Thanksgiving 2022

In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I often encourage people to spend time cultivating in advance a sense of gratitude for all we have. But it suddenly strikes me that I’ve rarely suggested how precisely to go about doing that. Thankfulness is, after all, an emotion that comes naturally to almost no one: we human beings seem more or less hardwired to feel that the good in our lives is constituted of boons that were coming to us all along and that we are therefore more than justified in being fully outraged when things don’t work out precisely as we had hoped they would. There was a time when I thought that the kind of worldview grew out of an unhealthy level of self-absorption. But as I’ve grown older I’ve come to see that kind of thinking as natural to the human condition. We are by nature greedy, selfish things, we human beings. As a result, I’ve come to admire all the more intently those among us who can summon up from deep within a sense of true gratefulness for the good that has somehow devolved upon them without them having earned it in advance with good deeds and noble behavior. Like everybody else in the world, I like to think of myself as a good person. But did I really earn personally the bounty of the world that I plan to enjoy at my Thanksgiving table? Really? And how exactly did I do that?

And that set of dour questions leads me to the question I’d like to write about this week: how can people go about cultivating the sense of gratitude that rests at the heart of everybody’s favorite holiday…or that should rest there? I imagine there could be many different ways to answer that question, but the one that strikes me as the most doable has to do with a different quality entirely, also one mostly in short supply in the world: humility.

If there’s anything we human beings are less naturally than grateful, it would have to be humble. (Can you imagine a politician standing up to say, “I haven’t really earned your trust or your confidence…but vote for me anyway and I’ll do my best”?) And yet humility—the all-too-rare quality of declining ever to overestimate your own virtue—actually can be cultivated. And, once cultivated, it can lead directly to the sense of gratitude that can transform Thanksgiving from a huge party “about” turkey and football into something “about” true moral growth and development.

For better or worse, the path towards humility leads through certain highly unpalatable truths.

We are tiny creatures living on a tiny rock. Yes, the world feels like a vast place most of the time to me too. I heard an interview the other day with a fellow who had managed to visit every single country in the world and then wrote a book about it. He was being celebrated precisely because that really is an impressive achievement to have managed, but the sun is a million times larger than the earth. And the Milky War is about 1.5 trillion times the size of the sun. On the other hand, the largest known galaxy (rather prosaically called IC 1101) is forty times larger than the Milky War and contains roughly 100 trillion stars to the Milky Way’s paltry 400 billion. So, yes, it’s impressive to have visited all 195 countries in the world. Imagine having been to Norway and Nauru and Kyrgyzstan! But the greater truth is that we human beings are minuscule things living on a tiny rock in a sea of uncharted nothingness so vast that even trained mathematicians can hardly fathom its size other than theoretically. Are you feeling humble yet?

And yet, tiny and ultimately inconsequential though we may be, we have nonetheless created a world that vaunts creativity and originality, that awards prizes to great authors and artists, and that has created complex systems to foster spiritual growth. In the worst science fiction movies (the only kind I actually like), the aliens are always bullies who have no respect for our puny earthling brains or accomplishments. But the fact that we, in our infinitesimally teensy patch of the universe, have created enduring works of art and literature, and of science. So the idea is to take pride in what we have accomplished on this planet without losing track of the fact that the Solar System alone, our space-neighborhood, is itself a cool 36 billion times larger than Earth. And our Solar System is about one one-hundred-and-sixty millionth the size of our galaxy.

We’re also newcomers. The span of recorded history—starting with the oldest Sumerian texts—is about five thousand years. But those five millennia constitute somewhere between a fortieth and a single sixtieth of the time Homo sapiens have actually been wandering around the planet. But Homo sapiens—ourselves—are only part of the story: the first human beings are thought to have appeared somewhere between two and six million years ago. But that figure too pales in comparison with the age of the planet itself, estimated by most scientists to be a cool 4.5 billion years old. So recorded human history would be one single nine-hundred-thousandth of the history of the planet. (That means that if you divided the history of the planet into nine hundred thousand parts, human recorded history would occupy one single one of them. Are you feeling it yet?)

I’m often asked how I, a rabbi who has devoted his entire professional life, to the exegesis of Scripture and the propagation of a Bible-based religion, can take these kinds of statistics seriously. Don’t I believe that the world is precisely 5783 years old? Doesn’t the Bible teach that the first humanoids were a fully human Adam and Eve? Isn’t that what the Bible says? First of all, that isn’t exactly what the Bible teaches. But that’s not the real point, which is that Scripture is the foundation stone upon which our spiritual lives rest but not the completed edifice in which we dwell. The challenge, therefore, is to build that edifice on truths we can embrace, not to allow our beliefs to usher us into a kind of loony-tunes world in which we feel noble and good about insisting that every sober scientist in the world is wrong and only we are right. Instead, the challenge is much, much greater. And that challenge is to learn from all about the nature of things, and then to build upon the foundations of our ancient faith a temple in which people possessed of true spiritual integrity can worship without embracing falsehood or fantasy. So I have no trouble embracing science and its lessons. And that is particularly true when that specific act leads not to the ruination of faith but to the perfection of the spirit.

The numbers mentioned above humble me. We feel so important, all of us. And, because we move so effortlessly from self-importance to self-aggrandizement to self-absorption, finding in science the road forward towards the kind of humility that can lead to true gratitude to God for the gifts we enjoy in our lives can be precisely the first step on the journey to humility and then, finally, to true gratitude to God for our lives and all that we possess.

At our Thanksgiving table, we always start dinner by asking the assembled to say in just a few words what they are truly thankful for this year. Some answer jokingly. Others amusingly pretend not to have understood what I meant by “a few words.” Still others offer up what they think is the expected answer. But now and then someone speaks truly from the heart and expresses the essential idea of the holiday: that to be truly at peace with and in the world, you have to feel both humble and grateful, the former because you acknowledge God as the source of good in the world and the latter because you truly do know how little of God’s munificence you have personally earned through the actual sweat of your actual brow.

I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving. We’re having mostly family, some friends…a huge turkey, the usual trimmings. And I plan to spend the day thinking about my physical place in our gigantic universe and the brevity of my days set into the vastness of history…and I hope to come out at the other end possessed of the simplest and most complex of all emotions: gratitude born of humility. We’ll see how well I do!