Vayetzey 2024

This week is Thanksgiving and while it is not a Jewish holiday, it is the expression of an important Jewish idea.   Every day, giving thanks is important, but having a day devoted to thanks is a way of ensuring that we keep it on our minds on all the other days as well. Of course, so many of our Jewish holidays are really about thanking God; for protecting us, for redeeming us, for giving us the Torah, and so much more.   

The great Mussar rabbi, Rabbi Natan Tzvi Finkel, known as the Alter of Slobodka, says that Hakarat Hatov, gratitude, is so central, that the first sin—which brought death and destruction into the world—was actually a sin of not expressing gratitude.  

The Alter asks what the sin of Adam and Eve was. Eating from the tree does not seem so bad and in fact, seems quite arbitrary. The sin must have been quite severe as the Midrash says that Adam and Eve before the sin were on such a high level that they could “see from one end of the world to the other.'' They had enormous spiritual capacity and that was compromised through the sin. According to the Alter, the sin was not in eating from the tree, but in the way Adam spoke. According to the Alter’s reading of the verses, when Adam says, “The woman you put with me, she gave it to me and I ate it,” Adam means, “You gave me a woman, someone who has binah, a higher sense of understanding, so of course I ate what she gave me, why wouldn’t I?” According to the Alter, Adam was correct, so the question remains, what indeed was Adam's great sin?   

The Alter answers that if you read the verse closely it is the sin of ingratitude. Adam does not say “The woman you gave me,” nor does he even mention her name. He says, “The woman you put with me.” God did not put her “with him”; God gave her to Adam as the greatest act of kindness. In Adam's phrasing, Adam expressed a slight ingratitude. The Alter says that when it comes to commandments, we must do them but we rarely do them perfectly, which is okay because we are not perfect. But when it comes to derech eretz, manners and character, a much higher level of punctiliousness is demanded of us. How we phrase things is not something small; it is everything!   

This is a very high bar, but an important teaching for us. We sometimes think that doing the mitzvot is more important than how we act interpersonally, more important than derech eretz, our manners and character, but the opposite is true. As it says in Pirkei Avot, derech eretz kadma l’Torah, character must come before Torah.   Without manners and character development, there is no Torah. In the case of Adam and Eve, a lack of proper gratitude, according to the Alter, literally destroyed the world.   

Thanking God is built into our Jewish routine, but this Thanksgiving, let us commit to taking extra effort to offer gratitude to those people in our life, to take care regarding how we phrase things, and to think sincerely about all that we have been given by those around us—our family, our community, our people and our country.    

Happy Thanksgiving!