In a number of places, the Talmud tells of a case in which someone did something wrong, and a holy man “placed his eyes upon him and he turned into a heap of bones” (Berachot 58, Shabbat 34, Bava Batra 75, Sanhedrin 100).
What does this mean?
The answer is that when a person does something wrong he doesn’t see how far the damage reaches.
But the tzaddik, the holy person, does see, because he has the “eyes of Hashem.” We see this from the verse, “Hashem’s eyes [look] toward the righteous” (Psalms 34:17), which can be translated homiletically as “Hashem [gives His] eyes to the tzaddikim.” And so the tzaddikim possesses the eyes of Hashem.
And we learn from a verse that “the eyes of Hashem travel across the entire world” (Zechariah
Thus the tzaddik sees how far the damage of a sin reaches.
And so this is what the Talmud is saying. The tzaddik “placed his eyes upon him.” He gave his own eyes to the other person so that he would be able to see with the eyes of the tzaddikim.
“And he turned into a heap of bones.” The word for heap—gal—is also related to the word meaning “be revealed.” And “bones” is related to the word meaning to squeeze tightly—particularly, to squeeze one’s eyes shut tightly, as in the verse, “and shuts his eyes from seeing evil” (Isaiah 33:15).
So the phrase can now be rendered, “The tzaddik gives the man who committed a sin his own eyes of a tzaddik so that his closely shut eyes can now see.” Now he sees the damage that he caused, which had been hidden from him before.
And there is no great punishment than seeing the damage than one has oneself caused.
Likutei Moharan 98.
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