Welcome back to our daily ביטחון. We're talking about recognizing השם in creation and appreciating as we said, the concept of טוב השם לכל, everything God doing is constantly good. I once heard an explanation, I don't remember where, this a seeming paradox of rain. Rain is the greatest thing in the world. The גמרא goes on and describes that rain is like תחיית המתים, like the resurrection of the dead. The rain comes down, the earth is dry, it's like it's dead, and it comes back to life. And yet, people look at rain as a nasty day. We don't want rain, we don't like rain. And why is that? Why did God make it that way? The answer is that anytime a great bounty is coming down, עין הרע interferes with it. For example, it says that the first לוחות were given with a lot of fanfare, thunder and lightning, and the יצר הרע got involved and the golden calf came about. Yet, the second לוחות came quietly, and therefore they lasted. If rain would be apparent and everyone would see the goodness like gold coming out from the heavens, it would be, have an עין הרע on the rain. So therefore, in order for the rain to come down and impact us in the best possible way, God made that it's something that we don't enjoy, the puddles, the mess, the sleeting, the all the negative feelings getting caught in the rainstorm. That's השם's greatness. Yet, we're blind as the חובות הלבבות said. So there's different reasons that's we're blind. One as we spoke about yesterday was, we get used, we always want more. Because we always want more, our desire and our our arrogance, because you always want more interferes with seeing what we have. But there's actually a more fundamental problem which is a concept in psychology called inattentional blindness, which has nothing to do with your arrogance or your desire. And the basic study tells us that when attention is focused on one object or task, observers often fail to perceive an unexpected object, even if it's large and visible. The most famous test was called the gorilla test where people focus on counting basketball passes. And during this game to see if you could count how many times the basketball was passed from the people in black or the people in white. In the middle of this scene, a gorilla, man in a gorilla costume, walks on the stage, beats his chest, and walks off for a total of five seconds, and close to 50% of the people don't notice the gorilla because they're focused on something else. So that's a natural blockage, that if we're not looking for something, we don't see it. And there are many such examples. But the truth is when it comes to הקדוש ברוך הוא, the question is, are we looking for him? We might not be looking for him because we're focused on something else. We're looking for what we want, we're not looking for him. And God is hidden in the world. The world עולם, the root of the word is העלם which means hidden. God is hidden. And if there's something, you're not looking for something, even if it's large and visible, you're not going to see it, surely if it's invisible. That's one strong reason. We're not looking for it, so we're blinded by that, by our inattentional blindness. There are other reasons for our blindness that is subconscious. One of them is we'll call it the obligation trap. The more we see השם's goodness, the more we're obligated to change our lives and show הכרת הטוב, and nobody wants to do that. We avoid recognizing what others do for us to avoid feeling beholden and responsible. And this is, we'll call a self-inflicted blindness, because we don't want to see something that's going to cause me to change my life or change how I look at myself. This is a point brought up by ר' אלחנן וסרמן that the world's greatest philosopher, Aristotle, could not see God, not due to the lack of his intelligence, because he was blinded by something else. He didn't want to see it because he didn't want to have to live his life by God. And that's why the ר' אלחנן וסרמן says that even the youngest person in the Jewish people is asked to have אמונה, because אמונה is really simple. If you see a beautiful building, it didn't come from nowhere. That is just obvious. If you see a, if you see a refrigerator on on Mars, obviously someone was there. Refrigerators don't come from nothing. Yet how could you think the world comes from nothing? The answer is, it's the blindness because you don't want to see it. And שוחד יעוור עיני פקחים, bribe blinds the eyes of the wise. And we're blinded by the bribe of living a life of liberty, a life with no one telling you what to do. And that's why we can't see. So there are many reasons for this blindness that doesn't allow us to see God. And therefore we have to fight against that blindness. And that's our job.