Our last thoughts before sleep and our first thoughts upon waking have a powerful impact on our minds. This may be why Judaism instructs us at bedtime to dwell on the central Jewish creed, the Shema, and shortly after we rise to recite the prayer Elohai Neshama, thanking God for our divine and incorruptible souls. Around the year 1600, Rabbi Moshe Machir, a kabbalist living in Safed, added a new suggestion that really caught on: In the morning, say Modeh Ani (“I am grateful.”)
I’ve heard it said that gratitude is the doorway to abundance. Whether or not an attitude of gratitude really opens us to receiving more of what we want, it certainly helps us appreciate more of what we have, thereby increasing our sense of life’s abundance. Gratitude also increases our recognition of interconnectedness. Instead of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals surviving on our own merits, we notice our relationality and our interdependence — in reality, our dependence. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes, “Thankfulness has an inner connection with humility. It recognizes that what we are and what we have is due to others.”
Etymologically, this is actually implied by the word modeh. Usually translated as “thanks,” the word is related to the Hebrew word for confession: viddui. To give thanks is really to admit something — that all we have is a gift. Judah, the biblical figure whose name gives rise to the word Judaism, is another etymological relation, suggesting that gratitude is central to living a Jewish life.
Interestingly, Judah’s Hebrew name, Yehuda, also contains the tetragrammaton, our most sacred name of God, augmented by the Hebrew letter dalet. As the hasidic masters explain, the dalet has a numerical value of four and represents physicality — the four elements, the four directions. It is through the addition of the dalet that the ineffable and uncontainable divine can enter the realm of physicality. Dalet is also the Hebrew word for door, and even looks a bit like an open door when written. Judah’s name thus not only records his mother’s gratitude for his birth (Genesis 29:35), but hints at how thankfulness itself is a doorway to welcoming spirit into matter.
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Contemporary research delineates three different levels of gratitude, each more substantial than the last. The most basic is the episode, an event or experience for which we are fleetingly thankful. More sustained is a mood of appreciation. But the most powerful and perhaps aspirational is to have gratitude as a consistent and lasting state, a baseline for our experience.
How can we cultivate this degree of gratitude? One suggestion is to keep a journal in which we record the things for which we are grateful each day. The traditional Jewish recommendation of making 100 blessings each day can be seen in a similar light. By regularly counting our blessings, priming ourselves to notice the sustenance and grace on which we depend, we might encourage more frequent moods of gratitude, and from these perhaps develop a consistently grateful state. Curiously, it is the 100th psalm that is designated as mizmor l’todah, the song of gratitude, and it is this psalm that instructs us to “serve God with joy.” Although distinct, joy and gratitude are closely related, as it is hard for anger to co-exist with either.
The idea of serving with joy adds another clue to how we can develop into full-time grateful beings. As gratitude educator Kerry Howells writes: “We traditionally think of gratitude as the warm feeling of thanks, but it actually has its most transformative impact if we move from what we are grateful for to expressing this in action. In other words, gratitude is not just an emotion that makes us feel good. When we express our gratitude by serving others or contributing to those around us, we are motivated to live our lives in the spirit of gratitude.”
For all its white-washing of some very violent history, the holiday of Thanksgiving puts this idea neatly into focus. On this holiday, Americans cultivate gratitude not just in the abstract, but by enacting customs of giving — most prominently by inviting family and friends to feast, and for many celebrants by providing food to the less fortunate. On this day, we literally put the giving into Thanksgiving.
A final thought: The Hebrew root of modeh has an underlying meaning, to throw or cast. Brown-Driver-Briggs, the standard biblical Hebrew dictionary, speculates that the connection between throwing and thanking originates “perhaps from gestures accompanying the act.” When we are truly grateful, we reach out our hands to pay it forward.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on November 30, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
