Gratitude

Friday, August 19, 2022

Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA

            A few years ago, a woman whom I had never met made an appointment to see me.  She sat down in my office and shared with me that her husband, whom she loved very much, was dying of cancer and she wanted to talk with a rabbi.  They were not elderly, but in their forties or fifties, with children still at home, and their world was crumbling to pieces around them.

            I listened, full of grief and heartache, and when she was done, I said “I’m so, so sorry.”  Then she asked, “Do you have any advice for me?”  These are the moments that they just do not prepare you for in rabbinic school. There is no way of preparing for that question.  So I took a deep breath and dug down into my own soul and I was surprised by what I said: “Maybe begin with gratitude.  Gratitude that you found such a wonderful life partner.  Gratitude that you have created a wonderful family together.”  I saw something in her relax, and I don’t remember what else we talked about.  But I have often thought back on that exchange and wondered if I said the right thing.  I think I did.  In that moment of need, I think that the two of us tapped into the healing power of gratitude. 

Throughout my life, I have been mystified and fascinated by the problem of gratitude, which can be so powerful, and also so elusive.  It’s not simple.   I remember the first time I said “thank you” to my mother.  A deep and true thank you.  I was twenty-nine years old.  I know, you’re thinking “that’s terrible!! It took you twenty-nine years?!”  But here is what happened.  Marian and I got engaged when we were both 29, and decided to get married in Rochester, New York, because we both had family there.  My parents and her cousins.  Marian’s mother was born and raised in Rochester. Anyway, we were living out here in Santa Barbara and the wedding was going to be in Rochester, and it just made sense for my parents….by which I mean my mother…to do a lot of the wedding planning.  It was a huge job, and she pulled it off, and I still remember the end of the night, after all the guests had left. At a certain moment, I was standing there with my mom and I turned to her and said “thank you Mom.”  And I meant it.  After many years of arguing and struggling and individuating… I finally said to my mother “Thank you.”  In that moment, I experienced the healing power of gratitude.  But it has to be true.

            How do we keep our gratitude honest?

            Every parent is caught in this bind.  We want our child to feel grateful and to express their gratitude, and so we remind our little children over and over again, “Now, what do you say?”  And our children learn to placate us with “thank you.”  But we are left wondering “did they really mean it?”

            Like “I love you” and “I’m sorry,” if the words “thank you” are forced or faked, then what’s the point?  Much more difficult, and much more important than teaching our kids manners, is the question:  how do we teach our children to feel honestly grateful?  For that matter, how do we bring ourselves to feel honestly grateful?

            The Torah this week speaks to us about our hearts.

            This is not typical.  Usually, Moses is speaking to the entire people, commanding justice and righteousness, prescribing a life of holiness, full of limitations and obligations.  Suddenly in this portion, Moses comes down and speaks to each person, individually, about a voice in our hearts.  V’amarta bilvavecha:  “You might say in your heart kochi v’otzem yadi asah li et hachayil hazeh; my own strength and the power of my hand achieved this success.”  There is a voice in our heart saying “I did this all by myself.”  A failure of gratitude.

            How did Moses know us so well?  Speaking to us, one by one, over three thousand years ago, Moses speaks to us about our hearts and the challenges of feeling honestly grateful.  In response, Moses offers a striking image.  Umaltem et orlat levavchem.  Circumcise the foreskin of your hearts, by which he seems to mean “Remove the barrier around your heart.  Open yourself up.”  Vulnerability is a path to becoming grateful.

            At this point, I would like to call to mind two members of our community who have passed on to the next world, but whose memory is alive within many of us.  Two women, both of them survivors of the Holocaust, Margaret Singer and Judy Meisel.

            Margaret’s beloved mother Gitl perished in Auschwitz, and in one of her poems Margaret demanded of God “why did you let the Shoah happen?  My mother never did you any harm.”  And yet, whenever I would mention in Torah study the world being broken and in need of repair, Margaret would shout “No!  It’s perfect.”  And when we saw each other on Jewish holidays, she would greet me with “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!” To me, Margaret’s gratitude always felt true.

            Like Margaret, Judy Meisel’s mother was also murdered by the Nazis, and Judy herself barely escaped from Stuthoff concentration camp, making her way with her sister Rachel to Denmark, where she arrived as a 16 year old in a broken and malnourished body, weighing 47 pounds.  “By the time I left Denmark for Canada,” Judy said, “the Danish people had restored my sister and me to good health and had given us back our trust in humankind.” 

Judy had a relationship with God, Whom she referred to as “The Above,” and when a black family moved into her neighborhood in Philadelphia, and Judy heard that an angry racist mob had gathered outside their house, Judy baked cookies and walked with a black woman through that crowd to deliver cookies to her new neighbors.  When Laura Bialis made her film about Judy, she and Judy chose for the title the Danish phrase Tak for Alt.  Thanks for Everythying.

            In the teaching guide to the film, Professor of Danish John Mark Nielsen explains that in daily conversation “Danes do not use the phrase ‘Tak for alt.’  As one Dane put it “those are pretty big words.”  Nielsen explains “the literal translation is “thanks for everything” but the meaning is greater.  A more accurate translation is “with deep and profound gratitude for the bounty and fulness of life.”  The one place in Denmark where the phrase is commonly found is on gravestones.

            Tak for alt, “those are pretty big words.”  That’s right.  True, honest, profound gratitude that acknowledges all of the suffering in the word and still manages to say “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it” is probably too big for most of us, at least on a daily basis.  Margaret and Judy were giants among us, because they experienced everything they experienced and still managed to remain grateful. 

            Judaism offers several spiritual practices for those of us who are not giants, but who seek to cultivate a spirit of gratitude, on a daily basis. 

            First, our tradition suggests that the first words we say when we wake up in the morning might be modeh ani (or modal ani for a woman), which means “thank you.”  The full prayer is a little longer, thanking God for restoring our soul to us after a night of sleep and dreaming.  But as a first step, before checking email and even before going to bathroom, the Jewish words to start the day, every day, are “modah ani, thank you.”

            A second suggestion offered by the traditional prayerbook is a prayer that is usually only recited on Shabbat morning, which takes us on an imaginary journey.  The prayer is called ilu Finu and in it we imagine ourselves expanding to fill the entire world.  We imagine our mouth as an ocean, and our eyes as the sun and the moon, and our arms like eagles’ wings and our feet like gazelles and then we pause, and consider that even in that state of mystical expansion, we would still not be able to adequately express our gratitude.  Because the universe is so full of miracles.  Then we drop back down into our human bodies and say “but we have to say something, so we will do the best we can….with these lips and this tongue, and this breath, we have to at least say thank you.”  Ilu Finu is about humble gratitude.

            Finally, our tradition offers us a beautiful, simple, spiritual practice, which I learned long ago from a twelve-year-old girl.  I was a 23-year-old rabbinic student and serving as a student rabbi in Calgary Alberta.  I was training this girl for Bat Mitzvah and she came to class with an orange.  Before beginning, she opened the orange and said, with intensity, “Isn’t an orange a miracle?”  I was a rabbinic student, but I don’t think I had ever understood the religious meaning of a perfect, beautiful, delicious, life sustaining piece of fruit.  In that moment I learned the purpose of offering a blessing over our food.  It is to become aware of the miracle by which our food grows from the earth.

Now, over forty years later, whenever I hike with the children of Netivot, our education program, I always bring carrots, or strawberries, or apples, organically grown, straight from the farmers’ market.  Out on the trail, next to the water, with the sun and the wind in the trees, we gaze at the fruit and we talk about the miracle of life and growth and we say the blessing borei pri ha-etz, Creator of the Fruit of the Tree, or Borei pri ha-Adamah, Creator of the Fruit of the earth, and we picture the tiny carrot seed growing into this magnificent, delicious orange root vegetable. and the kids always declare “this is the best carrot I have ever eaten!”

            In that moment, I think, both the kids and I are learning the life-giving, healing power of honest gratitude. 

Shabbat shalom.