Gratitude
Exercise: Set a timer for 10 minutes. Sit in a comfortable place with material for writing (it could be a pen and paper or a laptop. Whatever is easiest for you to express yourself.) Make a list of the blessings in your life. Include material blessings, family and friends, spiritual blessings, and anything else that comes to mind. After the timer goes off, make the following declaration: “Thank You for bringing me to a place with so much goodness and abundance in my life. I know that my agency is only part of the story. My successes and blessings are also due to You.”
Background: When we enter the land, says Deuteronomy, we are instructed to bring first fruits to the “place that God will choose.” We then make a declaration thanking God for bringing us out of Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. After that ritual we are invited to sit with the our family and the Levites to celebrate.
The Five Books of Moses have very few liturgies in them. We have the cohanic blessings in Numbers, declarations of our ancestors upon consecrating altars, and this declaration. By far the longest such liturgy, it is one of the few insights we have into rituals of the first Temple period. This was a key part of how they celebrated Shavuot in 6th and 7th century BCE.
Interestingly, even though the declaration took place at Shavuot, the Rabbis preserved this liturgy in the Passover Seder. We use these verses as the basis of retelling the Exodus from Egypt. Perhaps for the Rabbis of the 1st and 2nd century, using this declaration at Passover was a plea to God for redemption from Roman occupation.
For us, I suggest bringing this ritual back as a pre–High Holiday practice. Our era, with all our technological marvels, sometimes forgets that we are never the sole architects of our good fortune. Certainly, our efforts and skills matter. Yet there are always other people and fortunate circumstances that enable those blessings to become manifest. Praising God for those blessings is a way to acquire both humility and gratitude.
The Psalmist teaches: God is robed in splendor. This means God alone is singular and robed in majesty. It is a much-needed lesson for our era. We aren’t God -the job is taken. Paradoxically, that realization and the humility it engenders helps foster wellbeing. If we are the sole architects of our fortune, and we are mortal, fragile beings, than our blessings similarly are limited and fragile.
When we remember that our blessings come from God, then we realize there is another way in which we live that is tethered to eternity. Our lives are filled with blessings in a way that never ceases. That realization awakens a great sustaining joy and then we can say: thank you God for my life and all that is in it.
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi David Booth
