Blessings
I'm sure you know the feeling:
You have a pounding headache, and for hours and hours, you hope longingly for it to go away — you can't imagine it ever ending...
And then, at some point (hopefully)…it does.
You go on with your life, probably not thinking about it again — certainly not about how you had thought it would never end, and yet it did.
Hopefully, as you're reading this, you're not suffering from a headache.
What does it feel like to not have a headache?
The nice thing about not having pain is that you feel nothing.
This is the hallmark of the blessing of health.
Health, which we desire so intensely when we lack it, is invisible to us when we have it.
This is well worth meditating on for a bit.
Think about all the things which we would call "the important things in life" — food, health, livelihood, family, education — all of them, as valuable as they are, are like the water fish swim in. They are only fully appreciated when one is taken out of them and gasps to have them back.
Having said this, we can now understand why having your needs met i.e. being satisfied, is ironically, one of the most precarious situations you could be in.
While we are hustling to find whatever it is that we need in life, our senses are acutely honed to the world around us. We are awake with the awareness of our "rumbling bellies" and our dependence on others to help us satisfy those needs. And when we get what we need — when we finally land that job, or get that raise, or seal that deal — although, in that instant, we are filled with gratitude — in those moments that immediately follow, our appreciation naturally fades to black.
What was once that highly coveted goal we were "dying to get" is now dramatically demoted to status quo. And status quo tastes like water to the fish that swims in it.
It’s around this very point that Moshe pivots in one of his final speeches to the Jewish nation before his death. It was made famous in the 2nd paragraph of the Shema:
ונָתַתִּי עֵשֶׂב בְּשָׂדְךָ לִבְהֶמְתֶּךָ וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבָעְתָּ: הִשָּׁמְרוּ לָכֶם פֶּן יִפְתֶּה לְבַבְכֶם וְסַרְתֶּם...
I (Hashem) will give grasses in your field for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Guard yourself, lest your heart be seduced and you turn away...
We, as creatures of habit, could mutter these lines twice a day for a lifetime, and never think twice about the connection between them. A little bit of contemplation, however, goes a long way — it will jump out at you if you just look at them for a few seconds.
They're not separate ideas at all.
Being satisfied is the very thing that puts us into the dangerous, stoned state of unconscious entitlement in which what we have is nothing more than “normal” — in which all things being equal, we will only get another "high" from having more.
Our tradition provides us a remedy to our satiated stupor with the one magical word that is missing above:
This is actually the source for the mitzvah of "Birkat Hamazon," known colloquially as "bentching" (Yiddish for “blessing”), thanking God for the tasty, filling and nutritious meal He has blessed us with. It is the only Torah-mandated blessing, and is therefore the paradigm for all the blessings we make.
A blessing is not a ritualistic rabbit's foot or horseshoe we rub after a meal.
A blessing is a sophisticated form of meditation. Of course, like anything, it can also fall prey to habit and become an "abracadabra" mumbling of an ancient Hebrew spell, but what it is meant to be is a highly conscious experience of gratitude.
There are no shortcuts to emerge from the full-belly syndrome of taking things for granted for any area of life. The only way is to take the few minutes of actively thinking about and feeling the appreciation, and then saying "thank you" to Whomever gave it to you. The feelings of satiation — of “feeling loved and taken care of,” as my friend and mentor Rabbi Shmuel Lynn likes to say before his family bentches together on Shabbat —
these feeling pass quickly.
Hashem instructs us to take a few minutes after a meal to bottle these feelings of gratitude so that we feel truly satisfied and taken care of all day.
The blessing of all blessings is to know how blessed we are. Articulating our gratitude after we eat is what helps us taste what otherwise would have gone un-enjoyed: the satisfaction itself.
We should all be blessed and feel blessed.