Keeping Certain Things Special

I was on some Zoom meetings with associates in Israel when bomb alerts went off. My colleagues were entirely matter-of-fact, explaining how they first go to the bathroom, and then have a few minutes to grab a bite to eat. And THEN they go into the bomb shelter room in their home.

It was startling to realize that, within a very short time span, everyone in the country became entirely acclimated to missile and bomb alerts. Which made me realize that we can get used to just about anything - even the threat of imminent death!

This is also a biological phenomenon. Our scent receptor cells “fire” when they smell things, and if they keep firing, then they die. So, to preserve themselves, the cells reduce the signal over time, and we get used to the smells wherever we are.

De-sensitizing happens in all kinds of ways, of course. Exposure to bad behavior or language or nudity or violence or … just about anything leads to desensitization. This may be necessary as a coping method, but it comes with significant downside risks – think of abuse victims, who rapidly find ways to rationalize whatever happens to them. We used to be horrified by images of dead bodies, but now those images and videos are commonplace across social media. That can’t be good, right?

The corollary is that when we are not exposed to something, we remain sensitive to it. This is why many people (including orthodox Jews) strongly prefer not to be regularly exposed to environments with immodest dress, crass language, aggressive behavior, etc. We preserve and cultivate our sensitivities because those sensitivities are important to us. To take one extreme example: we believe that intimacy is meant to be the holy mating of bodies and souls, far more than scratching an itch by satisfying an animalistic function. In order to keep intimacy holy, to be sensitive to the beauty that can grow within a marriage, we go through quite a lot of effort to block promiscuous and related behavior.

Indeed, we specifically treasure all things that can and should be reserved for holiness. This is why, in the Torah, the ketores, the incense, is specifically reserved:

No outsider—one not of Aaron’s offspring—should presume to offer incense before G-d and suffer the fate of Korah and his band. (N. 17:5)

Korach wanted to make everything egalitarian, open to all. Why should only high priests offer incense? Korach brought 250 people to do so! He did not seem to realize (or care) that when we make something common, we also cheapen it.

More than this: we become accustomed to smells faster than to almost anything else. In order for incense to work, it must be rare!

And what is the function of incense? The smell enters our nostrils, the pathway that G-d used to ensoul Adam. And G-d formed the human, of dust from the ground; he blew into his nostrils the breath of life. And the human became a living being. (G. 2:7)

So the holy incense is meant to remind us of our creation and our connection to our Creator. That is meant to be quite special, indeed!

And so, like everything else, the incense must be kept special, even scarce. Only certain people could formulate the incense, and only other certain people could offer it. Making it common would have debased the incense and its impact on us, just as constant exposure to anything leads to a sense of matter-of-fact acceptance. So scarcity is externally imposed.

There is another layer to this as well. Following the Korach rebellion there is a plague, a nagaf. Aharon stops the plague by spreading incense around the camp – but why is the incense the cure for the plague?

The first nagaf in the Torah was the plague of the frogs:

Frogs shall come up and enter your palace, your bedchamber and your bed, the houses of your courtiers and your people, and your ovens and your kneading bowls.

The nagaf literally brought people and animals together, erasing the difference between them! So a plague, nagaf, is symbolic of mankind slipping downward, toward the general animal kingdom, and losing connection to the divine.

The incense is then used by Aharon as an antidote, as a way to bring us back to our senses, to realize that we are ensouled only by G-d, and that our lives derive our essence and purpose from that essential link.

Nevertheless, we must keep that re-connection rare enough so that we are careful to never take any of our relationships for granted.

The risk of desensitization to the good (as well as the bad) is ever-present.

We all have the challenge of always finding and appreciating the good, of always trying to be grateful for things that we would naturally take for granted. It would be nice if it were not so, but it seems clear that sometimes we need absence in order to appreciate presence.