Mishlei #16 Ch4-V25-Ch5-V9

Shlomo Amalek is talking to us about if we choose a life of wisdom, a life of goodness, Pasek Chafhei, Einecha, your eyes, Lanochach Yabitu, they will gaze directly, meaning you'll keep looking forward, and your eyelids will straighten before you.

And what that means, according to the simple understanding of this Pasuk, and the next Pasuk, which I'm going to read together, way out the footsteps of your feet, I'm going to come back to this, and all of your paths will be straight, meaning, if you do your part, then everything will respond in kind, So this verse here means the same thing.

If you keep your eyes directed towards the right direction, then your eyelids will straighten things out for you, meaning there will be a reaction where the things that are before you, the things that come before you, will be the important things.

If you focus on important things, then life itself will make it that the important things are available for you to focus on, like in the next verse.

If you... direct yourself, your feet, in the right way, then situations will be such that wherever you go will be where you need to be.

So if you do your part to focus on the right things, and the way the Rashi says it, if you look at what's true, and you look at what's right, then your eyelids, they will help you to see straight.

And the words afapecha, afapayim, is eyelids.

It's an interesting word because the word of means to fly or to flutter.

So afapayim would translate literally into flutterers.

That's where your eyelids are.

But the way that it's explained is that your eyes, you can choose the direction, but the eyelids, that's more opening and closing your eyes.

And so what we're saying is that if you try to look at the right things, then your eyelids, almost like automatically, will show you the things that you need to see and not show you the things that you don't need to see.

There's an interesting take on this in the Gemara in Megillah.

The Gemara is discussing the rule that when you, a sofer, when someone's a scribe, you're not allowed to be a scribe, a sofer, from memory.

You have to have a text in front of you that you're copying out of.

Asks the Gemara, is that true? And when he arrived at this place, no one had a Megillah.

And so he wrote for this community, he wrote them a Megillah by heart.

And then they had no one to read it, so he read it for them.

So you see that Rabbi Meir wrote an entire Megillah scroll from memory.

Rabbi Meir is an exception.

What does that mean? What does that mean? That his eyelids see straight and because of that he can write a Sefer Torah from memory? He said to him, this is in fact referring to words of Torah.

The words of Torah and wisdom are is like the blink of an eye and it's gone.

You have something in your mind, you're thinking about something, you blink and you forget it.

The Torah, you can know it while you know it, but the amount of Torah that you have learned, every person, the amount of Torah that you've learned all your life is a wealth, a hoard of knowledge.

But if someone asked you to pull up any of that information, it would be hard, because it's all in the back of our memories, but there is a lot of information, because when you learned it, at that point you understood it.