09 Daily Dose of Gratitude
Update: 2025-11-18
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Welcome to our daily Bitachon series and we are now in the Sha'ar HaBechina of the Chovot HaLevavot discussing seeing God in creation. And he tells us that the second reason why people don't see God in creation is they're just used to it. They see it all the time. It doesn't talk to them, doesn't mean anything, nothing extraordinary. The Chovot HaLevavot in his Sha'ar Cheshbon HaNefesh chapter three, says that a person should never be at the point which he calls he gives up on the wow. What does that mean? That means when I see something new and exciting, I say, wow. The first time you saw a Tesla car, you said, wow, look at that. It's a car going without gas. Or the wow of anything that's strange and different, we get the wow. But then we lose the wow. And the wow is only saved for the solar eclipse, but there's no wow for the regular sun. And that's the point that he makes, that we get amazed by waterfalls, but not by rain. We get amazed by the things that change, but not the constants. And the Chazon Ish says the difference between nature and miracles is nothing more than nature is just consistent miracles.And this is an important concept which separates different types of people, the kind of people that are only triggered by the changes and the difference and the people that are don't need an outside trigger, but they themselves are the cause to contemplate. And we see this by the four sons of the Haggadah Shel Pesach . One of them is the chacham . He asks, not because he's prompted by anything special. But the tam says, mah zot , what is this? What's the, what's the, why is this called the simple son? Because this is what's this? And we have to look at the context of when he asks the question. We say we do this is in Shemot 13:11 . We it's in our tefillin that when there's a firstborn donkey, you can either redeem it on a sheep or if you don't want to redeem it, then you have to chop the donkey's head off. At that point, the child says, mah zot , what is this? When something's strange, then he starts to ask, otherwise, nothing bothers him. This is a beautiful mashal I once heard of a child that goes into a cockpit of an airplane and he's looking at all the different things that are going on and he sees this big red button. He says, what's this? What's this? I mean, everything else in the cockpit you understand, all the different gauges and all the different levers make sense. Just the red button, you don't understand? And that's this tam over here that he's mah zot , what's this? What's going on? You know, I understand tefillin , I understand tzitzit , I understand all of the 612 mitzvot . The one thing that's bothering me is why you're chopping off this poor donkey's head. That's a tam . That that's you only ask questions when things are extraordinary, and the truth is, there are a lot of tams in the world. And that's why at the night of the Seder , we make changes, changes so the child should ask. But that's the child that should ask. That's the tam . That's we're not supposed to be tams . We're supposed to be the kind of people that are always thinking, always contemplating, always trying to understand.So we're just used to our bodies and used to everything that's going on with us. We don't even spend the time to look into it. Then there's an even lower level, the one אינו יודע לשאול. He doesn't even know how to ask. Even after he sees a change, he doesn't ask anything. He just keeps going. So our job is to bring ourselves up to the level of the chacham . The person that contemplates, that looks, that tries to tries to understand what's going on around him. And not just what's going on around him, but like Iyov said מבשרי אחזה אלוה, from my own skin, my own flesh and blood, I see God. Look at your body. A little simple, little simple example. If you ever look at your your knuckles and you see like there's a little extra skin by your knuckles of your hand, you can look at it right now when you bend it. Well, if you'd have knuckles, but the skin would be as tight by the knuckles as the rest of your body, they wouldn't bend. Look at the back of your shoulder. Has a similar look. Look at your knee. You have a little extra skin over there that God put in like the, you want to bend the straw, like there's that extra, you know, accordion piece at the end that you can bend the straw, otherwise it wouldn't bend well. Well, where did that come from? When do we ever notice that little extra flesh on our fingers? And there's endless examples of that, how God is doing things just for us to make life comfortable and good. And that's again, constant strengthening Tov Hashem la'kol . Hashem is good for everybody. We just don't see it because we're so used to it. And again, this is necessary, this is the backbone of bitachon , understanding Tov Hashem la'kol . He's reliable because he wants to do good for us and he's only doing good for us, but we forget about it and we're blind. And as we said, we're blind because we're used to it and we have to break that habit and that automatic way of looking at things and become excited and put the wow into something as simple.
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