I don’t like turkey. I realize the Thanksgiving police might be after me, but we’ve never been a traditional Thanksgiving food kind of family. We usually make something that we especially like; this year it was homemade bagels and lox. For some people the food is religion, and as a person of faith, I can respect that. When I first declared that turkey wasn’t my thing, I felt heretical. Was I the grinch of Thanksgiving?! But of course, Thanksgiving is about so much more than that, and I still feel deeply compelled to think about the meaning of this holiday, especially from a Jewish lens.
There’s a beautiful teaching that I think gets at the heart of what gratitude is meant to be about. A midash states that in the coming time of the Messiah, all sacrifices will be annulled except for the thanksgiving sacrifice, and all prayers will be annulled except for prayers of thanksgiving. The rabbis imagined a world in which one day a messianic era would arrive, and almost all holidays, almost all sacrifices, and almost all prayers would no longer need to be practiced. Except, they teach, for elements of our practice that relate to offering thanksgiving. Regardless of any messianic figure or era, these will endure. We will still engage in these practices.
This is to say, it doesn’t matter what else is going on around you, gratitude is integral to what it means to be a Jew and what it means to be a human. It means that even when there could be a time when everything is purely good, we still must cultivate a practice of gratitude. It means that when things are so challenging that it’s hard to imagine anything good, we still must muster up some energy to think about that for which we are grateful. I gravitate to this teaching because it tells us that we can strip away everything else, yet we still should have gratitude. It makes it so abundantly clear that gratitude is at the core of the values we must embody.
So to accompany whatever traditional foods you ate this year, or didn’t eat (I won’t tell), I hope that you had an abundant side of gratitude. I pray that we are each able to look at our lives, in all the ways that they are complicated and full and messy and beautiful and hard, and find things for which we are grateful. For certain, my life is full of many such things, and I am profoundly grateful to this community for being one of them.
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Sarit
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