Human beings don’t have to be told that we are living outside of paradise.  

It’s not just the fact that the world is not perfect: it’s that deep inside many of us, we feel a longing for a place that might be.  Within each of us there is a longing for a home we have never fully found.

Midrashically, this human experience of exile begins almost immediately, on the eighth day of creation, immediately after the first Shabbat.