«Los ojos no se abrirán jamás»
Judas«Los ojos no se abrirán jamás» is Gershom Wald’s image for a human blindness that protects people from confronting what they could scarcely bear to see. In response to Shmuel’s defense of Judas Iscariot as Jesus’s most fervent believer, Wald turns a disagreement about interpretation into a grim reflection on the limits of recognition: people go through life with their eyes shut, and, he says, they will never open.
The dispute over Judas
Shmuel invokes Aaron Abraham Kabak’s novel In the Narrow Path, describing its Jesus as a delicate, fragile Jew who seeks to bring compassion and charity into the world. He notes that Kabak portrays the relationship between Jesus and Judas Iscariot as tortuous, marked by love and hatred, attraction and rejection, and casts Judas as repulsive. Shmuel’s objection is that Kabak, like others, failed to see Judas as the most fervent believer.
That defense gives Wald’s reply its immediate force. The blindness is not merely a mistaken reading of a fictional character: in Shmuel’s account, generations of persecuted Jews have also circulated lies and slanders about someone of their own blood, whom their persecutors nonetheless chose to regard as a redeemer and savior. The Judas debate thus bears the weight of both inherited judgment and the possibility that the condemned figure has been misunderstood.
Wald’s image of closed eyes
Wald answers that almost everyone walks through life from birth to death with eyes closed, including both himself and Shmuel. The phrase «Los ojos no se abrirán jamás» condenses this claim into a sentence of finality: the condition is not presented as a temporary lapse that education or argument can readily correct.
He imagines what would happen if people opened their eyes even for an instant. They would let out a terrifying scream and go on screaming without pause. The contrast gives blindness a double meaning: it is a failure to see, but also a defense against a truth so painful that full recognition would overwhelm those who encountered it. Wald does not exempt himself from that condition; he includes both speakers among those whose eyes remain shut.
Silence and the limits of insight
After making his point, Wald asks Shmuel to read from his book and says they have spoken enough for the day. The request shifts the scene from intense argument to silence, without resolving whether Shmuel’s account of Judas has escaped the blindness Wald describes. Their exchange leaves the phrase suspended between accusation and confession: a claim about humanity at large that implicates the speaker as well as his listener.
The image also complicates the hope of recognition. Shmuel insists that a despised figure can be seen differently—as a fervent believer rather than a repulsive traitor—yet Wald warns that seeing fully may bring not liberation but unbearable horror. The phrase therefore holds together two pressures in the scene: the ethical demand to reconsider inherited judgments and the fear that people depend on not seeing what those judgments conceal.
