A thousand years ago, the great Rabbi Saadia Gaon thought that our Torah is reasonable and that the human intellect, by itself, can ultimately discover the great truths taught in Scripture. As an example of how reason can provide us with these principles, he offers: gratitude. The very first thing our reason tells us is that one ought to be grateful. Hence, from this principle of gratitude, we learn that a man ought to pray. It is reasonable that we pray to G-d out of gratitude to Him.Intelligent people should not be ingrates. That is why Jews recite the Modeh Ani immedi-ately upon arising, why they say the Modim as part of their prayer, why they recite the Birkhat ha-Mazon after eating. It is the first dictate of human reason.It is all the more amazing, therefore, to learn of a remarkable comment of our Rabbis on the Bible’s narrative concerning the birth of Leah’s fourth son. She called him Yehudah (Judah) because “this time I shall thank the Lord” (Gen. 29:35). Our Sages say, “from the day G-d created the world no one had thanked Him until Leah came and thanked Him upon giving birth to Judah, as it is said, ‘this time I shall thank the Lord’” (Berakhot 7). Noah, Shem, Eber, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob—the founders of the true religion—were they so callous and indifferent that they never acknowledged G-d’s gifts to them ? Were they, then, unfeeling, unthinking ingrates ?Indeed not. For a deeper understanding of gratitude reveals that there are two levels of gratitude. Gratefulness can be understood as courtesy—or as conscience; as a social gesture —or as sacred grace; as a way of talking—or as a state of the soul; as an aspect of personality —or as a part of character.

The most illustrious example of this nobler kind of gratitude, “thankfulness", is our Mother Leah. Her life’s greatest ambition was to marry Jacob and to be sincerely loved by him. When our Torah tells us that “the eyes of Leah were rakkot," dull or weak (Gen. 29:17), the Rabbis ask: what does rakkot mean? Rav says, literally dull; and this is not meant to discredit Leah but is said in praise of her. For she had heard people saying that Rebecca has two sons and Laban has two daughters, the older will marry the older (that is, Esau will marry Leah) and the younger will marry the younger (Jacob will marry Rachel). She went about inquiring: what are the characters of these men ? She was told that Esau is a wild and evil man. Jacob is a decent, respectable, scholarly young man. And she, therefore, was slated to marry the despicable but successful thief! As a result, she wept so much and so bitterly and so loudly that her eyes dulled, until her eyelashes fell off because of her many tears ! Her red, dull, uncomely eyes were beautiful indeed, for they had become so out of protest against being mated to Esau IHow pathetic is Leah’s story! Her love of Jacob is so great that she even submits to her father’s nefarious plan to substitute her for her sister Rachel, whom Jacob dearly loves, deceiving Jacob thereby. She is even willing to go to the huppah, and throughout life, playing second fiddle to a more vivacious, dazzling, beautiful sister, married to the same husband. And when she finally is married to him—how tragic her frustration, the blow to her selfesteem !Pathetic indeed—yet Leah does not give up hope. Her desire for Jacob’s love and respect is too precious to yield so quickly. She has a son and feels that now he will love her, so she calls the child Reuven, adding: “now my husband will surely love me." But he does not. A second child comes, and she calls him Simeon, “for G-d has seen how despised I am" and will make Jacob love me. And then a third child, Levi—“Now …

It is here that the greatness of Leah shines forth in all its glory: her fourth child is born – and she calls him Yehudah. Why? – “For this time I shall thank the Lord.” This time, when I realize and accept the fact that the greatest, most overwhelming desire of my life will not be granted to me by God – this time I will thank Him! Despite all my failures and disappointments – I thank God! Ha-paam – “this time” – for the first time in history, a great soul reached into the heights of the spirit and recognized that thankfulness is more than thanksgiving, that it is a way of reacting to God’s very Presence and not merely paying a debt for His favors. Ha-paam – “this time,” though my hopes are doomed, my love unrequited, my ambitions dashed – I am yet grateful. I do have a great husband nonetheless. I do have wonderful children. I do have the Lord’s promise to be the matriarch of a great people.Let me know if you’d like a more formal version or if this is meant for publication. This was not the thanksgiving of Compensation but the thankfulness of Consecration. This was not Leah’s social gesture, but her spiritual ascent. Would that all of us in our affuent society learn that even if we do not get all we want—and who does ?—yet there is so very much to be thankful for. We ought to be grateful al nishmotenu ha-pekudot lakh, for the religious freedom we Jews enjoy in our beloved America. Compare our situation with those of our brothers in Russia, where the Jewish neshamah is stifled cruelly. We ought be grateful al nisekha she’be’khol yom imanu, for life, health, family, friends. In our Nishmat prayer we speak of thanks al ahat me’elef alfei ribei revavot pe’amim—thousands and millions of thanks. For in this prayer, mentioned in the Talmud, wethank G-d for rain—indeed for every single raindrop! And it is not only things that we thank G d for. Gratitude is a state of mind, a psychological attunement to G-d, a climate of conscience, a cast of character, a matter not so muc…

Ultimately, the ability to achieve this higher form of gratitude is an integral aspect of character – it requires a humility based upon deep insight. That insight is – our own weakness and inadequacy in the presence of Almighty God. When we are grateful to Him, we are cognizant of the infinite distance between our moral failings and His exalted spirituality. Basically, gratitude to God means acknowledging our dependence upon Him. We confess our need of Him – our inability to get along without Him. No wonder that in Hebrew, the words for “I thank” – Modeh ani – also mean: “I confess.” I confess my need of You; I thank You for coming to my assistance! The Modeh prayer we recite upon arising each morning means not only “Thank You, God, for returning my soul to me” – it means also, “I confess, O God, that without You, I would never wake up alive!”This gratitude, the kind we have called thankfulness rather than mere thanksgiving, is what we Jews have not only been taught by our Tradition, but what we bear as a message to the world by our very names. The concept and the practice are deeply ingrained in the very texture of the Jewish soul, and this is reflected in the name “Jew.” For the word “Jew” comes from “Judah,” which is the English for Yehudah—meaning “thank G-d.” This is the name of Leah’s fourth son, at whose birth Mother Leah reached the heights of sublimity in fashioning, for the first time, an expression of thankfulness issuing from a profoundly religious personality. “Jew” is a name that we ought, therefore, bear with great pride and a sense of responsibility.We conclude with the words of David : Hodu la-Shem ki tov, ki le’olam hasdo. Usually this is translated, “Give thanks unto the Lord for He is good, for His love lasts forever.” I would paraphrase that, in a manner that is consistent with the syntax of the Hebrew verse : “Give thanks to the Lord, for it is good,” i.e. it is good for the heart and soul of the thankful person to be grateful, “for His love i…

The Talmudic sage Rava compressed his understanding of the human condition into four Hebrew words: O havruta o mituta. "Either companionship or death." Without the possibility of human relatedness, man is empty. Without an outside world of human beings, there can be no inside world of meaningfulness. Personality, liberty, love, responsibility — all that makes life worth living — depend upon a community in which man can locate and realize himself. But man is more than the sum total of his connections with others. There must be a self in order for there to be communication; there must be an inner existence to relate to the outer world. If man is not an island, neither is he a switchboard, a maze of wires that transmits the messages of others but has nothing of its own to say. God created men out of the dust of the earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, man became "a living soul" (Genesis 2:7). Onkelos, the Aramaic translator of the second century C.E., renders that phrase "a speaking soul." Speech is the vehicle of relationship. Man is a composite of both soul and speech, of self and a society to whom that self relates. Without '"soul" or self, he is no more than an elaborate cybernetic mechanism, lacking content or meaning. Without "speech" or social relations, he is only a species of protoplasm, so withdrawn he might as well be dead.For man to be man he must maintain the delicate tension between self and society, between personal privacy and public relationships. Mediat-ing between them is the family. Juda-ism is concerned with all three as-pects of man's existence. It addresses itself to the question of his inner psychic and spiritual life, his dignity and destiny. But its major concern is with the quality of man's relation-ships to the world around him, and these are usually developed within the family.This emphasis on family and com-munity may best be understood in terms of the way Judaism treats the very beginnings of man. The Bible offers two acc…

Unless it is granted that there is some common element that binds Creator and creature, some minimal resemblance between God and man that cries out for fulfillment, then He is so totally “other" that He does not really matter. If God and man cannot meet on the plane of moral character, then religion is completely deistic, man is utterly alone, and faith is nothing more than unprovable assent to a set of metaphysical propositions totally devoid of ethical consequences. Such a philo- sophical religion is unthinkable to the Hebrew mentality.It hath been told thee, O man, what is good and what the Lord doth require of thee: only to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with the Lord thy God. (Micah 6:8)The ideals of justice and mercy and humility are not rationally ar- rived at or supported by man independently of his religious affirma- tions. Nor are they solely disembodied commands issued forth magisterially by the Absolute out of the infinite recesses of His celestial heights. They are an invitation to man to participate in the divine ac- tivity. God both appeals and commands. He tells us what is both "good" and "required": that we act "with the Lord thy God." (The phrase may be read to apply to all three antecedent elements—"to do justly" and "to love mercy" as well as "to walk humbly.")The passage from Micah is reminiscent of the words of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy 10:And now, Israel, what doth the Lord require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him . . . For the Lord thy God . . . doth execute justice for the orphan and the widow and loveth the stranger . . .Micah uses the verb doresh, "require” or "demand”; Moses uses the gentler sho'el, "ask." Like Micah, Moses sees God as the model for human conduct. At the very beginning he indirectly implies the "withness," or fellowship, of man and God (sho'el me'imak, which literally means "asks from with you," rather than the standard sho'el mi'meka, "asks of you") and…

הרמב״ם פ״י מהל׳ מתנות עניים ה׳יט פסק: הנותן מזונות לבניו ולבנותיו הקטנים שאינו חייב במזונותיהם כדי ללמד אותם תורה ולהנהיג הבנות בדרך ישרה ולא יפקרו בנבלות, וכן הנותן צדקה לאביו ואמו, ולאמו, הרי זה בכלל הצדקה, וצדקה גדולה היא שהקרוב קודם. והוכיח הרמב״ם על זה מהפסוק שלא תתעלם, והוא גם מבואר כתובות דף נ״א: אשר אמרו שם שמצוה לעשות צדקה בכל עת, ואם אי אפשר לעשות צדקה בכל עת, הרי זה הזן בניו ובנותיו הקטנים. ועיין אליה רבה ע״פ עשה שבתך חול ואל תצטרך לבריות, דזוהי צדקה חשובה יותר גדולה, כי בזה מונע בושת מאשתו ובניו, ויש בזה משום חסד עם הקרובים יותר מצדקה לעניים זרים. וכתב בספר חסידים רמ״ח: כל דבר ששם בו הוצאות גדולות, אלא שגודלין יותר בניו ובנותיו, סלעים מותרין בזה, שם זה נחשב כגדולין, אלא אם זה נראה כזרות.

Maimonides' theory of character, as formulated in his Commentary on the Mishnah (the section on Avot, more popularly known as "The Eight Chapters") and later in his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, posits the famous rule of the mean as the key to character. The Middle Way is identified by him as the derekh Hashem, the "way of the Lord," and thus the way man must follow in forming his own character. Maimonides allows for only two exceptions, in which it is mandatory to go to one of the extremes. In each of the cases, Maimonides declares the Middle Way to be inoperative; here, in these two instances, one must necessarily go to the extreme. Thus, in the case of pride, Maimonides posits three points on the character bar: pride on one end, humility or lowliness (shiflut) on the other, and a mid-point he calls anavah. This last is the compromise between arrogant self-importance and self-debasing humility. Yet, while ordinarily the Middle Way calls for just such a moderate balance of traits, that does not hold true for this case of one's self-image, and also not for temper where too one must go to the other extreme. Maimonides offers two proof texts for his assertion of this exception. The first is the character of Moses in the enigmatic accusation against Moses by his brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam. We are not privy to the details of the siblings' complaint, but what is underscored is the remarkable reaction of Moses: he does not say a word, despite all temptation. Thus, Moses earns the Torah's encomium, והאיש משה ענו מארד מכל האדם אשר על פני האדמה, Moses was very anav, more so than any man the face of the earth. Since the Torah qualifies the anav sobriquet with the intensifier "very," that means that this mid-point must be extremely anav, which means: humble or lowly. And later, in Avot (chapter 4), we read: רבי לויטם איש יבנה אומר מאוד מארד הרה שפל רוח שתקרת אנוש רימה—r. Levitas of Yavneh said: Be very lowly of spirit, for the hope of man is naught but the worm. N…

The festivals of Pesach and Sukkot are located almost exactly at opposite ends of the calendar, one in the Spring, the other in the Fall. Both have the identical cause – the exodus from Egypt, זכר ליציאת מצרים. Yet they are significantly different from each other. In a most interesting commentary on a major verse concerning Pesach, the Sages (ספרא אמור פרשה ט ד״ה פרק יא) say the following: "ובחמשה עשר יום לחודש הזה חג המצות" – יום זה טעון מצה ואין חג הסוכות טעון מצה. והלא דין הוא, ומה אם זה שאין טעון סוכה טעון מצה, זה שטעון סוכה אינו דין שטעון מצה? ת״ל זה, חג המצות זה טעון מצה, ואין חג הסוכות טעון מצה. A special word is inserted by the Torah to indicate that, contrary to what one might expect, the proper observance of Passover does not require that we observe as well all the mitzvot peculiar to Sukkot, such as the dwelling in a sukkah and the ארבע מינים. Undoubtedly, the same assumption and opposite conclusion can be worked the other way around, namely, that Sukkot does not really require eating matzah and refraining from chametz. The underlying idea behind the assumption is quite reasonable: since both holidays are motivated by the theme of זכר ליציאת מצרים, all observances of the festivals should be identical. However, the conclusion, based upon the דרשה, restricts matzah to Pesach and the sukkah and ארבע מינים to Sukkot, because while both memorialize the Exodus from Egypt, each emphasizes a completely different dimension of the fundamental experience of such remembering. The Zohar (23a), on the verse אל אברהם אל יצחק ואל יעקב בא־ל ש־די ושמי ה׳ לא נודעתי להם, focuses on the word וארא, "and I appeared," and teaches that there are two ways of viewing the world. Before the Patriarchs, the world was there but people were spiritually blind: they could not see what they were looking at. The Patriarchs arrived at the high level of גוונין דאתחזיין, a way of penetrating the visible world – by which is meant that they could contemplate the natural scene and find in it the…

I do not recall exactly when it happened – whether it was an extra-curricular gathering, or in the course of a Sheur, or slightly afterwards when he was unwinding – but this is the gist of his remarks, which were wistful – and revealing of a larger pathos than any of us ever expected. The Rav said: “why do not my talmidim ever think of sending me Rosh Hashanah greetings?” I was thunder-struck – not only at his felt need for friendship rather than admiration alone, but at my/our sheer indifference to his inner feelings. Why, in our boundless esteem, did we not ever realize that he had a heart and that he was oh so very human, that he experienced the need for approbation not as the intellectual giant he was but as a basar ve'dam, as a sentient and sensitive individualHis greatness created a natural distance between him and his disciples, and that was probably the cause of his loneliness. But it was inexcusable for us to be so unconcerned for him as a person, to allow our near apotheosis of him to lead us to near apathy, to imagine him as a perpetual motion machine of great ideas, of fine distinctions, of intellectual creativity - without recognizing him as a person, as a sensitive human whose emotional needs were not that different from our own. Perhaps that is the price one pays for fame and genius - but that is not an excuse for us.The following year and ever since, until he passed away, I never failed to send him a greeting card for Rosh Hashanah. He always answered - -always[ — with a handwritten letter of blessings for the New Year.Here again I confess - in shame - that I merely sent him a printed card, whereas he replied in his own handwriting, personally. 1 failed to learn the lesson. I shall always feel the dull presence of guilt.There were, in my or our collective experience (as the Rav himself might say, following the Brisker form of analysis...) two Rabbi Soloveitchiks.The first was the one we met in class: endlessly creative, unbelievably profound, posses…