Maybe the most dangerous sin is the one we no longer feel is a sin
Some mistakes hurt immediately. We say something cruel, hurt someone or lose control, and we know something was wrong. But there is a more dangerous state: repeating the same thing until we no longer feel anything.
Haazinu says: “For they are a generation of reversals, children in whom there is no faithfulness” (Deuteronomy 32:20). A person can become accustomed to almost anything - even to what once shocked him.
The first time he speaks disrespectfully to a spouse, he feels bad. After a hundred times it becomes “my personality.” The first time he breaks a promise to a child, he is troubled. Later the child learns not to expect.
A heart does not harden in one day. It hardens layer by layer whenever we do something wrong and successfully explain to ourselves why this time it is fine.
Shabbat Shuvah therefore asks not only “What did I do?” but a harder question: what have I stopped noticing?
Sometimes the sign that the soul is alive is not that it never falls. It is that falling still hurts.