There is something absurd about the American “holiday season” for an observant Jew. What is so hard about hosting a Thanksgiving meal? You can turn your oven on and off and cook on Thanksgiving. You can run to the store to buy missing ingredients on Thanksgiving. You can look up recipes on your phone or listen to a podcast while you set the table on Thanksgiving. If you get into an argument with your hosts you can get into your car and go home. Thanksgiving, unlike some other holidays we know and love, never lasts for three consecutive days. The very prospect of serving a formal, sit-down, multi-course meal to a group of friends and family sends many Americans into panic mode; when Sara and I first started hosting Shabbat meals, there were still radio stations that had turkey roasting hotlines leading up to Thanksgiving. What most Americans do no more than once or twice each year is done by many observant Jews twice each week.
But celebrating gratitude with a large festive meal is Jewish even though it is somewhat counterintuitive. Shouldn’t we eat a small and simple meal to cultivate appreciation for the gifts that we have? “Who is rich?” Ben Zoma asks, in Pirkei Avot. “Same’ah b’Helko,” someone who is happy with their portion, however small it may be. What kind of holiday would that look like? We could eat a shared boiled turnip and cultivate our joy and gratitude for the true blessings in our life. But, the Torah says “v’achalta v’savata u’veirachta” you shall eat, be fully satiated, and then bless the Lord your God. On Thanksgiving, and on so many other occasions, we eat enough to bentch d’oraita – to be full and satisfied and therefore obligated from the Torah in Birkat HaMazon. In this way, by collecting and showcasing the blessings that have been given to us, we can cultivate our capacity to feel and express gratitude.
As an aside, if you are invested in the project of cultivating humrot, halakhic stringencies, I recommend considering adopting the practice of eating each meal until you are full so that you can then recite Birkat HaMazon as a Torah obligation; if you are not full, the obligation to bench is only d’rabbanan.
In Parashat VaYetzei, the capacity to give thanks is also marked and celebrated. Leah has four sons in quick succession and gives the first three of them names that express Leah’s hopes and yearning for her husband’s love. Leah names the fourth child as an expression of gratitude: וַתַּ֨הַר ע֜וֹד וַתֵּ֣לֶד בֵּ֗ן וַתֹּ֙אמֶר֙ הַפַּ֙עַם֙ אוֹדֶ֣ה אֶת־ה עַל־כֵּ֛ן קָרְאָ֥ה שְׁמ֖וֹ יְהוּדָ֑ה וַֽתַּעֲמֹ֖ד מִלֶּֽדֶת׃ And she conceived again and gave birth to a son and said This time I shall thank God and she called his name Yehudah…”
Why does this child elicit gratitude? Rashi, informed by the Midrash, tells us that Leah calculated that this fourth child was more than her “share.” If Yaakov would become the father of 12 tribes through his four wives, that would come to three tribes for each of the wives. When Leah had a fourth she realized that she had more than her share and so הַפַּ֙עַם֙ this time, “I will thank God.” Which means, “this time, I acknowledge something good happened to me which I could not deserve.”
But this insight was not just true about Yehudah. It was just as true about Leah’s first three children. There are no “shares” or “portions” of joy, or wealth, or justice that God divvies up according to some formula of fairness. Every good that comes to us is something we can appreciate and something that should elicit feelings of gratitude. And the universe, as God made it, does not owe us anything. Every blessing, however small, however expected, is an occasion for gratitude.
I’ve shared with you before how Rav Hutner, in an oral discourse published in his Pahad Yitzhak volume for Hanukkah connects gratitude with admission and explores the significance of Hebrew only having one word for both dynamics.
“Modeh” or “Modim” is to thank, as in the phrase in the siddur, “Modim Anahnu Lakh…” and it also is the word used when a litigant in court admits that the opposing party is correct in total or in part, as in the Talmudic phrase “modeh m’miktzat chayav b’shuv’ah” one who admits that the other litigant is partially correct must take an oath to claim partial ownership.
Rav Hutner elaborates that every human being has a portion of our souls that wants to live fully independently and self-sufficiently of all other people. We want to be able to say, in the words of Sefer Devarim, “kochi v’otzem yadi asa li et ha’chayil ha’zeh – my own ability and the strength of my hand made all this success.” When we thank someone, we admit that someone else did something for us that we appreciate. And, Rav Hutner astutely notes, that same dynamic is true when it comes to our relationship with God.
And the same dynamic is true for our relationship with God. When we thank God we admit that, even though we indulge fantasies of self sufficiency, we live each second only through God’s support
But there are other children named in Parashat VaYetzei and, at first glance, at least one of those names suggests a different attitude altogether. After years without children of her own, Rachel finally gives birth to a son and she names him Yosef to say
וַתִּקְרָ֧א אֶת־שְׁמ֛וֹ יוֹסֵ֖ף לֵאמֹ֑ר יֹסֵ֧ף ה לִ֖י בֵּ֥ן אַחֵֽר׃
So she named him Joseph, which is to say, “May the LORD add another son for me.”
If Yehudah’s naming represents a moment of gratitude at having been given more than one could have expected, Yosef’s naming represents a moment of unwavering ambition. Rachel has finally become a mother. She wants another child.
This divergence sets up the Yehudah vs Yosef dichotomy which drives the narrative of the final chapters of Sefer Bereishit and which continue as an orienting point of political conflict later on in Nakh.
But perhaps these two approaches can be reconciled. Rabbi Ilai Ofran suggests that we should emulate Leah and cultivate gratitude for whatever we have – same’ah b’helko – in the realm of gashmi’ut, material abundance and physicality. And we should emulate Rachel and cultivate ambition for more in the realm of ruchniot, spiritual life This might look like forgoing the larger home or the new car and the expensive vacation, but not giving up on the dream of completing the daf yomi cycle, or becoming a regular at weekday tefilah, or improving one’s character and overcoming anger, pride, and selfishness.
This division has merit. It is so easy to keep climbing the ladder of professional success, with its concomitant pecuniary rewards, and allow our ruchniot, our interior spiritual striving and character development to atrophy. One of the most inspiring things about being in a yeshiva community as a young man was to be surrounded by people with so much ambition for their own growth as scholars as Jews and to live among people willing to put great effort into becoming a mentch. It is rare to find friends as adults who inspire us in our interior and spiritual lives.
But I want to suggest another way to understand the dialectic between gratitude and ambition. I have discussed with you before the powerful insight of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter that someone else’s gashmiut is my ruchni’ut. Making sure that another person’s basic physical needs are met is an overriding religious agenda placed upon each one of us by the Torah.
In the context of Parashat VaYetzei and the dialectic between the names given to Yehduah and Yosef, this means that cultivating our gratitude with what we have, whether we have only a little or a great deal of material abundance, can be in service of making room for others, with whom we share this world to cultivate their ambition to thrive and prosper. This was so hard for generation after generation in Sefer Bereishit: Avraham and Lot separate when they acquire great wealth and they struggle to find land upon which their vast herds can pasture. Yitzhak arouses the jealousy of his Philistine neighbors in Gerar as the only successful farmer among our patriarchs. Yaakov’s newfound wealth causes his cousins, Lavan’s sons, to remark with jealousy that Yaakov’s rise was at their expense. We will soon see the terrible impact of Yoseph flaunting the special place he had in the eyes of his father, even though there was no material or financial gain beyond the value of one coat.
The more we have, the more gratitude we can feel, the more opportunities we have to invest in sharing that bounty and good fortune with others. This is the Torah’s central idea of a holiday celebration as Rambam makes explicit: a Jewish holiday in which we cultiave simcha shel mitzvah, the joy of a mitzvah, is celebrated by sharing our table with the ger, yatom, and almanah – those disadvantaged, in contemporary idiom, by race, class, and gender.
I remember feeling overwhelmed after Sara and I spent an afternoon at Fortunoff’s to register for gifts before our wedding. I was so excited to get married and was invested in the spiritual preparations for marriage but found looking at cutlery and dishes to be draining and exhausting and somehow disconnected from the most significant preparations and transformations related to my upcoming marriage. I shared some of these concerns in an email with my teacher, Rabbi Ebner z’l, who wrote back to me and reminded me that the plates and cutlery would one day allow our guests to feel honored and would create foundational memories of Shabbat and Yom Tov for our children.
Ambition towards honorable goals is necessary. Gratitude, for blessings large and small, is a foundational pillar of our relationships with God and with other people. The dialectic between these attributes is the space in which we live. Our ambition can be tempered by gratitude. Human nature being what it is, ambition and acquisitiveness have no natural end unless we intentionally pause for cultivating appreciation for what we already have. Ambitions for ourselves, whether for material or non-material goals can give our lives direction, but that ambition can have an ethical orientation when we center a concern for others when we set goals for ourselves.
Ultimately, Yehudah and not Yosef, emerges as the leader of the twelve tribes. But each of them has a profound and enduring impact on the religious culture of B’nai Yisrael and each of their names has a profound and enduring lesson to teach us.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 