The Great Thing About Gratitude
Aug 24th, 2010 | By admin | Category: 2007-8, Archivesby Rabbi Yisrael Rutman
Gratitude is great. Ask anybody in the Positive Psychology movement, and they’ll tell you. They’ll probably thank you for asking, too.
Psychology has always been more about the negative side of man—neurosis, anxiety, repression, schizophrenia are all terms which entered the language from psychology. Positive Psychology marks a turnabout in the field because it focuses instead on what makes people tick, not on what makes them not tick. Studies show that gratitude can lead to happiness. So positive psychologists encourage gratitude visits, letters of thanks and gratitude journals as methods of enhancing our appreciation of the good things in life.
To be sure, the orientation is studiously secular. As journalist Deborah Norville explains, “The practice of gratitude is part of every major religion. But the great thing about Thank You Power (title of her book) is that you need not be religious to receive its benefits—atheists and agnostics can still enhance their lives with the practice of gratitude.”
Whether this is the “great thing” about gratitude is debatable. Judaism has been teaching gratitude for three and a half thousand years, and has its own well-developed perspective. Underpinning the very belief in the existence of God is a sense of gratitude. It’s implied in the opening statement of the Ten Commandments. I am the Lord your God would seem to be a declarative sentence of sufficient clarity and power. But it continues: …Who took you out of Egypt, the house of bondage. Our freedom, our inception as a nation, we owe to the One who delivered us from Egypt. Other nations were established by conquest or insurrection, and celebrate their founding days with military parades. Ours begins with a debt of gratitude to the God who lifted us out of oblivion; and hence, the Hallel, the song of thanksgiving, we sing at every Jewish festival.
The various blessings that are so much a part of Jewish observance constitutes a highly sophisticated program for enhancing our appreciation of life. Whether it be the mundane (such as the blessings over food or going to the bathroom) or the dramatic (over the birth of a child or being saved from a terrorist attack), or the beautiful (the Grand Canyon or a rainbow), the Sages have composed blessings which remind us that everything comes from the Creator.
Of course, we are taught to appreciate what other human beings do for us, as well. Honoring parents is all about recognizing not only the direct biological source of one’s life, but also the immeasurable travail and expense, love and hope, which they have invested in us. Likewise, anybody who has helped us, from teachers and friends down to the guy who sweeps the street and the fellow at the toll booth, are deserving of our thanks.
The Jewish insight is that gratitude toward others and toward God are interrelated. The Sages say that someone who doesn’t appreciate what others do for him will not appreciate God either. Why that should be can be explained by a peculiar twist on gratitude that we find in the Torah.
A careful reading of the plagues in Egypt reveals that Aharon, not Moses, brought on two of the ten plagues: blood and lice. Rashi explains that it wouldn’t have been right for Moses to do turn the Nile into blood. As an infant he had been saved from the decree to kill the firstborns when his sister set him afloat in a basket on its waters, where he was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. Moses was likewise disqualified from initiating the plague of lice because it came from the earth, to which he also owed a debt of gratitude. It was the earth which provided the grave to cover up the Egyptian Moses had killed in defense of a Jew that the former had been beating up.
The obvious question: What does gratitude have to do with water and earth? They are inanimate objects, which were used to save Moses but played no sentient role in his rescue. Their feelings would not have been hurt had Moses brought on those plagues, since they have no feelings.
The answer is that gratitude is a character trait, built on habits of feeling and behavior. One who recognizes what others do for him will be responsive to sources of benefit whatever their nature—Divine, human or subhuman. If a person fails to show appreciation for a benefactor—even an inanimate one—it affects his overall capacity for gratitude.
By the same token, however, learning to show gratitude will enhance one’s capacity for it. So maybe Deborah Norville is right, after all. Maybe the great thing about gratitude really is that you don’t have to be religious to practice it.
Source: Rabbi E.E. Dessler, Michtav MiEliyahu, Vol. 3. P. 101.
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