Sarah Yocheved Rigler
Seventy-five orphaned girls in Calcutta taught me what gratitude really means. It took me ten years to absorb the lesson.
Although this was my second extended period of work at the Calcutta orphanage, I was still astonished by the girls' standard of living. Growing up, I had my own room; these girls did not even have their own beds. They slept two to a thin mattress spread on the floor, covered by a blanket and a mosquito net. During the day, the mattresses were stacked in a corner, and the room was used for games and homework.
Their only personal space was a drawer the size of a large shoebox. In it each girl kept everything she owned: whichever of her two cotton robes she was not wearing, two pencils and a notebook. About twenty-five girls had sandals that they wore outside on special occasions. About a dozen had a pretty dress given to them by an impoverished grandmother. That was all. No other clothes. No toothbrush. No pencils. None of the girls had enough possessions to fill her box. Yet this was the most joyful, loving group of people I had ever known. I loved them very much.
The girls persuaded me to teach them English. One day we worked on a lesson about opposites: tall and short, thin and fat, rich and poor. After explaining the words in simple English, I called a girl to the front and asked: “Is Bhavani thin, fat or in between?”
The girls raised their hands, and the one I chose answered: “Bhavani is thin.”
The girls were intelligent and eager to learn. The lesson was going beautifully until I asked Lakshmi to stand in front of the class. Pointing to the skinny, barefoot girl in a plain white robe, I asked: “Is Lakshmi rich, poor or in between?”
Two dozen hands shot up. I called on one girl. In loud, flawless English she answered: “Lakshmi is medium.”
Clearly she had misunderstood the word. Like all the girls, Lakshmi lived in extreme poverty, a fact they all accepted with cheerful resilience. I called on another girl. Eagerly she answered: “Lakshmi is medium.”
I explained “rich” and “poor” again, this time using Bengali words to prevent further misunderstanding. Then I asked the whole class: “Is Lakshmi rich, poor or of average means?”
In a joyful chorus, they all cried: “Lakshmi is medium.”
I was completely bewildered. How could these girls regard Lakshmi, and therefore themselves, as anything but poor?
After the lesson I returned to my room, my very own private room, and tried to make sense of it. After all, the girls knew that most children, even in impoverished Calcutta, had more than they did. They attended school with “normal” girls: girls who had parents, shoes and pretty colored ribbons in their hair.
I carefully examined what they did have. In the end, my list contained four items: the most basic shelter, food, education and friends. That was all.
But what about everything they did not have? None had a dowry, without which their prospects of marriage were slim.
None owned a single book or toy. None ever had money to buy a treat or a trinket. What extraordinary leap of imagination, or of the heart, had led them to think they were not poor? That question lodged like a splinter in my mind for ten years.
What am I entitled to?
Ten years later, I was studying Torah in Jerusalem. The rabbi explained why our matriarch Leah named her fourth son Yehudah, a name derived from the root meaning “to thank.” Since the word “Jew” comes from the name Yehudah, gratitude is somehow an intrinsic part of being Jewish.
But why did Leah wait until her fourth child to use that name? Wasn't she more grateful for her first child than for her fourth?
Citing the classical commentators, the rabbi explained that Jacob knew he would have twelve sons. Because he had four wives, each expected to give birth to three sons.
With the birth of this fourth son, Leah felt that she had received more than her allotted share. She therefore named him Yehudah, saying: “This time I will thank the Almighty.”
From this we learn an essential principle: Gratitude depends not on how much we have, but on how much we have compared with how much we think we deserve.
If you work hard at your job, you generally do not feel especially grateful when you receive your salary. Even a holiday bonus may seem only natural and bring no great surge of gratitude, unless it is considerably more than you think you deserve.
The opposite of gratitude is a sense of entitlement. The attitude “I deserve this” turns every gift into a salary.
Recognizing the good
In Hebrew, gratitude is called hakarat hatov, literally “recognizing the good.” The secret within the Hebrew expression is that gratitude depends not on receiving something good, but on recognizing the good we already have.
Gratitude therefore depends entirely on awareness. It requires going back to basics and recognizing all the elementary things we usually take for granted. Whatever we lack, and however difficult our circumstances, each of us can find an enormous number of things for which to be grateful.
If you lost money on the stock market but still have your children, you can be grateful for that.
If you lost your job but still have your health, you can be grateful.
If your legs cannot walk but you can move your arms, you can be grateful for that.
To whom are we grateful?
Besides recognizing the good and seeing what you have as a gift rather than a salary, gratitude has another ingredient.
A misconception prevents many people from feeling genuine gratitude. Some think gratitude, like love, is a warm feeling that wells up inside after a second helping of dessert at a Shabbat meal. But that pleasant feeling is not gratitude; it is satisfaction. It becomes gratitude only when you realize that your mother or wife worked to prepare that mousse cake, and you feel appreciation toward her.
Both gratitude and love must be directed toward someone. True gratitude means being thankful for what I received to the one who gave it to me.
From the Torah's perspective, all people are created beings. Life and every part of it, from the tiny hairs in our noses to thousands of enzymes, are gifts from the Creator. We are entitled to nothing. We are grateful to the Almighty for everything.
A recipe for gratitude
From all this we derive four steps toward gratitude:
- Recognize the good you have.
- Recognize that it is a gift, rather than something you earned.
- Identify the source of the gift: the Almighty or another person.
- Express your gratitude.
According to Judaism, gratitude is the foundation of everything: faith, joy, awe and love of the Almighty. Only when we recognize how much He has given us and how little we deserve it can we arrive at faith and love.
It is no wonder that a Jew should begin each day by expressing gratitude for life itself, saying Modeh Ani: “I thank You, living and eternal King, for restoring my soul to me with compassion; great is Your faithfulness.”
You will notice that this single sentence contains every element of gratitude. It expresses thanks to the Divine source of life for the most fundamental gift, life itself. There is no better way to begin the day.
After washing and dressing, a Jew continues to thank the Almighty for things that might otherwise go unnoticed. Fourteen brief Morning Blessings focus our awareness on gratitude for such basic abilities as seeing, moving, standing upright and walking. Some of these gifts easily inspire sincere gratitude. Yet we can overlook other blessings so thoroughly that we sometimes need a jolt to appreciate them.
I personally could not take one particular blessing seriously until I underwent emergency abdominal surgery. I lay in a hospital bed groaning with pain when the nurse told me to get up and walk a little. I thought she was out of her mind. Only when her gentle coaxing became insistence did I force myself to sit up and cautiously get out of bed, writhing with pain at every movement. Finally I stood, but the most I could manage was to take a few hunched steps across the room.
The nurse kept saying: “Stand up straight,” but my abdomen hurt too much.
Then it was time for morning prayers. Standing beside the bed, bent over like an old man weighed down by years, I reached the blessing: “Blessed are You, Almighty, our God, King of the universe, who straightens the bent.” I almost cried. How had I rushed through this blessing before? How could I have taken the “simple” ability to stand upright for granted? Why did I have to lose that ability before I could truly appreciate it?
It took me a long time to understand why my Bengali orphans considered themselves “medium” rather than destitute. They knew the secret of gratitude: They saw the little they had as a gift, rather than thinking they deserved more. They embodied the teaching of Pirkei Avot: “Who is rich? The one who is content with their portion.”