Thoughts on Sight and Sound

 

Dear Reader,

I came across an article today that speaks directly to recovery, self-awareness, and the danger of slipping into victimhood. The piece—titled Sight and Sound by Rabbi Sarah Bracha Gershuny—offers a reflection rooted in Jewish mysticism, and yet its message is universal and deeply relevant to anyone on a healing journey.

One sentence stood out to me:

“Seeing and hearing are concerned with the filters through which we experience reality, filters so habituated we probably don’t notice them.”

These words ring true. How often do we react not to what is, but to what we perceive—shaped by fears, old wounds, or assumptions? We live in a world saturated with noise: news, opinions, images, alarms. We rush to judgment based on fragments. We confuse feeling with fact.

Rabbi Gershuny connects this phenomenon to the psychological model known as the Drama Triangle, where people cycle through roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer. We may start with a sense of powerlessness, then lash out or try to fix others, only to end up feeling wronged again. As psychologist Stan Tatkin observed:

“Every perpetrator in the world thinks they’re a victim.”

This distortion of perception—especially in times of crisis, grief, or fear—is dangerous. It can convince us that our actions are justified, even righteous, when they are in fact harmful. As philosopher Epictetus once said:

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”

This is where recovery principles become lifelines. As people in recovery, we are taught to pause, to take daily inventory, to examine our motives. We learn that not every feeling requires a response. We surrender the illusion of control and lean on time-tested truths like “Easy Does It” and “Let Go and Let God.”

The words of Jesus in Matthew 7:3–5 offer timeless clarity:

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly…”

This passage calls us to humility. Before we name someone else’s failure, we must ask what distortions cloud our own view. Honest self-examination—not shame, not denial—is the beginning of wisdom and the bedrock of healing.

As the philosopher Simone Weil once wrote:

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”

We are not victims, nor are we saviors. We are human beings, invited daily to seek clarity, to shed our distortions, and to meet others—and ourselves—with compassion.

As we move forward into this reflective season of Tamuz and Av, may we have the courage to question our filters. May we learn to see more clearly, listen more deeply, and walk with greater trust in the quiet wisdom of our Higher Power.

Amen.