Feeling Grateful

Gratitude. It’s something particularly at the forefront of my mind this week. I am writing this on Wednesday night as I prepare to return home from New York, where we celebrated the engagement of our daughter Esty to a wonderful young man, Rabbi Dovid Geisinsky. My heart is full of gratitude to Hashem for bringing us to this day.

Gratitude is talked about a lot these days by psychologists as a way to achieve happiness. It has emerged as a powerful tool to overcome depression and despair.

Well, as is the case with so many of our brilliant “recent discoveries,” it is a central theme in this week’s Parsha in the Torah.

By the way, this past Shabbat I spoke on the theme of conflict resolution and the lessons the Torah teaches us about it in Talmud and Kabbalah. What I said was based on the teachings of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, our Rebbe’s father, one of our greatest scholars, Kabbalists and leaders, who was exiled by the Soviets and passed away in exile on the 20th of Av, which we marked this Wednesday.

After services, a prominent visiting psychologist came over to me and asked me a few questions about what I had said. She then told me with great awe that in psychology there are (I think this is what she said) five different ways to describe the method I was discussing, and it’s all in the Torah!

Getting back to gratitude, the Torah teaches us that this is vital for our survival and happiness. Moshe tells the people to prepare to enter a wonderful land with an abundance of blessings - the Land of Israel. Then he says (Devarim 8:10): “You will eat and be satisfied, and you shall bless Hashem your G-d…” This is the Biblical Mitzvah, one of the 613, to make the blessings after a meal containing bread, popularly known as Bentching.

Moshe then proceeds to charge us to always thank Hashem for everything we have. Never to feel that “my strength and the might of my hand achieved this wealth for me.”  Rather, Moshe says, “you must remember Hashem your G-d for it is He that gives you strength to make wealth…”

In the great book of Tanya, written by the founder of the Chabad movement, Rabbi Schneur Zalman writes that contrary to what may be typical in the world, that while one who is blessed with abundance may tend to feel arrogant, we must feel humility. We recognize that when we are blessed with goodness, wealth, happy events, etc., it all comes from Hashem. This means that Hashem has brought us closer to Him, and the closer we are to Hashem, the more insignificant we feel.

Many have described our times as the “me generation” or the “entitlement generation.”  When we take personal credit for our accomplishments, we may feel good about ourselves at the moment. But over time not everything goes our way and we get depressed. We find the accumulation of things to be meaningless.

When we recognize that everything we have comes from Hashem, including the wisdom and strength we have to do what it takes to get these things, we feel grateful for everything. If we don’t get everything we want, we are not destined to have it. We appreciate what we do have because everything we have is a gift.

May we all celebrate many happy events, may we all receive an abundance of blessings, and may we all recognize Hashem’s abundant kindness and feel deep gratitude for everything we have.