A version of this sermon was delivered at the 2017 East Meadow Interfaith Thanksgiving Service on November 19, 2017 at the East Meadow United Methodist Church.
Good
evening friends. The last time I was
honored with this opportunity to preach to our community was in 2013 and I had
just been installed as the Rabbi at Temple Emanu-El. You may recall that was the year that
Chanukah and Thanksgiving coincided. Let
me thank Pastor Johnson-Agu for allowing me the honor of speaking this evening,
as well as Rabbi Cohen-Rosenberg for her work organizing this evening’s service
and the work she does to coordinate our Interfaith Council all year. And thank you all for being with us as
well. This is a service to which I know
so many, including myself, look forward every year.
This year, I must
admit, however, is more than a little bittersweet for me and my community. As you may have read in the Herald or heard
in the supermarket, this coming July, Temple Emanu-El is merging into Temple
B’nai Torah in Wantagh. We fully
anticipate that we will continue to be a part of the East Meadow Interfaith
Council, as so many of our members will still be residents of East Meadow, and
we look forward to being with you for this service in years to come, but our
congregation will no longer have an East Meadow address. It is sad; but it is the right decision for
our congregation.
And
so, before I do anything else, I offer my sincerest thanks to the East Meadow Faith
Community on behalf of our congregation and our congregants. We have been a part of the fabric of this
community for 68 years and it is truly sad that we must go. For the last three generations, we have
called East Meadow our home. This coming
July, we will move. It is less than 5
miles away from our current address, but it is also a world away, even if it is
just over the border into Wantagh. The
specific reasons for our decision are best left explained at another
opportunity. So in the spirit of
Thanksgiving, I thank you and your communities for the many decades of support,
community, and collegiality.
* * *
Each
year "we gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing" and to give thanks. And Thanksgiving is an occasion on which we
publicly dedicate ourselves to gratitude, both personally and communally. But it sometimes seems like we have decided
that Thanksgiving is the only day of the year that we offer our thanks in such
a public manner. Thanksgiving is a once
a year event, like New Year’s or a Birthday.
But unlike those events, Thanksgiving ought not be the only time that we
practice gratitude and thankfulness in this manner. Thanksgiving should be the day on which we
model all other days of the year: not an exception, but the rule.
Jewish tradition has a lot to teach us about
thankfulness and what it means to have gratitude. How can we can begin to work toward a
commitment to thankfulness? By committing
to make every day a day of Thanksgiving!
To start, the term
for gratitude in Hebrew is Hakarat HaTov, which literally translates to “recognition
of the good.” Embedded in our
understanding of being thankful is a sense that there is a lot of good in the
world, but we have to do the work to recognize it. We have to take the time to think about that
which is good in our lives, especially all that we might take for granted. This act of recognizing the good grants us an
opportunity to mimic the divine. We
learn in the first chapter of Genesis that as God creates the world, God makes
a point on each day to recognize the good.
Our nature as humans,
however, means that it’s often easier to complain about the difficulties we
face. Some of this is because we can all
relate. We all know what it means to be
stuck in traffic or delayed in an endless security line. We get what it means to be disappointed. Negative feelings come on fast and seek
commonality with others.
When we experience
something good, we may understand that feeling to be quite personal, requiring
a deeper connection or relationship with another in order to share it. Recognizing the bad is easy; and our modern
lives have been built on valuing the easier, faster, and more convenient. We commiserate easily with others about the
bad. How many times have you been in a
line and someone shares their frustration with how long the line is or how
slowly it’s moving?
Recognizing the
good, on the other hand, asks that we focus on how wonderful it is that we’re
in line about to see a show, or get on a plane to travel to see a loved one or see
a place we’ve always wanted to visit. Recognizing the good means that we ought
to focus on the gifts we are given. It
is a matter of faith to recognize the good.
It requires that we pause to let in the good and let out the
gratitude.
Recognizing the good takes
time. At least we think it does. But, truthfully, it takes no more time than
focusing on the negative. It’s about our
mindset. Are we programmed to seek out
the good and give thanks or are we programmed to seek out and highlight the
negative? Have we programmed ourselves
to do one over the other? We can retrain
our minds to recognize the good simply by doing so over and over again. Gratitude begets happiness, which begets more
gratitude.
Let us retrain
ourselves to see the good, recognize it and be grateful for it. Let us not allow Thanksgiving to be the once
a year holiday where we force ourselves to see the good! Let the good that we see in our lives every
day be called out and heralded. This is
perhaps what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom
means when he describes thankfulness as "a transformative act of faith."[1] We are transformed by seeking out the good!
And this is now where
I’ll preach to the choir, because people of faith often have more ability to
recognize the good and show gratitude because our faiths allow us a conduit
through which we can channel our gratitude. Whatever concept of the divine we
may hold in our hearts and souls, it is a shared trait that we show our thanks
and offer prayers of thanksgiving to the Source of Creation.
Judaism, as all
faiths, has many prayers of thanksgiving and though they are particular to our
worship, they contain many universal truths about what it means to be thankful
and show gratitude for the good we recognize in our lives.
One blessing of
thanksgiving is found in all three of the Jewish daily prayer services, just
before a blessing for peace.[2] Traditionally, this blessing is first said independently
as a part of a litany of many blessings. These blessings are then repeated by a
prayer leader when one is present. The
prayer leader has the authority to recite all the blessings of this litany on
behalf of the community, and all we have to do is agree with an Amen. There is one exception. When the repetition of the blessing of
thanksgiving is offered by the leader, each member of the congregation recites
it on their own as well. Tradition
explains that this is because no one may offer thanks on our behalf.[3]
The universal truth
of this tradition is that we have to do it ourselves. We are not supposed to send anyone to be
thankful on our behalf. True
thankfulness cannot be outsourced, not even to a prayer leader. We have to recognize the good in our
own lives and show our own gratitude and our own appreciation. No one can do it for us.
This blessing of
Thanksgiving begins in scripture. In the
Torah, the Books of Moses, God commands a series of sacrifices, among them, the Thanksgiving
offering. For the last 2000 or so years,
prayers have taken the place of sacrifices in Jewish worship, which is why we have that blessing
of Thanksgiving. The ancient rabbis[4] teach us that in the
messianic age, all the sacrifices and prayers will be cancelled, with one
exception: the Thanksgiving. Jewish
belief is that the messianic age will be a time when no one will have any needs
and the universe will be complete and at peace.
We won’t need to ask for anything.
We won’t need to recognize God’s greatness. The only thing that we will need to do is
give thanks. The messianic age will be
an age of pure thankfulness.
The universal lesson
here is that thankfulness never goes out of style and will never not be
necessary. If we will have all our needs
met in the messianic age, and yet we will still need to offer thanks, how much
more important is our gratitude now for the good things we do have in our
lives?
Gratitude,
thankfulness, recognizing the good.
These are eternal requirements.
Not even the messiah undoes their necessity in the world! Our gratitude is always necessary. And it is essential that it always be personally
given. If we remember these lessons, we
can begin to work to make every day a day of Thanksgiving, rather than just the
4th Thursday in November.
Rav Kook, the first
chief rabbi of Israel once taught[5], and I’m paraphrasing
here, that without gratitude and recognizing the good, our spirits lose their
sparkle and their shine. By recognizing
the good, we keep that sparkle in our soul, we keep the light of God in our
beings, and we remain able to be bearers of that light. Our souls shine brightly when we are
grateful. Our spirits dazzle as they
emit the divine light.
May we all work to
let our spirits shine in this next year and in the days ahead.
May we learn to recognize the good, and through that good offer our
gratitude to God. In doing so we allow
God’s light to break forth like the dawn.
In doing so we taste the messianic age in our own day. In doing so we can make every day a day of
Thanksgiving.
May we all have a
blessed and safe holiday.
Thank you.
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