What We Stop Feeling

A guest enters our home and immediately smells something we haven't smelled in years, our home. Not because the smell is gone or because our nose is broken, but because our nervous system stops reporting on anything that remains constant. It's called sensory adaptation. A receptor that receives a new stimulus fires intensely, [music] but if the stimulus remains, it lowers its firing until it almost goes silent. The watch on your wrist, the clothes on your body, the hum of the refrigerator, the receptors are still picking them up. The brain simply stops transmitting, >> [music] >> which is why we don't feel our shirt, but we immediately feel an insect landing on our arm. And pay attention to what this leads to. The things we always have are exactly the things we feel the least. The home, the family, the bread on the table. The more constant a thing is, the more it disappears. Not out of ingratitude, but by design. And there is only one way to feel a constant thing again, to remove it and bring it back. Friends, how many of us live in abundance and don't feel anything from it? The home we dreamed of is today [music] just walls. The children we prayed for are background noise. We are not ungrateful, we simply adapted. And it is precisely about this that Rava [music] expounded. The Torah says, "You shall dwell in booths for seven days." Meaning, leave your permanent [music] dwelling and dwell in a temporary one. Seven days a year we are commanded to leave our home, not to suffer, but to feel it again. And on that same page, Rava explains why a sukkah higher than 20 cubits is invalid. A person does not realize they're dwelling in a sukkah because their eyes do not perceive the shade. The eye does not perceive it. And Rashi says, "Make a sukkah so that its dwelling nature [music] is recognizable." The law itself is structured so that the sukkah doesn't fade into the background. A height at which one stops feeling it is invalid. This is exactly the secret of the sukkah. It is a reset button for senses that have become accustomed. Seven days without the walls and the walls are felt again, just like the day we moved in. Seven days under a roof that you can't stop noticing [music] and you remember what it's like to notice a roof at all. Faith is not about forcing ourselves to feel gratitude for what is permanent. The nervous system doesn't allow for that. Faith is about leaving and returning. To know that gratitude is not a feeling you force, but what returns on its own the moment you step outside for a moment. So, when we return home after the holiday and feel the walls, the bed, the quiet again, let's pause. Let's not rush to readjust. [music] Let's stay with that feeling for a moment and know that it was there all year, waiting for us to leave so [music] we could return and feel it.