(Parshat Vayeira, Genesis 21:14-21)
Hagar and Ishmael are dying of thirst in the desert. In her despair, Hagar places her son under a bush and walks away, unable to watch him die. Then something remarkable happens:
Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. (Genesis 21:19)
Note that the angel does not create a well—the angel merely opens Hagar’s eyes—that well was there all along. The rabbis teach:
Rabbi Binyamin said: “Everyone is presumed blind until the Holy One opens their eyes.” (Bereishit Rabbah 53)[1]
The well was real. It was physical. It contained actual water. Hagar had functioning eyes. Yet, she could not see it.
Psychological Blindness
Inattentional Blindness: In the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment, people counting basketball passes fail to see a gorilla walking through the scene.[2] Our attention filters reality so aggressively that we literally cannot see what is right in front of us when our focus is elsewhere. Hagar, desperate and focused on her dying son, could not see the well.
Change Blindness: Even dramatic changes in our visual field go unnoticed if they occur during a brief interruption. The angel’s calling Hagar might represent that crucial shift in attention that set the stage for G‑d’s opening her eyes, allowing previously invisible information to suddenly register.
Creating vs. Revealing
We tend to approach problems by asking, “What can I build?”What can I invent? What new solution can I create?
But some of our most critical problems do not require creation. They require revelation—removing the barriers that prevent us from seeing what is already present.
The distinction matters:
- Creating a solution requires resources, time, and effort to build something new
- Revealing a solution requires only a shift in perception to recognize what exists
When We Cannot See the Well
What prevented Hagar from seeing the well?
Panic narrows perception. Under extreme stress, our cognitive tunneling intensifies. We literally process less visual information.[3] Hagar, consumed by fear and grief, lost the capacity to scan her environment effectively.
Expectation shapes observation. If you are certain the desert is empty, you stop looking. The mind sees what it expects to see—expectation shapes observation.[4] Hagar “knew” there was no water, so there was no water.
Proximity blindness. Sometimes solutions are so close they fall outside our search radius. We look to the horizon for help while standing next to the solution.
The Intervention
What actually happened? The text is specific: “An angel’s call breaks Hagar’s panic (v.17); G‑d opens her eyes (v.19). The reality did not change—her perception did.”
Sometimes we need an external intervention to break our perceptual blindness:
- A question from someone outside our situation
- A moment of forced stillness
- The collapse of a false certainty
- Fresh eyes on an old problem
The intervention does not create a new reality. It disrupts the mental state that was preventing us from seeing reality.
“To see, you must look!”
The Participating Observer
In some interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the Von Neumann-Wigner conscious collapse, the observer plays a crucial role—the observer collapses the wave function, transforming potentiality into reality. Physicist John Wheeler famously captured this with his concept of the “participating observer.”[5] Through this lens, we might view Hagar’s story differently: metaphorically speaking, until she looked, the well existed in a superposition of states—both there and not there. By opening Hagar’s eyes, G‑d empowered her to collapse the well’s wavefunction, as it were, bringing it into tangible existence.
The lesson cuts deep: to see, you must look. Use your power. Be a participating observer. Reality may be waiting for your attention to actualize what already exists in potential.
The Well Is There
Before you dig, before you build, before you despair—pause. What if the solution is already present? What if your eyes simply need opening? The water that could save you might be three steps away.
[1] Bereishit Rabbah, parasha 53 (esp. 53:13–14). Critical ed. Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck. Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965
[2] Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059–1074. https://doi.org/10.1068/p281059.
[3] Easterbrook, J. A. (1959). The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior. Psychological Review, 66(3), 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047707.
[4] Rao, R. P. N., & Ballard, D. H. (1999). Predictive coding in the visual cortex: A functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects. Nature Neuroscience, 2(1), 79–87. https://doi.org/10.1038/4580.
[5] Wheeler, J. A. (1983). “Law without law.” In J. A. Wheeler & W. H. Zurek (Eds.), Quantum Theory and Measurement (pp. 182–213). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.