There is something about Thanksgiving that just feels so Jewish. I think our faith often asks us to orient ourselves to the world with a posture of gratitude, and I love that we have a day that orients us to the blessings we feel in this world.
But there is an important extension from the feeling of gratitude which is that we are meant to give. We are not meant just to feel the blessings God has bestowed upon us, we are asked to receive God’s blessings so that we, too, will give.
In the very first encounter between God and our ancestor Abraham in the Torah, when God told him to go out on a journey and be the father of a new people, God instilled in him the integral nature of receiving and giving. God said to Avram, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.” (Bereshit 12:2) This verse describes that we will be abundantly blessed by God - we will become a nation, our name will be great. But crucial here is that not only will we receive God’s blessing, we will also be a blessing to others. We aren’t just recipients of the gifts we receive from God, we also have the power (and responsibility) to pass those gifts on to others.
So this Thanksgiving Shabbat, I hope you’ll join me in thinking about our purpose as it relates to gratitude. Yes, we hope to cultivate a posture of gratitude. But we also hope to have a posture of giving. A posture of knowing all the ways that we are blessed, so that we can bless others.
