Dovid Lowy- "Meetings" Gratitude Attitude- Part 1

[Music] hi devin loewy here and welcome back to another episode of meetings where we discuss torah topics to help us grow i'm really excited this week to be introducing a brand new topic you know hanukkah is approaching on the calendar and we're told that hanukkah is all about thinking the creator lahodas ulahallah saying thank you so i thought it'd be really appropriate that we kind of skip a little bit in the book that we're working with and go to the topic known as hakaras hatov having gratitude and appreciation by way of introduction let's try to understand you know until now we've been discussing that working on our character traits is similar to working on our muscles they're muscle it's muscle toning what type of muscle are we really trying to work on when we're working on gratitude so revolving says that there's really three different categories we could put them into there are things that strengthen our relationship between us and god they're called ben adam la malcolm between us and our creator things like prayer things like the sabbath they strengthen our relationship between us and our creator when we do them there are other things that strengthen our interpersonal relationships then adam lachaviro things like visiting the sikh giving charity helping out a friend in time of need those things strengthen our interpersonal relationships and then there's a third category known as bin adam things between man and himself they build our inner world and make us bigger and better people now one could arguably say that doesn't everything that we do make us better and it does and everything that we do also arguably makes us closer to the creator however there's certain things and we'll see the differences between them there are certain things that they primarily focus on one of these categories and the question is where does appreciation fall in revolby says appreciation is between a man and himself okay so what does that all mean let's get to a practical example that will illustrate this let's say a person wakes up in the morning is feeling a little tired a little cold makes himself a nice hot cup of coffee and sits there and enjoys it wants to really appreciate this cup of coffee how it makes him warm it has a good taste it's giving him energy for the day and he wants to appreciate it is that appreciation going to be expressed to the cup of coffee is the cup of coffee gonna know or feel appreciated no not at all it's not like a person that's gonna say hey thanks for appreciating me has nothing to do with that that is totally working on an appreciation between a person and himself building within his own world the feeling of appreciation and gratitude for that nice cup of coffee that's where appreciation begins and so too when we express it to somebody else yes it's important to express gratitude as we'll get to later on to another person or to god however appreciation starts that muscle toning begins within our own inner world building our world of feeling and becoming aware and building an attitude of appreciation and gratitude and so therefore it is essential says obi that we understand that that's where gratitude begins it begins from within you know this is exactly illustrated in an episode in the torah god tells moshe i want to give 10 plagues to the egyptians and i want you to start it off by hitting the water and making the water turn into blood moshe stops for a second and he says i'm sorry i can't do this one i gotta give it over to my brother aaron he's gonna hit the water and turn it into blood and the commentaries say why what's wrong with motion hitting the water and they explained that moshe said i just can't come to hit the water you see when i was little my mother put me into a basket and put me in the river in the water the water protected me it didn't hurt me and i i owe my life to this water how could i come to hit it and they asked well i don't understand the water is not going to get insulted it's not going to care if you hit it why can't you hit it emotions know you don't understand it's not about the water it's about me it's about me feeling appreciation to the water i can't come to hit the water we see this explicitly in the torah that moshe is teaching us an eternal lesson even though he was on a very high level but the lesson is there for generations that appreciation is about us feeling appreciation even to something that's an inanimate object it's irrelevant it doesn't matter that i can't express my gratitude to my cup of coffee it's that i need to feel appreciation for my cup of coffee and everything else around me and that's where the muscle toning starts with appreciation so by way of introduction let us understand that gratitude and appreciation is building our own inner world and we'll get to how that extends to also appreciating other people around us and expressing that but as long as we know where it begins that is our starting point so i urge you to join me on this journey as we begin learning about appreciation in preparation for hanukkah and beyond because appreciation is all about being jewish you know we're called yihudim which means to say thanks that is our name as jews we're we're called the thankful people when we wake up in the morning our first words are we say mode ani thank you so appreciation and gratitude is such a fundamental part of being jewish and being alive so i urge you to join me and i look forward to this journey of working on appreciation thank you again and see you next time [Music]