Thanksgiving And Parents Day – Common Ground

First of all, both should be every day! Honor your father and mother is a very important commandment- and it is considered the hardest because it applies both during life and afterward. Even more so, is Thanksgiving. We start off with saying ‘thanks’ first thing upon wakening. And we end up, if we are considerate, thanking the ones who give us love.

In this week’s Torah portion too – The Matriarchs name their children (except for Levi, whom G-d names) and when Leah births her fourth son, she names him Yehudah which means THANKSGIVING. She declares, ‘Now I will give thanks to G-d for my fourth son.’

The Talmud states that no one gave thanks before Leah. The commentaries ask, ‘Didn’t the previous patriarchs and matriarchs thank G-d for all the blessings in their lives? Of course, but Leah’s thanks were specifically for receiving more than she expected or felt she deserved. Jacob’s wives knew they would have twelve sons altogether so if Leah had four, it would mean she would have more than the others.

In Jewish law there is an extraordinary perspective about giving thanks. There are situations where thanks is actually as specific as a sales transaction, not as a rigid exchange but above and beyond feeling the gratitude for the gift. It is related to the idea that another meaning of the word Hoda’ah, giving thanks, is  also the awareness of an obligation. Of course, one can respond in a more generous way, but there is a minimal requisite. Tzedakah, charity, is a good model. There is a minimum responsibility of a tenth or a fifth, but under certain conditions, one can and indeed should give more. An extra endowment from heaven already has the name of others on it.

There are several examples in the Talmud which tell us that people should express gratitude, or at least not be ungrateful, to animals or even inanimate objects through which favors have been done to us. One example is when Moshe refused to hit the water to bring the plague of blood, because the river had protected him when he was a baby. Another is the commandment that dogs get first dibs on non-kosher meat because they remained silent when the Israelites left Egypt!

The Baal Shem Tov would go around asking people how they are in various aspects of their lives. If at each response they would say something like, ‘Baruch Hashem, thank G-d, a danken Gott etc,’ he would be very pleased and said that Hashem was ‘kvelling’ too! Once he visited a learned rabbi who studied all day and asked him the relevant questions about his welfare. The rabbi shrugged him off as if saying, ‘I’m too busy to answer you.’ The Baal Shem Tov reacted passionately, ‘Don’t you know that you’re depriving Hashem of His livelihood?’ He caught the rabbis confused attention, ‘What?’ The rebbe referred him to the verse in Psalms 22:4:  ‘You the holy One sits on the praises of Israel.’ In other words, G-d, so to speak, is enlivened by the praises and thanks coming from the Jewish people. The last Lubavitcher Rebbe would make a point of thanking anyone who did some service for him, Jew or non-Jew, above and beyond whatever payment was agreed upon.

How often should one say Thank You to G-d? At least as much as one should have said ‘thank you’ to one’s father and mother, especially in one’s youth. You must have heard the story of the kid who chafed at having to do chores around the house and wrote a note to his mother itemizing his charge for the chores. The wise woman promptly replied with her own itemized list of all the work she had done for him since birth! The boy immediately cancelled his list!

The sages tell us that the 127 years of our matriarch Sarah were equally good. How could that be given that she faced so many challenges her whole life? And as we age it may seem we have less to be thankful for, given the frailties that come with eldering? So there is another story to explain. If someone gave you a million dollars, and at some later point, asked for a thousand or two back, how would you feel? If you were a thoughtful person, you would say, ‘sure’, or ‘fine.’ G-d gifts us with life and so much of it is meaningful. Like a box of chocolates, we tend to first chew them mindlessly, until there are not so many left. If we have some difficulties here and there, would even our diminished life force cause us to kvetch unreasonably?  Instead, we might feel even more grateful for the remaining years. There is a prayer where we basically say to G-d, ‘Thank you for the opportunity to say, ‘THANK YOU.’  Those words are as endless as celebrating Thanksgiving all year round! If we make the ‘thanks’ count, we may just get a few extra years to be able to increase that count.