Giving Thanks
Elaine and I were on our honeymoon. We had arrived at a little town on the Italian coast called Paestum. It had a long and ancient history and you can still see the well-preserved ruins of several Greek temples. What drew us, though, was the sea. The sun was dazzling, the beach glorious, the sea inviting. There was just one problem. I could not swim. My parents did not know that the Talmud mentions teaching your child to swim as a parental duty, and somehow I never learned. But as I looked at the people in the sea, I noticed that the water was very shallow indeed. There were people standing several hundred yards from the beach, yet the sea only came up to their knees. What could be safer, I thought, than to walk out into the water and stop before I was out of my depth?
I did. I walked out several hundred yards and indeed the sea only came up to my knees. I turned and started walking back. To my surprise and shock, I found myself suddenly out of my depth. I had walked into a deep depression in the sea bed. I struggled to swim, and failed. There was no one nearby. The swimmers were far away. As I went under for the fifth time, I knew I was drowning. My life was about to end. As I recall, I had two thoughts: “What a way to start a honeymoon,” and “What is the Italian for ‘Help’?”
Of course someone did save me, otherwise I would not be writing these lines. To this day I do not know who it was. By then I was more or less unconscious. Someone must have seen me struggling, swam over, took hold of me, and brought me to safety. Since then, the words we say on waking every day have had a deep meaning for me: “I thank You, living and enduring God, for You have restored my life to me: great is Your faithfulness.” Anyone who has survived great danger knows what it is to feel deep gratitude, to know existentially, not just abstractly, that life is a gift of God. Every day is a reason to give thanks.
It is this feeling that underlies one of the sacrifices detailed in Parashat Tzav: the korban toda, the thanksgiving offering: “If he offers it [the sacrifice] as a thanksgiving offering, then along with this thanksgiving offering he is to offer unleavened loaves mixed with oil, unleavened wafers spread with oil, and loaves of fine flour, well-kneaded and mixed with oil” (Lev. 7:12).
Though we have been without sacrifices for almost two millennia, a trace of the thanksgiving offering survives to this day in the form of the blessing known as HaGomel: “Who bestows good things on the unworthy,” said in the synagogue at the time of the reading of the Torah by one who has survived a hazardous situation.
The sages define a hazardous situation as surviving one of the four dangers mentioned in Psalm 107, a song on the theme of giving thanks, beginning with the best-known words of religious gratitude in Judaism: “Give thanks to the Lord for His loving-kindness is forever.”1Berakhot 54b.
They are:
1. Crossing the sea: “Some went out on the sea in ships; they were merchants on the mighty waters…. They mounted up to the heavens and went down to the depths; in their peril, their courage melted away. Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and He brought them out of their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed.”
2. Crossing a desert: “Some wandered in desert wastelands, finding no way to a city where they could settle. They were hungry and thirsty, and their lives ebbed away. Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them from their distress.”
3. Recovery from serious illness: “They loathed all food and drew near the gates of death. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them from their distress. He sent forth His word and healed them; He rescued them from the grave.”
4. Release from captivity: “Some sat in darkness and the deepest gloom, prisoners suffering in iron chains…. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness and the deepest gloom and broke away their chains.”
These are still the situations of hazard on which we say HaGomel when we come through them safely. Some nowadays include air travel.
In his book A Rumor of Angels, the American sociologist Peter Berger describes what he calls “signals of transcendence” – phenomena within the human situation that point to something beyond.2Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969).
Among them he includes humour and hope. There is nothing in nature that explains our ability to reframe painful situations in such a way that we can laugh at them, nor is there anything that can explain the human capacity to find meaning even in the depths of suffering.
These are not, in the classic sense, proofs of the existence of God, but they are experiential intimations. They tell us that we are not random concatenations of selfish genes, blindly reproducing themselves. Our bodies may be products of nature (“dust you are, and to dust you will return”), but our minds, thoughts, and emotions – all that is meant by the word “soul” – are not. There is something within us that reaches out to something beyond us: the soul of the universe, the beating heart of existence, the divine “You” to whom we speak in prayer and to whom our ancestors, when the Temple stood, made their offerings.
Though Berger does not include it, one of the “signals of transcendence” is surely the instinctive human wish to give thanks. Often this is merely human. Someone has done us a favour, given us a gift, comforted us in the midst of grief, or rescued us from danger. We feel we owe them something. That something is toda, the Hebrew word that means both “acknowledgement” and “thanks.”
But often we feel something more. It is not just the pilot we want to thank when we land safely after a hazardous flight, or the surgeon when we survive an operation. It is as if some larger force was operative, as if there we sensed the presence of what Adam Smith called an “invisible hand” moving the pieces on the human chessboard. We feel as if heaven itself had reached down and come to our aid. As John Milton is believed to have said: “Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”
Insurance companies tend to describe natural catastrophes as “acts of God,” but we do the opposite. God, we sense, is in the good news, the miraculous survival, the escape from catastrophe. That instinct – to offer thanks to a force, a protective presence, over and above natural circumstance and human intervention – is itself a signal of transcendence. That is what was once expressed in the thanksgiving offering, and still is in the HaGomel prayer.
It is not just the feeling of gratitude that seeks religious expression. Sometimes the causality is in the opposite direction. It is religious expression that trains us to feel grateful. Prayer can be a form of cognitive transformation.
Reading or watching the daily news, it is easy to feel that life is a succession of dangers and disasters, since it is these that command attention. We are genetically conditioned to notice the things that are a potential threat. The safety of our ancestors depended on it. The result is that good news is seldom newsworthy. The plane that crashes captures the headlines, not the ten thousand that did not.
There is a simple experiment to show how this works. Draw a black dot on a piece of paper, hold it up in front of a crowd, and ask them what they see. Almost all will reply, “A black dot.” You then point out to them that the dot occupies less than one per cent of the surface of the paper. They simply do not notice the other ninety-nine per cent. It is “background.”
Our morning prayers open with the Dawn Blessings in which we give thanks to God for giving us back our consciousness after sleep, for the human body and our restored soul, the earth we stand on and the freedom with which we rise, and so on through a whole litany of thanks. What this does is to foreground the background, focusing our attention on the things we normally take for granted. It is a cognitive shift designed to make us attentive to the myriad blessings with which we are surrounded. And as a famous experiment has shown, those who have an attitude of gratitude tend to live longer and healthier.3Deborah D. Danner, David A. Snowdon, and Wallace V. Friesen, “Positive Emotions in Early Life and Longevity: Findings from the Nun Study,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 80, no. 5 (2001): 804–813. For a general survey of the health impact of thanksgiving, see Robert A. Emmons, Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
To give thanks for what we have is, as Ben Zoma taught, a better way of living than to be driven by a sense of what we lack,4Mishna Avot 4:1. the default cognitive mode of a consumer society.
So it is with profound wisdom that Jewish tradition teaches us to make our first words on waking the prayer I learned to say with such passion after I was rescued from drowning: “I thank You, living and enduring God, for You have restored my life to me: great is Your faithfulness.” The first word of this prayer, Modeh, not only comes from the same Hebrew root as toda, “thanksgiving,” it is also the root of the word Yehudi, “Jew.” We acquired the name from Jacob’s fourth son, Judah, who was given it by his mother Leah, who said when he was born: “This time I will thank God” (Gen. 29:35). To be a Jew is to offer thanks. This, the first word we should say each morning, is the meaning of our name and the constitutive gesture of our faith.
There were Jews who, after the Holocaust, sought to define Jewish identity in terms of suffering, victimhood, and survival. One theologian spoke of a 614th commandment: You shall not give Hitler a posthumous victory. The historian Salo Baron called this the “lachrymose” reading of history: a story written in tears. To be sure, there is Jewish suffering. Yet had this been all, Jews would not have handed on their identity to their children as their most precious legacy. To be a Jew is to feel a sense of gratitude, to see life itself as a gift, to be able to live through suffering without being defined by it and thus to give hope the victory over fear. To be a Jew is to offer thanks.