November 28, 2024

A couple of times over the past week, I’ve been talking with friends about how we taught our kids to say “thank you.” I shared that when my children were babies and toddlers, I would model it for them. Whenever I handed them something, I would say “Here you go!” When they took it (before they could talk), I would say “Thank you!” Pretty soon, especially once they became talkers, it was an automatic response. Before I go on too much longer letting you think I’m patting myself on the back for my excellent parenting, please know that the habit of saying thank you really only stuck with one of the two kids. And neither of them is polite in all areas of life, or on some days in any of them. 

This mildly amusing story, however, illustrates something we know to be true: gratitude can be complicated. In a week when as Americans we celebrate Thanksgiving, when all of our reasons for being thankful are front and center, it can feel somewhat sacrilegious to acknowledge this, but here we are. I know this is certainly true for me this year, with things both personal and communal weighing heavily on me - the gratitude is there, but it doesn’t come as easily as I might like.

Each year as we read the Torah over again, we take it in as our current selves. The lens through which we see the text is the lens of whatever we’re experiencing in our individual worlds. And so, I see shades of this kind of complicated gratitude in Parashat Toldot as well. 
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In the opening scene of the parashah, we are reminded of the circumstances of Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah. As we read in last week’s parashah, it was his marriage that brought him comfort after the death of his mother. The joy and gratitude of a new relationship existed side by side with grief and a sense of loss. 

As the text continues here, Rebekah and Isaac struggled to conceive; they knew the pain of infertility. Isaac prayed on behalf of his wife and she conceived. This surely was a moment overflowing with gratitude. Their prayers had been answered and they would become parents. Yet Rebekah’s pregnancy was not an easy one; she was in pain and cried out to God, “If so, why do I exist?” (Genesis 25:22)

A midrash from Bereishit Rabbah creates a fuller picture of Rebekah’s pain in this moment. “Rabbi Yitzḥak said: It teaches that our matriarch Rebecca was circulating around the entrances of women’s houses and saying to them: ‘In your days, did you experience this suffering? If this is the suffering that comes with children; had I only not conceived.’” (Bereishit Rabbah 63:6) Here we see the gratitude mixed with, perhaps even replaced by, fear, pain, and regret.

What do we do, then, when our gratitude is difficult to access, laced with less comfortable emotions, or overshadowed by difficulty? It’s not easy, and I’m not always that good at it, but I believe what we do is we let ourselves feel all of our feelings. When we look at this up close, we see that there can be hints of joy in times of sadness or the opposite. Contradictory emotions can coexist - our hearts can hold more than one thing at a time. When we zoom out a little, we find that over the course of a period of time, even over the course of one particular experience, we feel a wide range of emotions. Nothing is all one way or another. And when we look back on those experiences, all of those emotions can be part of how we tell the story of those parts of our lives. 

Our ability to experience life in this deeply feeling way is something for which I am truly grateful.

I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving and Shabbat Shalom.