36,500 Thank You’s This Thanksgiving
“To split the seas is one thing, but to transform a human being into a mensch, now that is a true miracle.”
Babies Are Not Good & Neither Are You
Recently I was sitting at Starbucks and watching a young mom lovingly discipline her child. She must have told that little boy, “say please,” or “say thank” no less than half a dozen times just while I was sitting there. So let’s say that she even says it twice a day during the course of the coming years, that’s thousands of reminders to say please and thank you, to be appreciative and grateful.
The question is why? Why does she have to say this so many times? Why does she have to say it at all? Aren’t people basically good, grateful, and able to at least intuit when it’s time to say please and thank you?
For anyone who has raised a child you already know the answer. No. Being good, being kind, being grateful, are all things that need to be learned.
It is not true that babies are good. What is good about a relationship with someone that says feed me, change me, feed me some more and if you don’t I’ll make your life a living hell? Of course, they are not bad. They are innocent, they are doing what they need to survive. But to be a good person, you must do good. We’re not born that way, we become that way. It takes effort - a lot of effort! In the words of the great mystic, the Maharal of Prague:
“To split the seas is one thing, but to transform a human being into a mensch, now that is a true miracle.”
Weeds In The Garden
It’s much like tending to a garden. You have to work pretty damn hard to bring forth the beauty. For the weeds, however, all you have to do is do nothing and they’ll take care of themselves for sure. The same is true with human nature. The weeds come forth naturally. The fruits and flowers take a lot of work. Whether we’re 5 or 15 or 55, “say thank you” needs to be part of our daily gardening routine.
This is why the kabbalists prescribed a thanks giving formula, one that made that young mom’s “say thank you” to that piece of cake, look like, well a piece of cake. According to the mystics, we are supposed to say 100 blessings of thanks and gratitude every day, 100!
Thank you for allowing me to wake up.
Thank you for the privilege of washing my body.
Thank you for letting the plumbing still work (and we're not talking about the pipes in your house).
Thank you for the food I’m about to eat, the sunset, the meeting with an old friend.
Thank you for canceling my mother-in-law’s flight this Thanksgiving (just kidding, sort of).
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, 100 times a day, every day.
That’s 36,500 thank you’s a year and 2,920,000 over the course of an average lifespan!
Is it realistic? Of course not. Trust me, I’ve tried on multiple occasions, and gotten nowhere near 100 blessings a day.
So what are the mystics challenging us to do? To break through our complacency, our tendency to forget that there are miracles all around us, that our life is one big blessing.
In the words of another great mystic, the Ba’al Shem Tov:
“If we were to walk in the woods and a spring appeared just when we became thirsty, we would call it a miracle. And if on a second walk, if we became thirsty at just that point again, and again the spring appeared, we would remark on the coincidence. But if that spring were there always, we would take it for granted and cease to notice it. Yet is that not more miraculous still?”
Simply Say Thank You
The mystics live in the real but strive for the ideal and the ideal is to overcome our nature, to pick the weeds, and to appreciate the garden - and along comes the mystical American holy day, Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is the epitome of this mystical ideal. It’s not ordinary. Like that spring it’s extraordinary. It’s just that we’re so used to it that we forget it is miraculous. Thanksgiving, however, as we’ve seen the last couple years, isn’t a guarantee. It shouldn’t be taken for granted, and certainly, it’s not just another day to stuff a turkey and then stuff our face. Remember, just because we grow used to something doesn’t make it less miraculous. Rather, it just means we have to work that much harder to appreciate it, acknowledge it, and like that mother at Starbucks was trying to teach her child, to simply say thank you.
So say thank you today. Better yet say 100 thank you’s today. Say it every day until Thanksgiving and pretty soon every day will become Thanksgiving. Best yet, in the process we will have done the miraculous. We will have transformed ourselves into a mensch, a man or woman who lives their life simply, and not so simply, saying thank you.
So thank you and have a Thanksgiving stuffed with giving thanks.