A Real Thanksgiving

In an interesting twist of fate, Thanksgiving coincides with the parsha that describes the first true thank you.  The Torah describes the naming of Leah’s fourth son in the following way, ‘And she became pregnant again, and she gave birth to a son, and she said this time I will thank G-d, she called his name Yehuda and then she stood up from giving Birth’.   This begs the question, why thank only now, by son four- she wasn’t thankful for the first three?

The Talmud makes the question even stronger as it says in Berachos 7b,’ And Rabbi Yochanan said in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, from the day the Holy One blessed be He created the world, no one thanked the Holy One Blessed be He until Leah came and thanked Him as it is stated, this time I will give thanks to G-d’ and thus she called his name Yehuda.  This is an exceedingly perplexing statement that creates a major question. We know that Adam thanked G-d as he is credited with composing the psalm we say on Shabbos, the weekly Jewish Thanksgiving that says, ‘it is great to give Thanks to G-d’. Why wasn’t his thank you good enough? What does this tell us about how the Torah views true gratitude?

To get to the foundation of gratitude we need to look at what the word thank you really means.  In Hebrew, the word is synonymous with l’hodot, ‘to admit’. With that in mind, we can begin to answer these difficult questions.   Adam? His ‘admission’ was coming to fix a mistake- his eating from the tree against G-d’s wishes. In a sense, that type of admission has a lot of personal benefits as it gets one out of the doghouse. A much higher level is to admit one received goodness from G-d.   Why? The nature of the admission is that one admits that they now have a debt to pay for the kindness. For this reason, a thankful admission is much harder- it doesn’t take a person out of the doghouse; rather, it ‘imprisons’ the person to pay back the debt. Any other thank you is just lip service.

As for our first question, why wait till Yehuda? One answer is that this is the moment that Leah realized that her portion in the upcoming 12 tribes would be more than the other three mother’s (each should have had three children).  She admitted she got more than she deserved.  That is the other aspect of real gratitude- not having the expectation of receiving. For these reasons, Leah expressed the first true thank you- it came with an expression of personal debt and it came with a feeling that she was getting above and beyond.

Hopefully, everyone had a real Thanksgiving- full of deep admissions that they received things above and beyond what they deserved, and with those gifts, they owe G-d a life well lived.  After all, that is the essence of being a Yehudi, a Jew- an admitter.