This was the D’var Torah I gave on the Shabbat right after Thanksgiving Day in 2022.
מִזְמוֹר, שִׁיר, לְיוֹם הַשַׁבָּת: טוֹב
טוֹב לְהוֹדוֹת, לה’
Mizmor, shir, l’yom HaShabbat, tov
Tov l’hodot l’Adonai,
A song, a poem, for the day of Shabbat: Good
Good to be thankful
Good to be thankful to the Divine
This is a psalm we sing on Shabbat evening in our service, and it’s in the prayerbook multiple times throughout the day, and it associates Shabbat with being thankful. Shabbat is a weekly Thanksgiving Day. It’s a time when we stop what we were doing and working at and perfecting, and we let ourselves absorb the blessings and beauty and miracles that are with us, just as they are and where they are.
Every big idea in Judaism is also a practice, and Shabbat reminds us that gratitude takes some focus, some kavvanah. We have to stop other things in order to be truly gratefuly, and not just for a moment to say “thank you” or “wow.” We need a day! And Shabbat is also built to be מֵעֵין עוֹלָם הַבָּא, a taste of the World to Come. When we stop doing other things, we give ourselves some room to experience a day made up of bits of what a perfected world would be — deeper connections as we sing together and talk together, enough food for everyone, exploring Torah for its wider insights, seeing each other in a more complete way. And those facets of Shabbat give us things to notice and be thankful for in the regular week — whenever we hear people’s voices joined together for justice or for joy, and whenever there’s enough food for everyone, or we hear some insight of Torah or we see people dazzle us with their humanity — Shabbat helps us notice those things all week and be profoundly grateful as we go.
The midrashim associate מִזְמוֹר, שִׁיר, לְיוֹם הַשַׁבָּת, the song of the Shabbat day, with the very first Shabbat. Why is that, what was it about that Shabbat — well a couple things that are basically the same thing.
One is, God had just put the finishing touches on Heaven-and-Earth and it was only just ready for the hard launch. So the world wasn’t exactly complete and perfect. And yet right before Shabbat, וירא… God saw everything God had made and wow, very good!
The other thing is that the midrash locates the whole drama of the Garden of Eden in the last hours of that first Friday, meaning the rupture between the Divine and the two humans and the decree of exile, and in the midrashim Shabbat itself comes to God and says: Let them experience one Shabbat in the Garden because otherwise the whole universe is going to just implode, and God says okay. In that version of the story, it’s Adam and Chava who compose a song, a poem for the Shabbat — it is good. מזמור… טוב It is good to be thankful, thankful to the Divine.
What I particularly love about this take on the psalm is that Chava and Adam express gratitude when you’d think it’s the last thing they would be feeling. They call out the word tov, the word good, they say this word that God has said all the week and they say it for the first time in their own voice when things are not so great for them, or so you would think. It’s another example of what I taught a few weeks ago, that most teachings of Judaism are interesting because of what the Talmud calls the hava amina, the I would have thought instead. You would have thought these would be two angry people, angry at God — or two scared people, scared of being thrown out shortly into a world that’s no Garden of Eden — and yet these are the inventors of human gratitude. And maybe it’s their tov, their song of what is good, that elicits God’s own song, God looking out once more over all of Creation and saying הנה, טוב מאד — whoa, still very good.
I love to read all of Psalm 92 from the perspective of Adam and Chava, those two people on that Shabbat, seeing themselves in the Garden today and knowing they would be out somewhere else tomorrow:
It’s good, to be grateful — to the Divine.
To make music to Your name, on high
To tell your chesed in the morning and your faithfulness during the nights.
For You make me joyful with the things you have worked on
With the works of your hands I celebrate
How large your deeds, O Divine; how deep your thoughts
A raging person will never get it; a fool will not understand this:
The wicked are flowering like the grass around us,
and all workers of evil are poking out of the ground —
to be destroyed, forever and ever
For look, your enemies O Divine, look your enemies — disappearing.
All workers of evil — disintegrating.
You raise up my horn like an ox, I am anointed with fragrant oil
My eyes are looking clearlyWhen others rise against me, still my ears hear this:
The righteous flourish like a palm tree
Like a cedar in Lebanon they grow tall
Planted in the house of the Divine, in the courtyards of our God they flower
Even more they give fruit in old age, fresh and fragrant still they are
To tell that the Divine is just, my Rock, who has no flaw.
Such a song of gratitude in the face of — everything. When I read the psalm as though it were written by Chava and Adam, I am struck by their observations of how easily the wicked sprout up, like grasses and weeds in a garden, and how convinced they are that like grasses they wither, while the righteous stand tall and obvious and give far more and far longer.
I am struck by their perspective — that when it comes to goodness, we may not be good ourselves all the time, or at this moment, but we can sing out to the Source of all goodness, and we know there is a Divine point of view from which great deeds and deep thoughts are real and constant.
Our midrash-composing rabbis decided to teach that part of the first human experience in the Torah was thankfulness when it’s not obvious to be thankful, thankfulness even at times of doubt and separation.
It’s a comforting perspective as we look at the world of just this week — mass shootings, hate crimes directed at LGBTQ+, the return of terror attacks at bus stops in Jerusalem. Even in this world — be thankful. Even when those are the sounds we hear, let our ears hear: The righteous flourish like a palm tree.
For me this is the hardest part of todah, of gratitude. I am impatient for the work that will make me feel more grateful, and more importantly make others grateful — and I think too often about what it would be if we all spent these number of hours that we celebrate Shabbat not stopping but doing tikkun olam. So it’s important to realize that gratitude is an essential part of a cycle, and we allowed a full day of every seven for this part. It is good to give thanks, טוד להודות. It’s an essential stage that helps us breathe, and so we can better work the other six on the things that we are impatient to create and to change.
Our own Shabbat here is like a garden, full of all the things made by the hand of the Divine to give us joy. Full of song together and words of Torah to think about, full of connection even across our many rooms, full of people we admire and the dazzling acts of humanity just this week many of which we don’t even know. Shabbat is our island of gratitude. טוב להודות — it is good to be thankful.
Shabbat Shalom!
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