132 - Could You Do That?

As mentioned, the Holy Sages, through divine inspiration, authored the prescribed prayers. And as part of the daily thanks that appears in the prescribed prayers three times a day, we say, "thank you Hashem for the miracles that we experience on a daily basis." As part of our journey and endeavor to grow in our emunah - our belief, we ought to internalize that every single one of us is experiencing miracles every single day. But again, our job is to try and find those miracles and thereafter express our gratitude to Hashem for them. 

We are taught that when the Jewish people were traveling through the desert, their sustenance came in the form of a food called mann that used to fall from heaven. Now most of us today, if we would experience such a thing, would again be quite surprised and perhaps moved by such an experience. We are taught that the mann was a type of food that was the tastiest thing in the world. It would taste like whatever you wanted it to taste like. Now imagine we would experience that. Not only a food falling from the heaven, but a food which is unheard of that actually tastes like whatever you want it to. 

Now for the Jewish people in the desert, it was actually the other way around. They became accustomed to receiving their food, the mann, that would fall from heaven every day. And therefore, when their journey in the desert concluded and they now arrived in Eretz Yisrael and were given the command to go and work the fields and produce wheat, which will eventually turn into bread and food, some commentaries write that there was a tremendous sense of surprise, for those people who had now come from the desert had been accustomed to the normal way of food being delivered to me is by falling down from the heavens. And when suddenly the ground can produce wheat and that can turn into food, that seems like an outright miracle. What we see today as the norm for the Jewish people in the desert was an outright miracle. And what they experienced by the mann falling from heaven would be an outright miracle for us today. 

By internalizing the words of the Anshei Knesset Sagedoila, that we are called on to thank Hashem for the miracles that He is performing for us every day, we will quickly realize that life is one big miracle. When one studies the anatomy of the eye, of how complicated the so many things that need to function in a perfect way in order to provide for us a constant camera that is able to shift its lens for different distances, as well as automatically adjust to different light settings, as well as automatically clean itself on a constant basis without usually needing repair, the fact that we have eyes to see is certainly no less of a miracle than the mann falling from the heaven and the splitting of the sea. 

And in the same way, if we look at the digestive system, when we ingest foods and somehow the body is able to take the nutritious parts of those foods and deliver them to specifically the parts of my body that needs those nutrients, whilst at the same time get rid of the waste that is unnecessary and actually detrimental for my body and all the other many complications that happens throughout this process, is that any short of a miracle of splitting the sea? 

Just because we are used to this incredible miracle that Hashem gave us today, yesterday, and the day before, does not mean it's a smaller miracle than something we are not used to. Our job is to make our maximum effort, and every one of us has the constant opportunity to try, find, and thank Hashem for all the miracles that He sends us.