Who Removes Sleep From My Eyes

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 19.

We've been walking through the Birchos HaShachar one by one - the rooster, the eyes, the standing up, the strength to the weary. Today we reach the last one in this stretch, and in a way it's the bracha that finishes the whole job. "Blessed are You... hama'avir sheinah mei'einai u'snumah mei'af'apai - who removes sleep from my eyes and slumber from my eyelids."

This is the final transition. The last step out of sleep and into full, clear consciousness. And I want to show you something the Sages did here that is so easy to miss.

Notice it's said twice. "Who removes sheinah - sleep - from my eyes, and t'numah - slumber - from my eyelids." Two different words for almost the same thing. Why? Because the Rabbis are describing two stages, and you know both of them. There's sheinah - actual sleep, lights out, gone. And then there's t'numah - that groggy in-between, the half-awake fog where your eyes are technically open but you're not really there yet. The siddur is asking God to remove both. Not just to wake us - but to make us fully present.

And that's the whole idea I want to give you today. There's a difference between opening your eyes and actually waking up.

You know exactly what I mean. You can be physically awake - eyes open, coffee in hand, walking through the morning - and still be completely asleep on the inside. Going through the motions. Present in body, absent in mind. The Gemara in Berachos 60b lays out the original morning blessings stage by stage, and the Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 46, codifies them. But the deepest one is this last request: don't just lift the sleep off my eyes - lift the fog off my self.

Now here's where it gets beautiful, because this bracha doesn't actually stop at six words. In the siddur, hama'avir sheinah is the opening line of a much longer tefillah. It flows right into Vihi ratzon - "And may it be Your will... shetargileinu b'Sorasecha - that You accustom us to Your Torah, and attach us to Your mitzvos, and not bring us into the grip of sin." Sit with that sequence for a second. The very first thing we ask for the moment we're fully awake is not money, not health, not success. It's: let me wake up into Torah. Let the first clear thought of my conscious mind be turned toward You, and let me be guarded from sin.

So waking up, in this prayer, isn't just biological. It's the first act of avodah of the day.

This is where the Chassidic masters take it somewhere powerful. They talk about two kinds of sleep - and two kinds of waking. There's the sleep of the body, sheinas haguf, which ends when you open your eyes. And there's the sleep of the soul, sheinas hanefesh - spiritual sleep. That's the state of going through Jewish life on autopilot, doing the mitzvos with your hands while your heart is dozing. The whole work of a Jew, they say, is hisorerus - awakening. Rousing the soul, not just the body. And the Chassidic reading of hama'avir sheinah is exactly that: God, don't only wake my body. Wake me. Remove the slumber from my soul.

That's why I love that the prayer pairs them. Hama'avir sheinah - You remove the physical sleep, that's the gift You give me. And then immediately: shetargileinu b'Sorasecha - now help me do my part, the spiritual waking, the hisorerus, by turning my newly-clear mind toward Torah.

So here's the question to carry with you today. You're going to open your eyes this morning - that part happens on its own. But are you actually going to wake up? Are you going to be present - fully here, fully aware that this day is a gift handed to a conscious soul - or are you going to sleepwalk through it?

That's the whole bracha. Don't just let me open my eyes. Let me wake up.

Tomorrow: we move into the shelo asani blessings - the series that begins "who did not make me..." We'll unpack what these blessings really mean, and why they're some of the most misunderstood lines in the entire siddur.