One Of America’s Top Vision Doctors

In the first minute of a conversation between caregiving researcher Neal K. Shah and neuro-optometrist Dr. Bryce Appelbaum, the host is corrected. Eyesight, Appelbaum says, is a symptom. It is the ability to focus clearly, the thing glasses and contacts are for, the thing a standard exam stops at: are the eyes healthy, and can you read the chart? Vision is what the brain does next.

It filters, organizes, and processes what comes through the eyes, then turns it into meaning and action. You can be told you are 20/20 and still be unable to converge both eyes on one point, track a line, or find your way through a familiar room.¹

That correction is the whole essay.

We have an attention deficit. I transpose letters. You carry the signs people file under dyslexia. I also teach Torah. For years, I watched my grandchildren glued to a phone, and I watched my mother spend the last years she could still function in front of a television, in a house that was not empty. I thought those were separate sorrows. Appelbaum’s distinction says they are one failure, missed because everyone was reading the chart.

Scripture already ran the functional exam.

Where there is no vision, the people come apart

The King James of Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” The Hebrew is sharper, and it is not about eyesight.

בְּאֵין חָזוֹן יִפָּרַע עָם וְשֹׁמֵר תּוֹרָה אַשְׁרֵהוּ

Where there is no chazon, the people yippara. Chazon is a revealed sight, an oracle, not a score on a chart. Yippara is the same verb used of Israel at the golden calf: they cast off restraint, they were made naked, they came apart.² The second half is not a different subject.

The one who guards Torah is happy. Revelation without instruction runs wild. Instruction without a living sight is a chart you can recite but still cannot use to navigate the room.

A standard exam asks, ” Can you read the letters. A functional exam assesses whether the two eyes and the brain work together. The proverb asks the same question of the people. Can you see what was revealed and keep it?

The wrong prescription

My teacher, Rabbi Tovia Singer, does not tell people to pray for a doctrine. He tells them to read the Book and take off the glasses someone else put on them. Read the original without the prescription.

That is Hosea, not a slogan.

נִדְמוּ עַמִּי מִבְּלִי הַדָּעַת כִּי־אַתָּה הַדַּעַת מָאַסְתָּ וְאֶמְאָסְאךָ מִכַּהֵן לִי וַתִּשְׁכַּח תּוֹרַת אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֶשְׁכַּח בָּנֶיךָ גַּם־אָנִי

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you from being priest to Me. You have forgotten the Torah of your God; I also will forget your children.”³

Nidmu is to be cut off, silenced, ruined. The cause is not a missing building. It is mibli hada’at, due to a lack of knowledge. And the knowledge they rejected is named in the same verse: Torat Eloheicha, the Torah of your God. The priest who will not look at the text loses the children. That is the verse I did not want. It is also the verse that explains a house.

Appelbaum says fifteen of the eighteen symptoms most often tied to ADHD are also symptoms of functional vision problems, and that children labeled with ADHD are about three times more likely to have convergence insufficiency, the failure of both eyes to point at the same place.⁴

I am not a clinician, and I am not claiming my transposed letters were only a vision problem. I am saying that a label can describe the behavior while missing the team that is failing. Someone looks at the chart, says, “You see fine,” and hands you thicker glasses.

Adam’s family has been handed a religion in the same way. We can pass the chart. You can repeat the creed. You still cannot converge. The Torah’s claim is blunt: one Adam, one household, one set of sayings. If the glasses require a second founder before the first book is allowed to say what it has to say, they are not correcting vision.

They are replacing the test. Christianity and Islam can be argued elsewhere. Here, one contrast is enough. The Ten Sayings repair a house. A creed that cannot sit at the same table as the family next door has failed the functional exam. Rabbi Singer’s instruction is the clinical move: take the prescription off and read the page as it was before the glasses.

This is a midrash on a medical distinction. Dr. Appelbaum did not diagnose a religion. The mapping is mine.

A mother, a television, a familiar room

The 2024 Lancet Commission added untreated vision loss to its list of modifiable dementia risks, a small share in its worldwide model, about 2 percent.⁵ A Johns Hopkins analysis the same year, in a national sample of older Americans, estimated that up to 19 percent of prevalent dementia cases might be attributable to vision impairment, much of it correctable, with contrast sensitivity and near vision carrying more of the weight than the distance chart.⁶

Appelbaum’s point to families is the practical one. Getting lost in a familiar place can be an early warning sign that spatial vision, not just memory, is failing. A standard exam does not test whether the brain is still building a map of the room.

I missed it.

My mother spent the last years she could function watching television, alone inside a house where her family lived. I am not diagnosing her from a podcast, and I am not charging the family with a medical error. I am naming what the screen does. It does not ask you to converge on a face.

It does not ask you to track a voice, judge a doorway, or answer. Passive television viewing and scrolling, Appelbaum warns, weaken the visual and nervous systems, especially when cognition is already declining.¹ The room goes flat. The person is present and not present.

Hosea had already said the quiet part. Forget the Torah of your God, and the children are forgotten too. A person can live with the Book in the house and still be watching something else. Lack of knowledge is not a low test score. It is a priestly failure: the ones who were supposed to keep the sight did not put the page in their hands.

Glued: To Your Phone and Television

Appelbaum calls the screen habit a strain that the visual system was not built for. Hours at inches from the face. High-energy light. Almost no distance. Almost no real depth. A two-dimensional field where the eyes lock near and stop teaming the way they team in a room.¹

I have watched my grandchildren’s posture. Glued is the word, and it is earned. A child who cannot look up cannot learn to track a line of Hebrew, a face across the table, or a boundary. Yippara again. No chazon, and the people, including the small ones, cast off restraint. The phone is not a neutral window. It is a prescription that says the chart is fine while the skill of seeing a real room atrophies.

He does not answer that with thicker glasses. He answers it with training. Shut the near field. Give the system distance, motion, and two eyes on one point. The spiritual shape is the same. Shut the rectangle. Put the page in the hands. Read aloud. The skill returns with use. Hosea’s threat is also Hosea’s map: the children are lost when the Torah is forgotten, and they are the ones the verse refuses to leave unnamed.

The exercise

Appelbaum’s good news is that vision is a skill, trainable at any age, and that cognitive decline is not always a sentence.¹ I cannot promise that of a brain disease. I can say the proverb has already promised it to the people. The one who guards Torah is happy. Not the one who passed a creed. The one who keeps the instruction at heart, where the seeing actually happens.

Adam is the blueprint. The Ten Sayings are the alignment. Torah is the operating text. Someone gave us glasses and told us everything was all right. Rabbi Singer’s line is the functional exam: do not pray for a doctrine. Read the original without the prescription.

Do one thing. Do not collect a new religion and call it a checkup. Ask whether the eyes and the instruction are converging on one point. If the household can name one father and keep the sayings, the chart was never the problem.

I transpose letters. I still track the text. That is the receipt that the skill can be trained.

With thanks to Dr. Bryce Appelbaum and to Neal K. Shah of Johns Hopkins and CareYaya, for the conversation that made the distinction plain: eyesight is the symptom; vision is the brain. The rest of the mapping is a Torah teacher’s, not theirs.

---

Footnotes

1. Neal K. Shah, interview with Bryce Appelbaum, OD, “The 30-Second Exercise That Could End Reading Glasses Forever,” YouTube, July 21, 2026, https://youtu.be/tkwSfy5prIE. Appelbaum distinguishes eyesight (clarity, the chart, glasses) from vision (brain filtering, teaming, tracking, depth, meaning, action), and warns that passive screen time weakens the visual and nervous system.
2. Proverbs 29:18. Hebrew chazon is revelation or oracle, not eyesight. Yippara is “cast off restraint”; the same verb describes Israel at the calf in Exodus 32:25.
3. Hosea 4:6, author’s translation from the Masoretic text.
4. As stated by Appelbaum in the Shah interview. The convergence finding has a paper trail: David B. Granet et al., “The Relationship between Convergence Insufficiency and ADHD,” Strabismus 13, no. 4 (2005): 163–68, reported a roughly threefold higher rate of convergence insufficiency among children with ADHD. Overlap of symptoms is not the same as identity. Vision therapy studies have reported improved binocular measures and lower ADHD symptom scores in children who had both; they do not show that ADHD is only a vision problem.
5. Gill Livingston et al., “Dementia prevention, intervention, and care: 2024 report of the Lancet Standing Commission,” The Lancet 404, no. 10452 (2024): 572–628. Untreated vision loss was added as a modifiable risk factor, with a population attributable fraction of nearly 2 percent in the Commission’s model.
6. Jason R. Smith et al., “Vision Impairment and the Population Attributable Fraction of Dementia in Older Adults,” JAMA Ophthalmology 142, no. 10 (2024): 900–908. In a U.S. sample of older adults, the population attributable fraction of prevalent dementia for at least one vision impairment was 19 percent (95 percent CI 8.2–29.7). That is an upper-bound estimate assuming causality, not proof that one in five cases is caused by the eyes alone. Contrast sensitivity carried the largest share.

• Chapter 1: The Elephant in the Room
• The Divided Mind: Cain, Abel, and the Blueprint of Creation in Torah and Neuroscience
• The Atom and The Man
• Toldot | תולדות | “Consequences”
• Until This Day Parashat Ki Tavo