Matia ben Heresh Burns Out His Eyes Against Satan's Temptation

Rabbi Matya ben Heresh sat in his house of study in Rome, bent over the Torah, and the light coming off his face was like the sun. The students who served him said that in all his days he had never once lifted his eyes toward a woman. Not in the market, not on the road, not across a courtyard. His face had taken on the form of the ministering angels, and the hours of daylight passed over his bowed head without his noticing them go.

High above, this was noticed by exactly the wrong reader.

The Accuser Grows Jealous of a Spotless Man

Ha-Satan passed by the study house and could not look away. In the heavenly court he is the prosecutor, the one whose work is to test, and here was a man who gave him nothing to indict. The jealousy of it gnawed at him. "Is it possible," he said, "that a man like this has not sinned?"

He went up before the Holy One. "Master of the universe," he said, "what is Rabbi Matya ben Heresh to You?"

"He is wholly righteous," said God.

"Give me permission and I will incite him."

"You cannot prevail over him."

The Accuser waited. And still, the answer came. "Go."

A Face Crafted to Stop a Heart

The Accuser took the shape of a woman. Not an ordinary beauty. He built a face the like of which had not existed in the world since Naamah, the sister of Tubal-Cain, the woman over whom the sons of God themselves had once erred, when they saw the daughters of men and could not master what they saw. That was the face he wore. He carried it to the doorway of the study house and stood there, directly in the rabbi's line of sight.

Matya looked up from the scroll. He understood in a heartbeat what stood in his doorway and why. He turned his face and set it behind him, toward the wall.

The Accuser moved. He came around and stood at the rabbi's left. Matya turned his face to the right. The Accuser slid to the right, and Matya turned again, and the woman of impossible beauty kept circling, taking up each new angle the instant the old one was abandoned, so that there was no direction the rabbi could face that did not have her in it.

Matya stopped turning. He sat very still. "I am afraid," he said, low, almost to himself, "that the evil inclination will overcome me and make me sin."

Fire and a Nail

He called the student who served before him. "Go," he said, "and bring me fire and a nail."

The young man hesitated, then went and came back with what his teacher had asked for, irons heating in the coals. Matya took them. While the circling woman watched from the doorway, certain now of the victory she had been promised would never come, the rabbi pressed the white-hot nails into his own eyes and put out his sight where he sat.

The Accuser felt the room change around him. The thing he had come to corrupt had chosen darkness over him, and there was nothing left in that house for jealousy to feed on. He shook. He fell backward, away from the threshold, and the beautiful borrowed face went with him into nothing.

Matya sat in the new dark, the scroll he could no longer read still open before him, faithful and blind.

The Angel Sent to Heal Him

In that same hour the Holy One called for Raphael, whose name means God heals. "Go," He said, "and heal Rabbi Matya ben Heresh."

The angel came and stood in the ruined quiet of the study house. The rabbi lifted his sightless face toward the new presence in the room. "Who are you?"

"I am Raphael," the angel said. "The Holy One sent me to heal your eyes."

And the rabbi, who had burned out his own sight rather than risk a single lingering glance, would not take the cure. "Leave me," he said. "What was, was."

Raphael did not argue. He went back up before the Throne. "Master of the universe," he said, "this and this is what Matya said to me." He had refused. He would keep his blindness.

Then the Holy One gave the angel a second message, and it was not a command to a healer but a promise to a man. "Go and tell him that I am a surety that the evil inclination shall never rule over him."

Raphael carried the guarantee down and laid it before the blind rabbi. The danger he had maimed himself to escape would never reach him again. Heaven itself had gone bond for it. Only then did Matya let the angel near, and Raphael healed him at once, and the light came back into the eyes that had chosen the dark.

The Eyes That Would Not Look

In the same tradition that keeps Matya's story, there is Joseph in Egypt, and the daughters of kings who climbed the wall to stare at his face, and how he never once fixed his eyes on any of them or let a thought of them in. For that, the tradition says, no evil eye ever held power over his line, and he was given to inherit two worlds. Matya belongs to the same line of men. He had heard, perhaps, what the Sages drew out of his own ordeal: that whoever will not gaze at women, and all the more so at the wife of his neighbor, hands the evil inclination nothing to grip.

So the rabbi went back to his scroll in Rome, his sight restored and his guard never once lowered. The hours of daylight passed over his head again. He did not notice them go.