reaching down from a shared point. Mid-surrender, or mid-embrace, depending on how you’re looking.

According to the Arizal, the Ayin is structurally two eyes joined at the back of the skull.³ And the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot tells us what those two eyes represent: a student of Avraham has ayin tova — a good eye, a generous eye, an eye that looks for the redeemable. A student of Bilaam has ayin ra’ah — an eye that fixates on lack, on deficiency, on curse.⁴

The good eye doesn’t see less. It sees beyond.

All of this then brought me to Rabbi Mendel Kalmenson’s Positivity Bias⁵ — a book about the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s way of looking at people and situations, always finding the redeemable element as a trained discipline. He once said, “I worked on myself to look at things in a positive light; otherwise, I could not have survived.”

Ayin tova. One eye on what is, one eye on what could be. The capacity to see what is real and possible in a person, even — especially — when the person themselves cannot.

By then, my anger had mostly passed. What I felt instead was something I didn’t expect: a kind of gratitude. For the blessing I’d remembered, the framework that turned repulsion into awareness, and the letter that holds both eyes at once, joined at the top, looking in two directions without contradiction.

“Shelo asani aved” (שֶׁלֹּא עָשַׂנִי עָבֶד), in Hebrew “who has not made me a slave”.

We’re making a poster of it — the Ayin and this blessing at the bottom. Inspired, oddly enough, by a triggering post that landed in my feed this week. More on that soon.

_References

1. _{Shelo asani aved — one of the Birchot HaShachar, the morning blessings recited daily.}

2. _{Shemot 13:3 — Sefaria. Moshe instructs the people to remember the day of the Exodus as an ongoing, daily practice.}

3. _{Pirkei Avot 5:19 — on ayin tova and ayin ra’ah, the students of Avraham and Bilaam: Sefaria.}

4. _{Rabbi Mendel Kalmenson, Positivity Bias — on the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s practice of finding the redeemable in every person and situation.}