I was scrolling Instagram when I saw him — a Jewish politician, a Green Party leader, doing the thing. The softening. The careful repositioning. The particular contortions a certain kind of Jew performs when they want to be legible to 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, a line surfaced 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 edges of 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, which means, literally, narrow places. Moshe 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 has stopped being able to imagine the view from outside. Or who forgot it entirely. “Remember this day…”
This is where the letter comes in. In Hebrew, aved (slave) is written with an Ayin — ע — the sixteenth letter, numerical value 70, meaning: eye. Also, in another register: salvation. ³
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 Bias ⁵ — 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 the end of the scroll, the 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.
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.
Root Systems is where we dig into the Hebrew and Yiddish words, the history, and the occasional rabbit hole that ends up on your wall — or just lives here, in the part of the internet where we get to think out loud.
References
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Shelo asani aved — one of the Birchot HaShachar, the morning blessings recited daily.
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Shemot 13:3 — Sefaria. Moshe instructs the people to remember the day of the Exodus as an ongoing, daily practice.
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On the letter Ayin — its meaning, structure, and the Arizal’s interpretation: Chabad.org.
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Pirkei Avot 5:19 — on ayin tova and ayin ra’ah, the students of Avraham and Bilaam: Sefaria.
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Rabbi Mendel Kalmenson, Positivity Bias — on the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s practice of finding the redeemable in every person and situation.