Rabbi Mónica: Thank You, Dark Though It Is
Parshat Vayetze 5781
November 27, 2020
The poet WS Merwin writes,
November 27, 2020
The poet WS Merwin writes,
|
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking it standing by the windows looking out in our directions back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you.[1] |
I’m aware there's a risk in giving a dvar Torah about gratitude the day after Thanksgiving.
In rabbinical school, I had very beloved a teacher who would annoy the heck out of me each year, by saying during Thanksgiving week, "Happy Hodu," meaning Happy Thanks, or Happy Gratitude. Hodu as in, tov l'hodot ladonai (it is good to give thanks to G!d) from Psalm 92, which we sing every Friday night, or hodu ladonai ki tov (give thanks to G!d for the good), which we say during Hallel, baby namings, and other festive occasions. It annoyed me because that word, hoda'ah, is such an important Jewish concept. We say it upon waking each day: "Modah ani lifanecha..." "I am grateful before You, Holy One, for returning my soul to my body." It's the very first word that we utter each day, the word that sets the intention for everything we do next. Hoda'ah then, is not just an idea, it is a disposition, a stance we are conditioned to take through practice. I never felt that my teacher should conflate hoda'ah with the colonial history of the United States, the genocide of native American peoples and the subsequent erasure of their struggle.
I don't think hoda'ah is the Hebrew cognate to the Hallmark Thanksgiving that's actually an indigenous National Day of Mourning.
And yet, I've been thinking about hoda'ah a lot this past week.
Not because of Thanksgiving, and not just because Jess and I named our dog Hodi, after it. But because of grief and loss.
If gratitude is not a colonialist American idea, assimilated into our contemporary Jewish lives, then what is it? What is it for us as Jews?
R' Shimon bar Yochai, a 2nd century Talmudic sage, teaches:
In rabbinical school, I had very beloved a teacher who would annoy the heck out of me each year, by saying during Thanksgiving week, "Happy Hodu," meaning Happy Thanks, or Happy Gratitude. Hodu as in, tov l'hodot ladonai (it is good to give thanks to G!d) from Psalm 92, which we sing every Friday night, or hodu ladonai ki tov (give thanks to G!d for the good), which we say during Hallel, baby namings, and other festive occasions. It annoyed me because that word, hoda'ah, is such an important Jewish concept. We say it upon waking each day: "Modah ani lifanecha..." "I am grateful before You, Holy One, for returning my soul to my body." It's the very first word that we utter each day, the word that sets the intention for everything we do next. Hoda'ah then, is not just an idea, it is a disposition, a stance we are conditioned to take through practice. I never felt that my teacher should conflate hoda'ah with the colonial history of the United States, the genocide of native American peoples and the subsequent erasure of their struggle.
I don't think hoda'ah is the Hebrew cognate to the Hallmark Thanksgiving that's actually an indigenous National Day of Mourning.
And yet, I've been thinking about hoda'ah a lot this past week.
Not because of Thanksgiving, and not just because Jess and I named our dog Hodi, after it. But because of grief and loss.
If gratitude is not a colonialist American idea, assimilated into our contemporary Jewish lives, then what is it? What is it for us as Jews?
R' Shimon bar Yochai, a 2nd century Talmudic sage, teaches:
מִיּוֹם שֶׁבָּרָא הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא אֶת עוֹלָמוֹ,
לֹא הָיָה אָדָם שֶׁהוֹדָה לְהַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא,
עַד שֶׁבָּאתָה לֵאָה, וְהוֹדַתּוֹ
לֹא הָיָה אָדָם שֶׁהוֹדָה לְהַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא,
עַד שֶׁבָּאתָה לֵאָה, וְהוֹדַתּוֹ
"From the day that the Holy One created the world, there was not a single person who gave thanks to their Creator, until Leah came and gave thanks."[2]
According to this teaching, the first person in the history of the world to express real gratitude was our ancestor Leah Imenu, in this week's parsha, Vayetze.
What could this possibly mean? Surely Leah was not the first person to express gratitude in Biblical history. Didn't Avraham give thanks for escaping Avimelech? Yitzhak for meeting Rivka, or Adam and Chava for the fruits of the garden?
Yet our text teaches that something about Leah's gratitude was unique, and in some way, she was the first to offer true praise. So let's learn about Leah's story.
In the preceding parshiyot of the book of Genesis, we've had tale after tale of sibling rivalry. This week we encounter our next troubled sibling pair, Rachel and Leah. When we meet the two sisters, we are introduced to them through a comparison. The Torah describes simply that Leah's eyes are rakkot, tender/long/weak, while Rachel, in the same sentence, is recounted as beautiful in appearance and beautiful in form (Genesis 29:17). Immediately upon encountering these sisters, the Torah unambiguously introduces the favored one and the underdog.
The story unfolds accordingly. Jacob falls madly in love with Rachel. He makes a deal with her father Lavan, and works for Lavan seven years in exchange for Rachel's hand in marriage. So great was his love for Rachel, that the seven years he worked to marry her, appeared to him as though but a few days had passed (29:20). At the end of those seven years, Lavan prepares a wedding for Jacob, and in the darkness of night, he tricks Jacob into marrying Leah, his older daughter, instead of Rachel.
Jacob's feelings are clear. In the morning, upon discovering what has happened, he cries out to Lavan: "What is this you have done to me? I was in service for Rachel! Why have you deceived me?!" (29:25)
Imagine Leah's humiliation. Unwanted, unloved, and stuck now with her sister's boyfriend. Her father was a con artist. She spent her life unfavorably compared to her little sister. Though Jacob and Rachel are also victims of Lavan's deception, it is Leah who remains without an ally or a lover throughout the story, at the hands of the drama unfolding around her, and objectified within it.
As an aside, for a very different take on the love triangle between Jacob, Leah, and Rachel I really recommend The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, where these characters are midrashically treated with incredible imagination and complexity. In that story, Leah is not so disempowered. But in the stark, understated manner of the Torah text itself, it's hard to read Leah's fate as something other than a tragedy.
Now we arrive at the part of the story that so interested Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.[3] G!d saw that Leah was unloved, and opened her womb, while Rachel remained barren.
Leah gives birth to her first child, and names him R'uven, declaring, "The Holy One has seen my suffering, and now my husband will love me" (29:32). Leah's naming is born out of wordplay. R'uven holds two different Hebrew roots within it: ra'ah, meaning to see, and ahav, meaning to love. His name is a prayer for Leah's hopes and expectations. Maybe now, she thinks, I have borne a child, and Jacob will actually pay attention to me, maybe he will actually love me.
However, the Torah tells us nothing about Jacob's response to the birth of his son, and in fact, Leah has several more children against the backdrop of Jacob's silence and absence.
Bearing a second son, Leah names him Shimon, and again she embeds her cry of loneliness and prayer for recognition into his name, declaring, "This is because the Lord heard (from the root shama) that I was unloved and has given me this one also" (29:33). Shimon and shama. Leah is unheard by her husband, though vividly recognized by G!d. Maybe this time, she thinks, my child will be the solution. Again, nothing changes between Leah and Jacob.
Leah gives birth a third time, and names this son Levi, declaring, "This time my husband will become attached to me (from the word yilaveh), for I have borne him three sons" (29:34). Levi and laveh. Notice that when her first son was born, she prayed for her husband to love her, and by the third, she hopes to settle for his attachment. With each of her first three children, Leah's prayers become more raw, her yearning more acute. I imagine that many of us can relate, having lived through a succession of disappointments, heartaches, and unactualized longing.
And then, Leah gives birth again. The Torah tells us that she named her fourth son Yehudah, declaring, "This time I will praise the Lord" (29:35). Yehudah's name contains in it odeh, hoda'ah, the word for gratitude, the giving of thanks.
It is this fourth time around that Leah finally names one of her children something that has nothing to do with Jacob, and nothing to do with her sadness. Instead of focusing on what she doesn't have, Leah turns toward her blessings, and toward herself, no longer locating the promise of her satisfaction or identity in Jacob's attention. And this is the moment that R' Shimon identifies as the first act of expressing true gratitude to the Source of All Life, when Leah pronounces, "הַפַּעַם אוֹדֶה אֶת ה׳" "This time, I will praise the Holy One."
Leah's gratitude is a paradox. Her life has been a series of disappointments. And yet, Leah, unlike her sister Rachel, is able to conceive and bear children. Leah's sister, the beloved, beautiful, favored one, shoulders her own burdens and source of deep suffering. In this story, no one gets life as they wanted it. Because, of course, that's not how life happens. And the Torah emphasizes this with the sisters--each one has what the other wants, and each one learns to make peace with the hand she is dealt.
It's essential to note that Leah's expression of gratitude does not make everything OK. Her marriage with Jacob doesn't improve, her loneliness does not disappear, and her rivalry with Rachel does not magically resolve itself. Her disappointments, and her traumas, are a real and enduring part of her life. But here the Torah transcends binaries. It's no longer Leah vs. Rachel, or love vs. loneliness. Leah is heartbroken, and she is grateful. She endures great sorrow, and she gives thanks.
As R' Ari Lev often quotes Dolly Parton in Steel Magnolias, "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion."
With the birth of Yehudah, something turns in Leah. She finds the courage to accept her life. Even more than accept it, she is able to lift her blessings in praise. What we as readers know, running as an undercurrent through Leah's story, is that her four children will beget an entire nation. Yehudah's name, after all, becomes the name of the Jewish people--Yehudim, Jews.
Our parsha teaches us what a Jew, a Yehudi, ultimately is. Someone who can live in the liminal space between life as we hope it will be and life as it is. A dweller of paradox. A person who, like Leah, can find her way to gratitude without having everything she wants, or even needs.
This week my family has been observing shiva for my grandmother Elly, our family's matriarch. My grandmother lived past her 101st birthday, which we celebrated in October. She was a survivor of WWII, who emigrated four times to four different continents, spoke at least nine languages without having been educated past the high school level, and bore witness to the transformations of the world over the past century.
We shared so many stories about my grandmother over the past week, and what surfaced again and again was her seemingly bottomless well of gratitude. She faced great disappointments and adversity in her life, as well as danger and persecution. She had to make very tough decisions and sacrifices. But she consistently maintained a gusto de vida, a taste for life, and always found something to lift up in praise. When she was 94, she made her final emigration, to the United States from Venezuela, to live out her final years in my mother's care. During those years, she and I both lived in Boston and I visited her regularly. I never went to see my grandmother without receiving a litany of her gratitudes. Even in her final year, when her memory and lucidity finally began to wane, she still found something to compliment, a bit of beauty to praise. I would marvel at her ability to express gratitude, having been uprooted from various homes, having lost countless loved ones, and finding herself yet again in a strange land.
In the words of meditation teacher Pema Chödrön, "Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world."[4]
Leah, our ancestral warrior of the heart, adds another dimension to this teaching. It's one thing to express gratitude when life is good. It's another to express gratitude when life is complicated, when we are in pain, depressed, lonely, devastated. Leah is the first person in Torah to feel and express gratitude even, and especially, amidst profound sorrow.[5]
At Kol Tzedek we have a practice each week of sharing our gratitudes with one another. We've done this through a global pandemic, surrounded by loss of life and loss of aspirations and dreams. We've done this through wildfires, hurricanes, police violence, immigration crises. Through deaths and funerals and shivas in our families and community, through illnesses and unemployment. Sometimes the gratitudes are small: a moment of generosity, a brief flash of beauty. Sometimes they are large: simchas, celebrations, political victories. Often they include appreciation for community and togetherness. Whatever it is, we lift it up.
We don't do so to sugarcoat the suffering we bear, or the very real battles we fight in pursuit of justice. We do it to flex and strengthen the muscle, the discipline, of finding that which can be praised, even as we yearn for a different life and a better world.
To express gratitude is not an act of naivete or denial, and it should never be weaponized or used to erase history. Real gratitude is hard won in a world like ours. It can be an act of resistance against the forces that wish to deaden our pathos and empathy, our aliveness and our joy. And it does not fall into our laps. We cultivate it through mindfulness and awareness. We nurture it through rigor and resistance.
It helps to have role models in this. One of mine is my grandmother. I invite you to consider who yours could be.
I want to close the way we opened, with words from WS Merwin's remarkable poem, "Thanks:"
According to this teaching, the first person in the history of the world to express real gratitude was our ancestor Leah Imenu, in this week's parsha, Vayetze.
What could this possibly mean? Surely Leah was not the first person to express gratitude in Biblical history. Didn't Avraham give thanks for escaping Avimelech? Yitzhak for meeting Rivka, or Adam and Chava for the fruits of the garden?
Yet our text teaches that something about Leah's gratitude was unique, and in some way, she was the first to offer true praise. So let's learn about Leah's story.
In the preceding parshiyot of the book of Genesis, we've had tale after tale of sibling rivalry. This week we encounter our next troubled sibling pair, Rachel and Leah. When we meet the two sisters, we are introduced to them through a comparison. The Torah describes simply that Leah's eyes are rakkot, tender/long/weak, while Rachel, in the same sentence, is recounted as beautiful in appearance and beautiful in form (Genesis 29:17). Immediately upon encountering these sisters, the Torah unambiguously introduces the favored one and the underdog.
The story unfolds accordingly. Jacob falls madly in love with Rachel. He makes a deal with her father Lavan, and works for Lavan seven years in exchange for Rachel's hand in marriage. So great was his love for Rachel, that the seven years he worked to marry her, appeared to him as though but a few days had passed (29:20). At the end of those seven years, Lavan prepares a wedding for Jacob, and in the darkness of night, he tricks Jacob into marrying Leah, his older daughter, instead of Rachel.
Jacob's feelings are clear. In the morning, upon discovering what has happened, he cries out to Lavan: "What is this you have done to me? I was in service for Rachel! Why have you deceived me?!" (29:25)
Imagine Leah's humiliation. Unwanted, unloved, and stuck now with her sister's boyfriend. Her father was a con artist. She spent her life unfavorably compared to her little sister. Though Jacob and Rachel are also victims of Lavan's deception, it is Leah who remains without an ally or a lover throughout the story, at the hands of the drama unfolding around her, and objectified within it.
As an aside, for a very different take on the love triangle between Jacob, Leah, and Rachel I really recommend The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, where these characters are midrashically treated with incredible imagination and complexity. In that story, Leah is not so disempowered. But in the stark, understated manner of the Torah text itself, it's hard to read Leah's fate as something other than a tragedy.
Now we arrive at the part of the story that so interested Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.[3] G!d saw that Leah was unloved, and opened her womb, while Rachel remained barren.
Leah gives birth to her first child, and names him R'uven, declaring, "The Holy One has seen my suffering, and now my husband will love me" (29:32). Leah's naming is born out of wordplay. R'uven holds two different Hebrew roots within it: ra'ah, meaning to see, and ahav, meaning to love. His name is a prayer for Leah's hopes and expectations. Maybe now, she thinks, I have borne a child, and Jacob will actually pay attention to me, maybe he will actually love me.
However, the Torah tells us nothing about Jacob's response to the birth of his son, and in fact, Leah has several more children against the backdrop of Jacob's silence and absence.
Bearing a second son, Leah names him Shimon, and again she embeds her cry of loneliness and prayer for recognition into his name, declaring, "This is because the Lord heard (from the root shama) that I was unloved and has given me this one also" (29:33). Shimon and shama. Leah is unheard by her husband, though vividly recognized by G!d. Maybe this time, she thinks, my child will be the solution. Again, nothing changes between Leah and Jacob.
Leah gives birth a third time, and names this son Levi, declaring, "This time my husband will become attached to me (from the word yilaveh), for I have borne him three sons" (29:34). Levi and laveh. Notice that when her first son was born, she prayed for her husband to love her, and by the third, she hopes to settle for his attachment. With each of her first three children, Leah's prayers become more raw, her yearning more acute. I imagine that many of us can relate, having lived through a succession of disappointments, heartaches, and unactualized longing.
And then, Leah gives birth again. The Torah tells us that she named her fourth son Yehudah, declaring, "This time I will praise the Lord" (29:35). Yehudah's name contains in it odeh, hoda'ah, the word for gratitude, the giving of thanks.
It is this fourth time around that Leah finally names one of her children something that has nothing to do with Jacob, and nothing to do with her sadness. Instead of focusing on what she doesn't have, Leah turns toward her blessings, and toward herself, no longer locating the promise of her satisfaction or identity in Jacob's attention. And this is the moment that R' Shimon identifies as the first act of expressing true gratitude to the Source of All Life, when Leah pronounces, "הַפַּעַם אוֹדֶה אֶת ה׳" "This time, I will praise the Holy One."
Leah's gratitude is a paradox. Her life has been a series of disappointments. And yet, Leah, unlike her sister Rachel, is able to conceive and bear children. Leah's sister, the beloved, beautiful, favored one, shoulders her own burdens and source of deep suffering. In this story, no one gets life as they wanted it. Because, of course, that's not how life happens. And the Torah emphasizes this with the sisters--each one has what the other wants, and each one learns to make peace with the hand she is dealt.
It's essential to note that Leah's expression of gratitude does not make everything OK. Her marriage with Jacob doesn't improve, her loneliness does not disappear, and her rivalry with Rachel does not magically resolve itself. Her disappointments, and her traumas, are a real and enduring part of her life. But here the Torah transcends binaries. It's no longer Leah vs. Rachel, or love vs. loneliness. Leah is heartbroken, and she is grateful. She endures great sorrow, and she gives thanks.
As R' Ari Lev often quotes Dolly Parton in Steel Magnolias, "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion."
With the birth of Yehudah, something turns in Leah. She finds the courage to accept her life. Even more than accept it, she is able to lift her blessings in praise. What we as readers know, running as an undercurrent through Leah's story, is that her four children will beget an entire nation. Yehudah's name, after all, becomes the name of the Jewish people--Yehudim, Jews.
Our parsha teaches us what a Jew, a Yehudi, ultimately is. Someone who can live in the liminal space between life as we hope it will be and life as it is. A dweller of paradox. A person who, like Leah, can find her way to gratitude without having everything she wants, or even needs.
This week my family has been observing shiva for my grandmother Elly, our family's matriarch. My grandmother lived past her 101st birthday, which we celebrated in October. She was a survivor of WWII, who emigrated four times to four different continents, spoke at least nine languages without having been educated past the high school level, and bore witness to the transformations of the world over the past century.
We shared so many stories about my grandmother over the past week, and what surfaced again and again was her seemingly bottomless well of gratitude. She faced great disappointments and adversity in her life, as well as danger and persecution. She had to make very tough decisions and sacrifices. But she consistently maintained a gusto de vida, a taste for life, and always found something to lift up in praise. When she was 94, she made her final emigration, to the United States from Venezuela, to live out her final years in my mother's care. During those years, she and I both lived in Boston and I visited her regularly. I never went to see my grandmother without receiving a litany of her gratitudes. Even in her final year, when her memory and lucidity finally began to wane, she still found something to compliment, a bit of beauty to praise. I would marvel at her ability to express gratitude, having been uprooted from various homes, having lost countless loved ones, and finding herself yet again in a strange land.
In the words of meditation teacher Pema Chödrön, "Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world."[4]
Leah, our ancestral warrior of the heart, adds another dimension to this teaching. It's one thing to express gratitude when life is good. It's another to express gratitude when life is complicated, when we are in pain, depressed, lonely, devastated. Leah is the first person in Torah to feel and express gratitude even, and especially, amidst profound sorrow.[5]
At Kol Tzedek we have a practice each week of sharing our gratitudes with one another. We've done this through a global pandemic, surrounded by loss of life and loss of aspirations and dreams. We've done this through wildfires, hurricanes, police violence, immigration crises. Through deaths and funerals and shivas in our families and community, through illnesses and unemployment. Sometimes the gratitudes are small: a moment of generosity, a brief flash of beauty. Sometimes they are large: simchas, celebrations, political victories. Often they include appreciation for community and togetherness. Whatever it is, we lift it up.
We don't do so to sugarcoat the suffering we bear, or the very real battles we fight in pursuit of justice. We do it to flex and strengthen the muscle, the discipline, of finding that which can be praised, even as we yearn for a different life and a better world.
To express gratitude is not an act of naivete or denial, and it should never be weaponized or used to erase history. Real gratitude is hard won in a world like ours. It can be an act of resistance against the forces that wish to deaden our pathos and empathy, our aliveness and our joy. And it does not fall into our laps. We cultivate it through mindfulness and awareness. We nurture it through rigor and resistance.
It helps to have role models in this. One of mine is my grandmother. I invite you to consider who yours could be.
I want to close the way we opened, with words from WS Merwin's remarkable poem, "Thanks:"
|
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you thank you we are saying and waving dark though it is |
Shabbat shalom, I am so grateful for all of you.
[1] "Thanks" by WS Merwin
[2] Talmud Bavli, Brachot 7b
[3] With much gratitude to Rabbi Shai Held, from whom I learned this lens for understanding Leah's story, and whose words and teachings have greatly influenced this D'var Torah.
[4] Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
[5] R' Shai Held, "Can We Be Grateful and Disappointed at the Same Time?"
[1] "Thanks" by WS Merwin
[2] Talmud Bavli, Brachot 7b
[3] With much gratitude to Rabbi Shai Held, from whom I learned this lens for understanding Leah's story, and whose words and teachings have greatly influenced this D'var Torah.
[4] Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
[5] R' Shai Held, "Can We Be Grateful and Disappointed at the Same Time?"