O pinion
Photo by Mike Morgan
Hello Darkness
BY SANFORD D. GREENBERG
“WELL, SON, YOU ARE
going to be blind tomorrow.”
It was a strange thing to hear
someone say. Strange that he
should use “son” when none of
us in the examining room were
related to him. Strange, too,
that he could speak with such
assurance about such an awful
outcome: Blind? Tomorrow?
Oddest of all, though, was that
the person — the “son” — he
was addressing was me.

been working at and expecting
to become fell into a black hole,
along with my sight.

Back in Buffalo after the
surgery that blinded me, I fell
into a despair that at times
seemed total and boundless. I
still felt compelled to learn, to
become someone, to have an
impact on the world, but how
to do that when a well-meaning
social worker had already told
me that the best employment
I could reasonably expect was
making screwdrivers.

I had been campaigning for
Jack Kennedy before glaucoma
shut me down, dreaming of
law school, perhaps of entering
politics myself. And now this —
darkness morning, noon and
night. Three factors combined
to pull me out of the abyss. Two
I will mention here; the third
gets ahead of the story.

First, Sue and my family
were towers of strength, even
The spine of my life, though, what has held all
these years together, has been my promise to
God, my tikkun olam.

I was 20 years old, in the
prime of my young life. After
growing up impoverished
in Buffalo, N.Y., I had won a
full scholarship to Columbia
College. Now I was a junior,
immersed in a world of schol-
arly riches, surrounded by
intellectual luminaries and
the seemingly endless cultural
delights of the surrounding
city. I had a wonderful
girlfriend, Sue, and some of
the most steadfast pals a guy
could ever ask for, including
my roommate, an architecture
student with a rare talent for
music: Arthur Garfunkel, or
“Art” as the world would soon
come to know him.

And then the ophthalmo-
logical surgeon I had been sent
to see in Detroit spoke those
unforgettable words, “blind
tomorrow,” and all that I had
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM though everything they had
been expecting of me — and me
of myself — had been turned so
savagely on its ear. Second, that
spring of 1961 after I lost my
sight, Arthur took a plane to
Buffalo to see me, not to pat my
hand and say everything was
going to be A-OK, but to inform
me that I was coming back to
Columbia, that I was going to
graduate with my class, that
he would be my eyes, my guide
dog, my scheduler, really my
everything until I could better
fend for myself.

“That’s insane!” I told him. “I
can’t. Don’t you see, I’m blind!”
But I did go back. And it all
came true just as Arthur had
known it would. I graduated
with my class, Phi Beta Kappa
and as its president. Graduate
school followed, at Harvard; at
Oxford as a Marshall Scholar;
as a White House Fellow under
Lyndon Johnson. Sue and I
married and started a family.

I succeeded beyond all my
expectations as an inventor
and entrepreneur.

In time I got comfortable
enough to reflect on the course
of this life that had once seemed
all but extinguished, and that’s
when I realized the enduring
power of the third factor that
rescued me from despair: the
sacred vow — what’s known
in my Jewish faith as a tikkun
olam — I had made a resolution,
newly sightless and still hospital-
ized, to do all I could to help end
blindness, for everyone, forever.

The course of my life, I
came to see, had been shaped
by a loving wife and family, by
wonderful friends like Arthur,
by invaluable mentors like
David Rockefeller, by my own
iron determination to succeed
not by the terms of my blind-
ness, but by the goals I set for
myself before my vision was
ended, and by the willingness
of so many others to support me
in that quest. The blind are, of
necessity, a dependent nation.

The spine of my life, though,
what has held all these years
together, has been my promise
to God, my tikkun olam. In its
service, I have favored compa-
nies that serve health needs.

One I founded created the
first database tracking antibi-
otic resistance globally. I’ve
also accepted time-consuming
government positions that
serve the medical common-
weal, such as chairman of
the federal Rural Healthcare
Corporation. In the private
sector, I’m chairman of the
Board of Governors of the
renowned Wilmer Eye Institute
at Johns Hopkins University.

High marks, I used to tell
myself, at least for trying. But
a promise to God or whatever
higher power or cosmic calling
you believe in is an inviolable
undertaking, graded on a scale
far more demanding than
numbers can account for. And
JEWISH EXPONENT
by that measure, I kept thinking
that I was looking through a
glass darkly. But what was I to
do? Blindness arrives by many
roads. Would we have to kill off
an entire transportation system
to make it go away?
Finally, I sought the advice
of a friend far wiser than I. In
my memoir, I write about what
followed: my meeting with
Dr. Jonas Salk, his magnani-
mous spirit and his wonderful
response when I finally
gathered my courage to ask
how he had conquered polio,
especially three words at the
end of his answer — words
that have also stayed with me:
Just end it!
That, I realized almost in the
instant, was the liberation I had
been looking for to see my tikkun
olam through: Don’t get hung up
in the weeds of moving forward.

Start where you want to end and
rearrange the world to get you
there, just as Jack Kennedy did
with his vow to land a human on
the moon before the end of the
1960s, just as Martin Luther King
Jr. did with his poetic evocation
of a more just America, and just
as Jonas Salk did by working
backward from his vow to end
polio to a vaccine that actually
did that. Sometimes the shortest
route is what seems the longest
way around.

Has it been easy? No. More
than two decades would pass
before my wife and I established
the Sanford and Susan Greenberg
Prize to End Blindness and
awarded $3 million in December
2020 to 13 scientists and
researchers who have made the
greatest progress toward eradi-
cating this ancient scourge.

Is success a sure thing? No
guarantees there either. Perhaps
blindness is an injustice tragi-
cally endemic to the human
condition, a burden resistant
to the wonders of science, to
be randomly distributed across
all of time. But given my own
life experiences, given all the
good fortune that has come my
way, given the resources at my
disposal, not to attempt to end
blindness would be the biggest
injustice of all.

That’s the essence of a tikkun
olam, to pursue perfection even
if it should prove unattainable.

But here’s my deepest secret: I
absolutely believe that blindness
can be ended, that justice for
those of us forced to go through
life in the dark half-light of the
unsighted is well within our
reach. l
Sanford D. Greenberg is founder
of End Blindness, chairman of the
board of governors of The Johns
Hopkins University’s Wilmer Eye
Institute and author of the memoir
“Hello Darkness, My Old Friend.”
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JULY 8, 2021
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