Figure 1.3. As of the seventh grade, I was the fastest Braille reader in Israel.
So I escaped into my Braille books. With my books, I was in a different world and would read for hours on end. Even when my mother said, “Time to sleep, lights out,” I would just hide the books under my bed. Although our walls were thin, as soon as the lights were out and I knew that she couldn’t see me anymore, I pulled out my books again and kept reading.
Whenever more of my Braille books arrived at the post office, I would hurry to pick them up. The books were huge. I was something to marvel at, a small kid carrying a very large school bag on my back, tied and strapped to my shoulders, with a Braille typewriter squeezed under one arm and a sack of Braille books under the other. More than once, the typewriter fell and broke, and we would need to pay to get it repaired. My father always resented the price, and I felt guilty about having let the typewriter fall.
Slowly but surely, my muscles built up. Many a passerby felt I was engaged in too much lifting and carrying. But that lifting, in many ways, formed my character. I imagined that, one day, something would liberate me from my blindness, and I acted by it.
I went from doctor to doctor, on my own.
I struggled against the resentment of the other children in school who thought I was receiving too much special treatment. They resented the fact that they had to explain to me what was on the blackboard. And I agreed with them! I wanted to be able to see the blackboard with my own eyes. I wanted to work on my own. I even had teachers that were mean to me because they felt I was not behaving right. They believed a blind kid was supposed to be submissive and passive—something I never was and, most likely, never would be.
I desperately wanted to be liberated from my condition. But all the doctors told me there was nothing I could do, that legal blindness was going to be my life, and that my vision would never be more than half of 1 percent without glasses, nor more than 4 or 5 percent with glasses. They said that I should accept the sight I had and that I should be happy with it. Those were nice words, but they did not work for me.
Discovering the Bates Method
My father was openly upset at the fact that his deafness prevented him from succeeding in life. My mother also felt like she was put down by the hearing world. I understood the prejudice they had experienced but, nonetheless, felt I had a bright future, though I did not know what it was.
Then one day I met another young boy named Jacob, who had dropped out of high school. He showed me eye exercises based on something called the Bates Method. I learned the eye exercises and started to work with them diligently.
To my amazement, as I practiced the Bates Method and experienced improvement, I received more complaints than ever from the authority figures in my life. You see, a part of my practice was to look from detail to detail; the purpose of this exercise was to stop my brain from being lazy. But my geography teacher would get upset as I moved my eyes from each bell beside the chalkboard to the other, looking at the details during class. She went all the way to the vice principal. Thankfully, the vice principal heard my case and told her that the exercises may help me, and that they did not disturb my ability to listen to her lessons.
My Bible studies teacher was upset that when my class sat in the yard reading biblical verses, I would close my eyes and face the sun, moving my head from side to side. When I faced the sun, my pupils would contract; when I moved my head to the side, my pupils would expand. My teacher said that it bothered him to see me moving my head from side to side, even though he recognized that I understood everything he was saying. He said that even though I was the best student in the class, I should stop doing the sunning because it bothered him.
Despite these reactions, I persisted. My retina started to wake up to light, and that was my vehicle to removing the thick, heavy, dark glasses that had made the world dimmer for me.
My mother was upset with the fact that I would run, ten times a day, up to the roof to do sunning. She said, “You are taking time out from your homework.” Then she was upset that I would for sit three hours a day and do palming, an exercise to rest my eyes and stop them from moving involuntarily.
In short, I encountered so much resistance to what I did that I didn’t even know it was possible to attempt change without facing resistance. When everybody resists you, difficulty comes not only in doing the exercises, but also in dealing with the fact that your family, friends, teachers, and even neighbors oppose your efforts. Still, I persisted.
Figure 1.4. With these glasses I was able to read the largest letter on the eye chart from a distance of five feet (20/800).
Within three months, I was able to see print. And not with 38 diopters, which is a microscopical lens, but with 20 diopters, which is simply a very thick lens. Headaches that had plagued me all my life disappeared within six months.
Seeing the Light
Within a year of practicing the Bates Method, I was able to see regular letters. I’ll never forget the day I was doing the sunning exercise on a roof and looking at sharp black letters printed on white paper. I placed the paper at the tip of my nose. For the very first time in my life, at the age of seventeen and a half, I could see the printed word without magnification. This success took such a huge effort that I threw up. Again, I sunned and palmed and threw up, until I saw another letter, then another. Soon, I heard loud voices in argument. It was the neighbors downstairs accusing each other of creating a mess on the windows. I hadn’t realized that each time I threw up, it was over their windows. So I went downstairs and told them what had happened. Instead of being angry with me, they were amazed at my honesty. I could have ignored my deeds, but I didn’t. I was proud of the fact that I could finally see a letter. I honed my process and, within three months, could see multiple letters by putting the print right in front of my nose.
From then on, I continued to work. People were surprised that instead of just feeling my way down the road, I could literally see the road. Instead of not recognizing them, I started to know their faces. One neighbor was actually upset that I could recognize her! “What is wrong?” she would ask. “You’re the blind person in the neighborhood. How can you see us? What have you done? What’s going on?” It was amazing. I had taken away from her the feeling of security that resulted from her knowing what was going on in the neighborhood. It was almost as if she felt that the world she knew had been taken away from her. Here is the blind kid looking at everyone and actually seeing them. I was used to resistance but was pleasantly surprised by the first voices of admiration I received.
My diligence continued. I looked from detail to detail. People finally accepted that I could see and recognize them, so my status soon changed from being one who was nearly blind to one who was nearly sighted. I kept working despite the fact that my progress was slow.
A landmark came when Jacob, my friend and mentor on the path to vision improvement, told me I no longer had astigmatism. Don’t ask me how he knew, but when I went to the ophthalmologist in the public clinic, she was shocked. She said to me, “I don’t know how it happened, but you don’t need the cylinders in your glasses to correct your astigmatism because you don’t have astigmatism anymore!” I was not surprised to hear this.