By Rabbi Michael Berk
This year Thanksgiving will be unlike any we’ve ever had. How can we even be grateful when there is such sadness, isolation, disease, loneliness, anger and despair all around us? Maybe we need to use this Thanksgiving to focus on what giving thanks really means; what we have to be grateful for, and how we can live a life of gratitude.
When we teach children to say thank you, we are introducing them to a profound and maybe uniquely human phenomenon. Gratitude as a religious value teaches us that we are obligated to thank God for our lives every day we wake up. We are to be grateful for every morsel of food we enjoy; for every evening we spend in homes which shelter us from the elements; for the clothes we wear; and for the relationships which add depth and meaning to our lives.
Why would God care if we are grateful to Him? For religious people, it is because we believe we are God’s partners. That, after all, may be one reason God created humanity — to replace Him. When God was done creating Jupiter and zebras and everything else, He left the rest to us.
Gratitude arises in us when we are humbled by the realization of the bounty that God has bestowed on us and how dependent on God we are. When we are grateful to God for all life’s gifts, we want to repay Him by being good and doing good in the world.
If you are not religious, gratitude still works the same way. Instead of feeling humbled by dependence on God, you may feel humbled by how dependent you are on all the members of your community. That’s the humility we have become familiar with in the last several months, when, whether or not you believe in God, you realized how dependent you are on others for everything from administering lifesaving medical treatment to loved ones, teaching our little ones, or stocking store shelves for all of us.
We all learned how fragile our complex society is when we suddenly couldn’t find toilet paper or garbanzo beans anywhere. We should have learned to be grateful to the expanding list of people whom we consider frontline workers: doctors and nurses, delivery people and store clerks. We are all in this together and are more interconnected than we realized.
Humility inspires the question, “What can I do to show gratitude for my blessings?” That’s the point of gratitude — to be inspired to bestow blessings on others as blessings have been bestowed on you. An Indigenous scholar commented about the Native American notion of gratitude: “Gratitude and abundance are reciprocal things,” she said, adding that when we take from the land, we should also give back. ”I would add that we should also give back to the people around us, our society and communities, in gratitude for all the they do for us.
On this Thanksgiving we have lots to be grateful for. We just need to put aside thoughts of what we don’t have, and focus on what we do have. Many of us will sit down to sumptuous feasts on Thanksgiving, probably in relatively comfortable homes and with decent clothes on our backs. People who are grateful want life’s blessing to be available in a fair and just society for all to enjoy.
I can only speak with some measure of authority for Judaism, but I think my observations will resonate with Christians and Muslims. My religion teaches forcefully and with great clarity about gratitude and the obligations we have toward others, as well as the obligations a community has towards its members.
Our faiths require us to care about others and do good deeds for them. But religion is deeper than that. Our faiths also make claims on our cities, states, and nation, insisting that society also has an obligation to assist those in need. You can’t leave it to the churches, synagogues, and mosques.
There’s a strange discussion in the Talmud about whether or not the people who live around a courtyard can build a gate at the entrance. The rabbis decided that if a gate is to be built, it must be constructed in a way that allows anyone to get in, especially the poor. This may render the gate useless if it had been intended to offer security, but there is a higher value involved: you cannot cut yourself off from the poor and vulnerable.
You cannot say, “It’s our courtyard!” Because, said the rabbis, a community has to be a place where you can see the faces and hear the voices of others, even the poor and homeless whom you’d like to ignore. If you can’t hear or see them, it’s impossible for there to be justice in the community.
When you see a hungry person and give that person a tuna fish sandwich, that is a lovely gesture of charity. When society provides a means for that person to feed his or her family and find work, it’s not charity. It’s justice.
Gratitude is not natural. It is something we are taught. That’s why in a New York Times article about how to handle Thanksgiving shopping with the pandemic surging, we are reminded to say thank you to those risking their lives so you can put food on your table. When you shop, be “patient and thank [the workers] for their service.” If you have groceries delivered, “Wear a mask when accepting the delivery, give your delivery person a generous tip and always wash your hands after unpacking the groceries.”
Notice that thanking is more than a verbal exercise. Real thanks starts with kind words but leads to actions that express gratitude, like making sure those workers have fair wages and health care.
If you need an example of how to find a reason to be grateful, meet Holocaust survivor Simon Gronowski. The world knows about him because last April he opened the window of his apartment and began entertaining his neighborhood in Brussels with concerts. Here’s a man who has every reason to feel deprived and angry, and that the world is an awful place that meted out a terrible fate for his family and people. But he’s not bitter; and the reason for his concerts is to give people something pleasurable during a difficult time.
When he reflects on his struggle to survive the genocide waged against his people, and compares it to what we are currently going through, he finds plenty to be thankful for now. Remembering the long time he spent in confinement, the constant fear and sadness he experienced, he wrote to his fellow citizens, “Currently reduced to forced idleness, conducive to reflection, my thinking wanders and rejoins the confinements that I suffered 75 years ago…Today, we can stay with our family or be helped by it, keep in touch, we can do our shopping, stock up on provisions, read the newspapers, watch television, but then we lived in terror, we lacked everything, we were cold, hungry and our families were separated, dislocated.”
“When I tell my story at schools, I always finish with a message of hope, I always tell them one important thing: I tell them that life is beautiful,” he added.
There’s always something to be grateful for, even this Thanksgiving. Life is beautiful, and if you are grateful for your life, try making the lives of others beautiful.
This Thanksgiving, poised between a year that has been dark and depressing and a new year promising hope and light, is going to be complicated; maybe even a bit heartbreaking. Despite all we’ve been through, I hope we find some way to enjoy family and good food, and that our feasts warm our heart to feel grateful for the blessings we can still count.
And may our gratitude lead us to begin healing our fractured nation, and create cities, states, and a nation that take care of the vulnerable, the hungry and homeless. That’s the “Thank you” God waits for.
Michael Berk is Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel, the largest Jewish congregation in San Diego and the oldest in Southern California.
