As the hand held before the eye hides the tallest mountain, so this small earthly life hides from our gaze the vast radiance and secrets of which the world is full, and whoever can take life from before his eyes, as one takes away one's hand, will see the great radiance within the world.

-from Ten Rungs: Collected Hasidic Sayings
Martin Buber

What happens when we take away the hand from before our eyes? That is, what happens when we step back from our own suffering, our own pain, and see it in the context of all the suffering and pain with which the world is full?

When we hold our personal dramas and tragedies before our eyes, we become blinded, in a way, to the outside world. For while we see the pain and suffering around us, it seems to us inconsequential compared to that pain which is all the time held before our eyes. Our own pain seems a gargantuan mountain, before which the mountainous pain of the world shrinks, almost to nothing.

When we take away the hand from before our eyes; that is, when we see that it is just our hand held before our eyes, and not a mountain, as we once suspected; when we see rightly; then the fathomless mass of all the suffering in the world presents itself to us and our own suffering receeds, almost to nothing.

With our hand held before our eyes, the world seemed filled with pain: our own. When we take away our hand the world again seems filled with pain: that of all the others in the world.

Before there is pain, after there is pain. So what did it avail us then, to remove our hands, since our world was, and still is, suffering and suffering?

The suffering, however, is not the same.

When we hold our hand before our eyes we suffer because we sense that there is a lack, that something is missing. And because we see only ourselves, we sense that something in ourselves is missing. This sense of lack creates our first suffering. But then we suffer again, for we also sense that it is beyond our power to fill this need. For if it were within our power to fill this need then surely we would have filled it already. We suffer because we feel a space within us and then we suffer because we can find no way to fill this space. We suffer because we realize that we will never be able to relieve our own suffering.

But when we pull back our hand and our eyes see rightly, then we are confronted by the suffering of all the others in the world; we sense that something is lacking in the world. We feel the world's need now, instead of our own. But while we could see no way of easing our own suffering, now we see an infinitude of ways in which we may ease the suffing of others. Here is a need we can fill! For while no one may lighten his own load, each may lighten the load of his brother, if only in some small degree.

And the miracle is this: in filling the need of others, we find our own need filled. And this is "the great radiance within the world".