Meditations on Thanksgiving weekend

By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel

Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel

CHULA VISTA, California  — Most people are not born with an attitude of gratitude. I want to share with you some Thanksgiving meditations I have thought about this week. To begin, here are two brief anecdotes that illustrate this point.

Once upon a time, some American tourists went to Mexico on vacation; they toured some hot springs, where they saw the natives washing their clothes! One tourist said to his guide, “My, isn’t it wonderful how Mother Nature provides her children with hot water to wash their clothes?” The tour guide replied, “So you might think, Senor, but the natives complain that Mother Nature doesn’t provide the soap!”

It’s been said that the hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

Chinese wisdom teaches, “When you drink from the stream remember the spring.”

I am reminded of another story I once saw on The Simpsons, where that little misanthrope Bart is asked to offer thanks at a family meal, he says, “Dear God, we bought all of this stuff with our own money, so thanks for nothing.”

Unfortunately, gratitude is something most people are not born with; but with proper nurture, it is a skill we can all attain. When we look at the delicious food on our table, most of us are probably thankful the market had everything we needed for a holiday.

But where did the supermarket get the food? You guessed it from the farmer. But for the farmer, he understands how precarious his profession is. He can lose a crop with an unexpected storm, or an insect infestation, or a cold frost that destroys the orange crop. Many bad things can happen.

Perhaps we need to realize that the abundance we experience is truly a blessing; we could just as easily be living in a time of great scarcity. When the pandemic first started, we saw how empty the shelves in the supermarkets were. Thanksgiving comes in many forms—even in the form of toilet paper, for it was amazing how quickly it disappeared because people lived in fear and in want.

But gratitude is an acquired skill; it involves a retraining of our mind and our attitudes.

Research has shown that people who regularly practiced grateful thinking were more than 25 percent happier, slept better, suffered lower levels of stress and even spent more time exercising. People sure like to complain.

An author who wrote a book on Gratefulness, Prof. Richard Emmons, explains that” Preliminary findings suggest that those who regularly practice grateful thinking do reap emotional, physical, and interpersonal benefits. […]  Grateful people experience higher levels of positive emotions such as joy, enthusiasm, love, happiness, and optimism […] As a discipline, the practice of gratitude protects a person from the destructive impulses of envy, resentment, greed, and bitterness.” Politicians, especially, love to create class-warfare between the haves and the have-nots, as if creaturely comforts would ever dictate our inner and spiritual state of mind.

In Yiddish, we have a word for such a mindset, it’s called “Kvetching,” or chronic complaining. It’s as old as the Bible itself. It seems that many folks have an innate bias towards being or feeling negative for whatever reason. In other words, for some of us, being a grouch comes naturally. Therapists and psychologists alike tend to focus on the ethos of victimization and narcissism rather than engendering a life-attitude of thankfulness.

But this need not be the case.

Write a Gratitude Journal

  • Gratitude makes us happier. A five-minute a day gratitude journal can increase your long-term well-being by more than 10 percent. That’s the same impact as doubling your income! Saying the good morning prayers leading up to a hundred blessings a day is another great way to develop thankfulness.
  • How can a free five-minute activity compare? Gratitude improves our health, relationships, emotions, personality, and career.

Developing an attitude of gratefulness can not only make us happier, it can also protect us from heart attacks, lessen physical pain, and confer other physiological benefits.

For our spiritual and psychological healthiness, we need to be thankful for all that is good in our lives. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus once wrote, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”

Aesop may have made this point even more forcefully:

Once, a dog had gotten himself a piece of meat and was carrying it home in his mouth to eat it in peace. On his way home, he had to cross a plank lying across a running brook. As he crossed, he looked down and saw his own shadow reflected in the water beneath. Thinking it was another dog with another piece of meat, he made up his mind to have that also. So he made a snap at the shadow in the water, but as he opened his mouth, the piece of meat fell out, dropped into the water and was never seen more.

  The moral: 

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

When we lose sight of what we have, by grasping after shadows, we risk losing everything we already truly have.

What applies to the life of the individual, applies no less to our nation as a whole.

In words that could have been penned today, Abraham Lincoln knew that the need for remembering God in prosperity is imperative for any time, and constituted a requisite for our nation’s integral character and identity.

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, for many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.

Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self‑sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to God that made us! It behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

This year in particular, it is perhaps even harder than usual to feel gratitude at a time when COVID 19 has taken a great toll on families everywhere around our country and world.

One might wonder: When we look at the evil that the pandemic that has gripped the world, it might seem as though “Thanksgiving” is self-deceiving. Despite the abundance at our tables, it’s also easy to wonder, what should we be thankful for? For those who have lost jobs, loved ones, money, and dreams, this year is a very challenging time for us to think about being grateful.

Perhaps many of us can relate to what Bart Simpson said.

But the truth is there has never been a time in which bad things didn’t happen to good people. Suffering has always been a part of the human condition throughout recorded history.

The Pilgrims experienced enough hardship to leave them demoralized. Yet they sat for three days, feasting, rejoicing and grateful for what they had. Rejuvenated, they made it through that first winter, and another, and another — just as our immigrant ancestors who left the Old Country did.

The lesson of this week’s parasha beckons us to see the cup as half-full, as we focus upon the many blessings we experience daily.

For instance: health. We expect to wake up in the morning and expect to be healthy, but when we receive a diagnosis that we have an illness, suddenly we appreciate and recognize what we had and now have lost..

Gratitude is really about the appreciation of the gifts that God has given us. Without appreciation, we do not have gratitude. In the absence of mindfulness, we have mindlessness and confusion; a world where we do not sense God’s blessings in our lives or in the lives of our nation.

As a spiritual exercise, we should write down a gratitude list of at least ten thankful things. Of course, the list will vary from person to person. My friend Father Leo will be thankful for his Green Bay Packers, while I will be thankful for the New England Patriots, yet despite our personal histories, I think we can find many things that we should be thankful for.

On this Thanksgiving weekend, we need to ask ourselves: What are we really grateful for? What are the blessings that are present in our life? For some of us, it might be having the presence of a spouse or a friend, whose life endows us with friendship and love. Have we ever taken the time to thank God for having those special persons in our lives?

Regardless of our political or religious beliefs, we should all be grateful for this holiday that we are lucky to live in a country that allows us such freedo

As a nation of immigrants, I believe that immigrants experience Thanksgiving in a way that is very different from most of us who were born here. My father was an immigrant who survived the death camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek ; Thanksgiving for him and other members of my father’s family was the most joyous time of the year.

Thanksgiving was always a joyous time for our families–most of whom happened to be Holocaust survivors.

Once, one of my aunts attended a community Thanksgiving dinner and sat at a table where a number of other Holocaust survivors were sitting. This was a very garish affair, and all the women at the table were wearing their most expensive jewelry and finery. Toward the end of the meal, the only thing left on the table was a basket full of baked bread.

One woman recalled, “When I was in the concentration camp, I saw a woman trade a very large 4 carrot diamond for a couple of slices of stale bread; another woman remembered, “When I was in the camp, I used to often dream about being married to a baker, so that I would never be hungry again.” A third lady remembered how wonderful it was to eat the smallest morsel of bread when she was starving. When the waiter arrived, he said, “Would you like me to remove the bread from the table?” The ladies all answered in unison, “Not now, not ever again.”

What exactly does “thanksgiving” mean? Thanksgiving, to be truly Thanksgiving, one must first express “thanks,” and then by “giving.”

For many, the yearly community service — helping in a soup kitchen, delivering canned goods to the needy, sick or elderly — has been fulfilled, and they can feel gratified in knowing they’ve done a good deed for others.

We’ve said our thanks, counted our blessings and passed the peas and the candied yams. Thanksgiving is over, and as soon as the holidays are out of the way, we can get back to our lives. Why do so many of us relegate thoughts of thankfulness and limit kindly-acts to a single day, or a single season?

I am reminded of a comment about Thanksgiving, I heard from the Jay Leno Show concerning the human condition.

Leno noted how on Thanksgiving, restaurants give away free meals, soup kitchens pop up all over the place, all kinds of groups provide all kinds of food to the poor.

But, Leno pointed out, for the most part, all those who help out do so only on Thanksgiving. “We give these people one big meal a year, really stuff them and tell them, “That oughta hold you. See you next Thanksgiving.'”

And if we are truly thankful for our faith, what can we do to bring it into our homes, to keep it alive in the world? Thanksgiving teaches us much about spreading the power of blessing.

Most importantly, we should never tire of telling those significant people how much we appreciate them in our lives. Not only will we be healthier and happier as individuals, but we will also all be content and grateful as a nation.

Now, the day after Thanksgiving is as good a time as any to start.