One of my responsibilities as the educator at camp
this past summer was to teach the youngest campers about prayer. We would begin
by learning about blessings. I would teach them the traditional Jewish
blessings for seeing the wonders of nature, figuring there’s no place in the
world where they would have more opportunities to say these blessings than at
summer camp.
There are two blessings for seeing a miracle in
nature. The first is what you say when you see a big miracle, like mountains,
seas, or even lightening. It goes:
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ,
אֱלהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעולָם, עוֹשֶֹה מַעֲשֵֹה בְרֵאשִׁית.
We praise You, Eternal God, Sovereign of the
universe, who makes the works of creation.
The second blessing is what you say when you see
smaller miracles like beautiful trees and animals. It goes:
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ,
אֱלהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעולָם, שֶׁכָּכָה לּוֹ בְּעוֹלָמוֹ.
We praise You, Eternal God, Sovereign of the
universe, that such as these are in Your world.
This led me to a little game I played all summer. When
I would see something beautiful in nature, I would ask myself, is this miracle
big or small? Which blessing should I say here? Is that sunset a big miracle?
Is the way the rain makes patterns in the reservoir a small miracle? What about
this stunning vista or that gnarled, ancient tree? Even just asking the
question tuned me in to the many miracles surrounding me. It didn’t matter
which blessing I chose, because I had labeled what I was seeing as a miracle. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes: “Our
goal should be to live life in radical amazement… [to] get up in the morning
and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is
phenomenal; everything is incredible. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” For me,
these blessings were away to achieve “radical amazement.” They gave me a language to identify moments that
seemed miraculous. Blessings are a way of expressing gratitude, and having the
language helped me to find moments to be grateful.
Thinking Gratitude
I’ve had gratitude on my mind lately. It started
with my blessings game, but it picked up in earnest when a classmate taught me
a new prayer practice. During t’fillah at school each day, she pauses
during the hodaah prayer and will not let herself sit down until she has
listed 5 things for which she is grateful. I thought, I could do that. Here are
some of the things for which I have expressed thanks in the past few weeks:
· It is Thursday and the
week is over
· Being home for dinner
every night this week
· A group of peers to
support me
· Annie’s delicious
Chicken Piccata
· A terrific student
pulpit
· My favorite Korean
restaurant re-opened
· The fall TV line-up is
back
· A lunch without a
meeting where I can just sit
· A restful and productive
weekend.
· Comfortable shoes.
My gratitude ranges from the mundane to the profound.
There are themes that continue to reappear. Mostly, food comes up a lot. And
Annie. And my friends. It’s only been a few weeks but already I can feel a
difference in my life. This 30 seconds of gratitude is one of the more spiritual
parts of the prayer service for me. It is a moment to say thanks. What I am
thinking about on this Kol Nidre evening is how I can spend the upcoming year continuing
to cultivate an attitude of gratitude.
The science
The scientific literature on gratitude is
unanimous – people who feel gratitude are happier, healthier, and more
resilient. One study asked participants to keep a journal. A third of the
participants wrote a list of five things for which they were grateful, a third listed
hassles or frustrations, and a third wrote down something neutral. Those who
kept the gratitude journals reported exercising more regularly, feeling better physically,
and being more optimistic about the future than people in the other two groups.[1]
Gratitude also has an effect on personal goal
attainment. Studies found that participants who kept gratitude journals were
more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals, be they
academic, interpersonal, or health-based.[2]
Expressing gratitude can also have a profound
impact on children and adolescents. One study found a correlation between
feelings of gratitude and avoidance of risky behaviors like using drugs.[3]
Studies have also found an impact on test scores and performance in school.
In Judaism
But none of this is news for Jews. The Jews are a thankful people. In
fact, the name Jew comes from the son of Jacob and Leah, Judah. When Leah had
her fourth son, she was grateful and said, הַפַּעַם
אוֹדֶה אֶת־יְהוָה (Gen 29:35 WTT), “This Time I will thank
God,” and thus she named him Judah. From Ohdeh – I will thank. And so, from that
moment on, the people of Judah, the Jews, became a people of gratitude. A
people who knew how to say thanks.
And we have a very special tool for marking our gratitude: blessings.
Rabbi Dov Heller, calls blessings the “technology for helping us develop
gratitude.”[4]
They encourage each of us to develop an “attitude of gratitude.” An attitude,
which scientists confirm will make us happier, healthier people.
Gratitude is not something we only acknowledge a few times a year. Rather,
according to the rabbis as well as scientists, it is a daily practice of self-improvement.
The Talmud instructs us to say 100 blessings each day. If we are awake 16 hours
of the day, that means we are saying a blessing about once every ten minutes. Can
you imagine finding something to be grateful for every 10 minutes, something
deserving of a blessing? Hard to imagine doing this for one day, let alone the
rest of your life, but the attitude of gratitude developed by living in such a constant
state of blessing would give you a new appreciation for the many miracles that
surround you.
A story is told of a boy who had just
eaten a delicious sandwich for lunch and said to his mother, "Thank you
very much." But his mother said, "You should not thank me alone, for
I only prepared the food." The boy wondered, "Whom should I
thank?" He thought to himself, “The bread comes from the baker. I will
thank him.” So the boy went to the bakery and said, "Mr. Baker, thank you
for the wonderful bread that you bake.” The baker laughed and said, "I
bake the bread, but it is good because it is made from fine flour, which comes
from the miller who grinds it."
"Then I will thank the miller,"
said the boy, and he turned to leave.
"But the miller only grinds the
wheat," the baker said. "It is the farmer who grows the grain."
So the boy went off in search of the
farmer. He walked to the edge of the village, where he saw the farmer at work
in the fields. "Thank you for the bread I eat every day."
But the farmer said, "Do not thank
me alone. I only plant the seed, tend the field, and harvest the grain. It is
sunshine and good rain and rich earth that make it grow."
"But who is left to thank?"
asked the boy, and he was confused, tired, and hungry again, for he had walked
a long way. The farmer said, "Come inside and have dinner with my family,
and you will feel better."
So the boy went into the farmhouse and
sat down to eat with the farmer's family. Each person took a piece of bread and
then, all together, they said, "We thank You, O Eternal, our God, Ruler of
the universe: You cause bread to spring forth from the earth."
Suddenly, the boy realized that it was
God whom he had forgotten to thank. [5]
Bread does not just spring forth from the earth. So many hands go
into making it. God’s hands and human hands. The process of saying blessings
for the miracles in our lives helps to trace them to their sources, both immediate
and distant. Our blessings reveal to us the many hidden hands that form the
miracles of our lives.
Gratitude combats Insufficiency
Acknowledging miracles gives us a sense of contentment, and combats
the insufficiency we all sometimes feel – the sense that we don’t have enough
or that we are not enough. Pirke Avot says, “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in
their own lot.”[6]
There are two mindsets in the world: scarcity and abundance. Scarcity says “I
do not have enough.” People who live with scarcity feel like there is an
insatiable hole in their lives, and nothing they do will ever fully fill it. People
who live with abundance look around and say “Look how blessed I am.” Whatever
they have feels like enough. This is the message of Dayeinu on Passover – any
one of the miracles listed would have been enough. How lucky are we to have
experienced not one, but all of them. Each is part of a larger path to
redemption, but when we separate them out, we can see them as a multitude of
miracles, not just one. This is the value of a daily gratitude practice,
breaking down the miracles of our daily lives into their component parts, until
we can begin to move from a place of scarcity to a place of abundance. Bread is
not just one miracle, it’s dozens of miracles baked into tiny loafs. How can
anyone who thanks God for the miracle of bread not see the abundance in their
life?
17 years ago my family was in a rough place. My grandfather had
just been diagnosed with lung cancer. Neither of my parents was particularly
happy at work. And I was in middle school (need I say more). The conversation
at our dinner table each night had been reduced to a litany of complaints. My
mother started to worry about the effect this was having on all of us. One day
my Mom watched Oprah interview woman about how keeping a gratitude journal had
helped her cope with cancer. “Some days,” she said, “all I can write is ‘I got
up and got dressed today’ but those days even that can feel like a miracle.” This
woman’s story touched my mother deeply and she saw it as a way to combat the
scarcity we were all feeling. That night, at dinner, she announced that we
would begin the meal by going around the table, each saying one thing that we
were grateful for, something we have done at every meal since. I believe deeply
that this practice of gratitude has transformed my family. I believe it has
made us happier. I believe it has made us more resilient. In my mother’s own
battle with cancer, this practice of gratitude has been one of the key powers
that has kept her spirits up and her outlook positive, even on grim days. Cultivating
an attitude of gratitude has helped my family weather seemly impossible storms.
Jewish Living is Grateful Living
The first words that a Jew utters upon waking are Modeh Ani
l’fanecha – “I offer thanks before you.” From the very first moments of our
day, we are grateful. Before we sit up, or put on our glasses, the lens through
which we should see the world is one of gratitude.
And this mood carries us through our day. Nearly one third of our
daily prayers are on the theme of gratitude. We experience gratitude at meal
times – both before and after we eat. The Talmud says that someone who eats
without blessing is like a thief. One must not take food without giving thought
to how it came to be. In this way, every meal is an opportunity to cultivate an
attitude of gratitude.
The Enemy of Gratitude is Habit
Yet despite the regularity of these blessing, we must not allow
them to become rote, routine, and devoid of meaning. The enemy of gratitude is
habit. It is easy to blindly say hamotzi without noticing the miracle that
bread springs forth from the earth (with lots of help). The Medieval
philosopher Bahya Ibn Paquda says that we are surrounded by such a “superabundance
of divine favors” that it is easy to become accustomed to them and stop
noticing them completely. We begin to see these divine favors as essential
parts of our being, not miracles that exist outside of us. If I see the food I
eat only as a necessity of my daily life, I fail to acknowledge it as
miraculous gift that appears at my table. An attitude of gratitude reawakens us
in to the superabundance of miracles that surround us. The blessings for nature,
or the blessing over bread, or the blessing we say after we go to the bathroom
are opportunities to remember that even in the ordinary, there is wonder. Blessings
shake us from our complacency.
A Year of Living Gratefully
So what do we do with all this? How do we create a uniquely Jewish
practice of gratitude? I propose on this Yom Kippur that we each resolve to
make this a year of living gratefully. Just like in the scientific studies, we
need ways to record our gratitude. To change our lives, gratitude has to be a
daily practice. And from our Jewish tradition we know that ritual makes things
permanent. The more we have a specific time or way to do something, the more
likely it is to happen. Here are a few suggestions:
- I invite your family to join mine in starting each meal with gratitude. It’s like an out-loud gratitude journal that you share with the people you love. Or try a keeping a journal. Or, I read about one woman who is keeping a “gratitude jar.” Each night she writes something she is grateful for on a slip of paper and puts it into the jar, and next year, at Rosh Hashanah, she will open it again, to relive all the gratitude she felt this year.
- Set a number. Don’t just try to find one thing you are grateful for, find five. One may not be enough to tune us in to the superabundance of miracles. This is why my friend’s Amidah practice has been powerful for me, and I was fascinated to see the number five paralleled in the scientific literature. Our tradition encourages us to find 100 things to bless in a day. I bet we could each find five. I read about a woman who counts blessings instead of sheep. When she wakes up in the middle of the night and has trouble falling back asleep, she starts to think fondly about each of her children and then each of her grandchildren, one by one. She blesses them and sends them gratitude prayers. She says “I never make it through the whole list before I’m peacefully asleep again.”[7]
- Be specific. As I said, habit is the enemy of gratitude. If we are to cultivate a sense of “radical amazement,” we are going to need more than just “thank you God for the food I ate today.” Maybe this is why there are so many different blessings in Judaism – a different blessing for apples and potatoes – so that in thinking about which blessing is required, we consider the miracle more closely. This was certainly the function of my “big miracle/small miracle” game. It was about more than just naming something as miraculous, it was about saying “What about this is miraculous?” As you keep your journal or jar, or share around the table, I encourage you to be specific. As one scientist put it:
- While you might always be thankful for your great family, just writing “I’m grateful for my family” week after week doesn’t keep your brain on alert for fresh grateful moments. Get specific: “Today my husband gave me a shoulder rub when he knew I was really stressed." Opening your eyes to more of the world around you can deeply enhance your gratitude practice.
- Relationships rely on gratitude. Scientists have found a high correlation between successful marriages and the amount that a couple expresses gratitude towards each other. Dr. John Gottman suggests that in successful relationships, positive expressions like smiles, compliments, laughter, and expressions of appreciation and gratitude outnumber negative expressions like complains and frowns by 5 to 1! Take an opportunity each day to tell your partner one thing you are grateful for that day, just to make sure you tip the scales in gratitude’s favor.
- On that note, Annie, Thank you for being amazingly supportive these last 10 days. You are the biggest blessing in my life.
This Yom Kippur we ask God to seal us for a blessing in the book of
life. If my research on gratitude has taught me anything, it’s that this work
falls mainly on us. As my teacher, Sam Glaser puts it, “If you want more
blessings, make more blessings.” Let this year be a year of blessing for all of
us, but even more than that, may this year be a year when we notice the
abundant blessings that surround us. Let it be a year when we take more time to
say thank you to the people around us who are sources of blessing in our lives.
Let it be a year when we notice miracles hidden in each day and thank God as
their source. Let it be the year of abundance and not scarcity, of appreciation
and not acquisition. So that, when we are here next Yom Kippur we will know
that God sealed us for blessings in the book of life. Blessings which we
noticed. Blessings for which we said thanks.