December 4, 2024|ג' כסלו ה' אלפים תשפ"ה Who Left the Flowers at Our Door?
Print Article
Last week, my doorbell rang but when I answered it, there was nobody there. Instead, I found a vase of flowers outside the front door with a note. Flowers on a random weekday? There wasn’t a birthday or anniversary to mark. Who could they be from? I opened the card:
To our beloved shadchanim – can’t believe it’s been 26 years! With endless appreciation, we are forever grateful, Love, Ezra and Rena.
Twenty-six years ago, Yocheved and I set up mutual friends and now, for no particular reason, out of the blue, they sent flowers to say thank you. This wasn’t the first time they expressed their gratitude, it isn’t that they remembered a debt they had never repaid. They had thanked us numerous times before. Yet, because their gratitude had not diminished, they felt compelled to still say thank you again.
Most people don’t realize how much a simple gesture of thanks can mean to the recipient of it. In 2018, Psychological Science published a study of 300 participants who were asked to write a letter of gratitude to someone who positively impacted them from long ago. Participants wrote to their parents, friends, coaches, or teachers. The writers were asked to predict the degree of surprise, happiness, and awkwardness the recipients would feel after receiving their gratitude. The study found that those writers expressing gratitude consistently underestimated how much people appreciate being appreciated. The recipients of the letters reported feeling less awkward and in fact much more appreciative than the letter writers predicted. Being appreciated and receiving gratitude proved to make someone’s day much more than those expressing thankfulness thought it would.
In our Parsha, when Leah names her fourth son Yehudah, the Torah tells us she did so because הפעם אודה את ה׳, it was an expression of gratitude to Hashem. The Gemara (Berachos 7b) goes so far as to say that, in fact, Leah was the first person in history to say thank you to Hashem. This doesn’t seem to make sense. Adam HaRishon said, “Tov l’hodos laShem.” Noach thanked Hashem, Malkitzedek expressed gratitude to the Almighty. Eliezer communicated appreciation for Divine assistance, and the pre-Leah list could go on. How could the Gemara make such a bold assertion when it seems from the Torah not to be true?
Rav Yeruchem Levovitz explains: most people say thank you in order to pay off a debt of gratitude. Someone does something nice for us and, as part of an unofficial quid pro quo, we say “thank you” to them in an effort to settle up the score. Each of the earlier people who said thank you did it once, one time, to pay a debt. Leah was the first to understand that gratitude doesn’t conclude, it doesn’t end. If we see gratitude as more than a debt, we never stop expressing it.
Leah named her son Yehudah, literally meaning thank you. Every time she called out his name – “Yehudah come for supper, Yehudah did you do your homework, Yehudah get ready for bed,” every time she called his name, she reawakened her sense of appreciation and fulfilled her commitment to never take him for granted. Unlike the others who said thank you and paid off their debt of gratitude, Leah formulated a thanks that was felt and expressed each and every day on a consistent basis.
Rav Yeruchem explains that Leah expressed this committment when she gave Yehudah his name. We normally read הפעם אודה את ה׳ as an explanation for why the new son was called Yehudah. Rav Yeruchem suggests that we read Leah’s expression with a question mark – הפעם אודה את ה׳? Should I only thank Hashem this one time and then move on? No way, I will continue to thank Him over and over again.
A shadchanus gift represents paying off a debt of gratitude once and done. Flowers twenty-six years later for no reason demonstrate that the appreciation never ended, or as they wrote, feeling forever grateful.
The Torah endorses, encourages, and urges us to be grateful. We are call Yehudim, says the Chiddushei HaRim, because we are a people of gratitude. We don’t just pay a debt of gratitude, like Leah, we say thank you over and over, we feel endless thankfulness and boundless gratitude for the good things in our lives.
Charles Plumb, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, was a jet fighter pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent six years in a Communist prison. He survived that ordeal and one day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam and you were shot down!”
Plumb did not recognize this man and was perplexed. “How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb. “I packed your parachute,” the man replied, “I guess it worked!”
That night, Plumb couldn’t sleep. He kept wondering what this man might have looked like in a sailor uniform. He wondered how many times he might have passed him on the ship without acknowledging him. How many times he never said hello, good morning, or how are you. Plumb was a fighter pilot, respected and revered, while this man was just an ordinary sailor. Now it grated on his conscious.
Plumb thought of the many lonely hours the sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship carefully weaving the fabric together, making sure the parachute was just right and going to great lengths to make it as precise as can be, knowing that somebody’s life depended on it. Only now did Plumb have a full appreciation for what this man did. After that encounter, Plumb began travelling around the world as a motivational speaker asking people to recognize who is “packing their parachute.”
Have we thanked those who contributed to the lives we are blessed to live? Imagine if our kindergarten teacher got a note from us thanking her for nurturing us with love. Imagine if our high school principal, our childhood pediatrician, our housekeeper who cleaned our childhood room, out of the blue got a gesture of gratitude showing that we cared enough to track them down and say thank you after all of these years. Did we express enough appreciation to the person who set us up with our spouse, gave us our first job, safely delivered our children?
Research shows that expressing gratitude has mental and physical health benefits, including lower rates of depression and better sleep, improved relationships, and success at work.
Be thankful. Stay thankful. And keep demonstrating gratitude, for your own benefit and for the benefit of someone who will be thrilled to know you still appreciate their role in your life.