{Teachers Version}Gratitude

• So before we begin...does everyone know each other at the table? lets just quickly go around and everyone introduce themselves very briefly..
• Okay, so here's what I'd like to open up with tonight...
• What does the word Jew mean? (What's the "etymology"?) let them go around, and give answers...don't say right or wrong...just hear out their answers.
• Awesome...now let's take a look at the first source and see if we can find an answer...
• the context of the source is about Leah (one of Jacobs wives) who just gives birth and names her child...

The word Jew, or Judah, comes from the name Yehuda, which means thanks. Like the word "todah".
So we see the etymology and the essence of a Jew is to be thankful.
In our busy lives, gratitude often gets overlooked. The effects of having gratitude on the human psyche are only beginning to be understood by the world. Let me show you an amazing quote from the 'ancient mystical' Jewish source, Psychology Today.

Gratitude is an emotion expressing appreciation for what one has—as opposed to, for example, a consumer-driven emphasis on what one wants. Gratitude is getting a great deal of attention as a facet of positive psychology: Studies show that we can deliberately cultivate gratitude, and can increase our well-being and happiness by doing so.
In addition, gratefulness—and especially expression of it to others—is associated with increased energy, optimism, and empathy.

So if we do the math...100/day for 365 days is 36,500 blessings every year! (elaborate for them the different types you do..blessings on food, drink, bathroom, smells, seeing beautiful sights...
Q] Why do you think it's so important to always be making blessings??
The next source will seem kinda unrelated, but I think it will shed some serous light on this question...

Can someone summarize this source for me? (they will say, if we give charity with a bad attitude it doesn't get reward)
Amazing, great summary. Let me ask you a question: if you keep kosher, keep shabbat, or don't eat on YK, does it matter what kind of mood you're in when you do it? Of course not! You fulfill the commandment even if you really don't want to do it. So why is Maimonides telling us that when it comes to charity, our money, that we have to do it with positive attitude?
(let them discuss and see if they can come to the conclusion: that when it comes to our money we feel its REALLY ours, but G-d wants us to recognize that it's only ours because He blessed us with it, but we come to think it's ours because of our own greatness...)

This is exactly why we have to give charity with a positive attitude...
And this is also why gratitude and blessings are such a big part of Judaism. Because if we attribute our blessings to ourselves it creates pride/ego. The more we attribute our blessings to the Almighty the more it will strengthen our relationship. As opposed to attributing the gifts He gives us to ourselves, and thereby distances ourselves from Him.

Okay, so so far we've explained that the essence of being called a Jew is having gratitude, and that's why blessings are such a big part of our daily routine; because want to attribute our gifts to the Almighty to better to connect with Him.
Q] But, we're always saying thank you in the world we live in, without really giving it thought. Fake gratitude doesn't cut it. How do we have real gratitude?
Let's take a look at a source that we're all familiar with. A prayer we read on the biggest night of the year for gratitude! It's a night all about thanking G-d! Feel free to sing...
Let's analyze it and ask any big question that comes to mind here..

Again this a great opportunity for interaction...
Every year we all read this...I'm sure you've thought of the question..what do you guys usually think it means?
Okay, so what questions do you have?? (they should come up with the obvious questions; "would it really have sufficed if He split the sea and didn't take us across?? If He drowned the enemy but then starved in the dessert?? What does this mean)
The 2 points we want to bring out are:
1) That we don't need a favor to fully take care of our problems, in order to say thank you. "It would have sufficed to say thank you" even for each "small" step You helped us with.
SO Dayenu teaches us: There's no favor too small that we shouldn't give appreciation for.
2) When saying thank you, SPELL OUT THE DETAILS! Be as detail oriented as possible. (we live in a world that everyone just says "thank you!" which is supposed to serve as an all inclusive appreciation, but really doesn't express true gratitude for anything.)
Dayenu also spells out each specific step of the favour. Focussing on the many missed details in our daily lives allow us to work on growing in gratitude. Have you ever eaten an orange? Probably without much thought. Look how Rabbi Avigdor Miller describes the 'amazing' process of merely eating an orange!
READ THIS OUT LOUD

What we see from source 6,7,8 is that G-d told us he is going to put us in Egypt as slaves for hundreds of years, and then take out to bring to get the Torah at Sinai and then to bring us to Israel.
So, if the whole purpose of Slavery in Egypt was all a lead up to Sinai and Israel, why don't we focus on that all on Passover night?? Once, we're thanking G-d for Egypt, why not Thank G-d at all for that too??
Ask them: "what do you think the benefit is of NOT mentioning these other "favors" that G-d did for us on Passover night?"
The answer is that in order to offer a real thank you, it requires contemplation. If we first really, deeply, think about what was done for you, it will generate a sense of indebtedness, and only then can we offer a proper detailed thank you. That's why we don't thank G-d for the Torah on Passover and instead we wait until the Holiday of Shavuot: so that we can have time to think about it, to feel indebted, and only then give a detailed thank you over the holiday.
So to have a proper thank you in Judaism we need to first deeply contemplate, and only after a period of time, offer a proper thank you.
To summarize what we've learned tonight:
1) The Essence of what a Jew is = Is thanks, gratitude.
2) That's why we make over 36,000 blessings a year
3) And the reason it's so important to live with gratitude is to counteract the natural tendency to attribute life's greatness to ourselves instead of to G-d. (zedaka positive attitude)
4) But how do we have proper gratitude? By first contemplating what was done for us, and only after offering a detailed proper thank you (Dayenu & not mentioning Israel)

In the early 1990s one of the great medical research exercises of modern times took place. It became known as the Nun Study. Some 700 American nuns, all members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in the United States, agreed to allow their records to be accessed by a research team investigating the process of ageing and Alzheimer’s Disease. At the start of the study the participants were aged between 75 and 102.
What gave this study its unusual longitudinal scope is that in 1930 the nuns, then in their twenties, had been asked by the Mother Superior to write a brief autobiographical account of their life and their reasons for entering the convent. These documents were now analysed by the researchers using a specially devised coding system to register, among other things, positive and negative emotions. By annually assessing the nuns’ current state of health, the researchers were able to test whether their emotional state in 1930 had an effect on their health some sixty years later. Because they had all lived a very similar lifestyle during these six decades, they formed an ideal group for testing hypotheses about the relationship between emotional attitudes and health.
The results, published in 2001, were startling.[2] The more positive emotions – contentment, gratitude, happiness, love and hope – the nuns expressed in their autobiographical notes, the more likely they were to be alive and well sixty years later. The difference was as much as seven years in life expectancy. So remarkable was this finding that it has led, since then, to a new field of gratitude research, as well as a deepening understanding of the impact of emotions on physical health.
What medicine now knows about individuals, Moses knew about nations. Gratitude – hakarat ha-tov – is at the heart of what he has to say about the Israelites and their future in the Promised Land. Gratitude had not been their strong point in the desert. They complained about lack of food and water, about the manna and the lack of meat and vegetables, about the dangers they faced from the Egyptians as they were leaving and about the inhabitants of the land they were about to enter. They lacked thankfulness during the difficult times. A greater danger still, said Moses, would be a lack of gratitude during the good times. This is what he warned:
When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery … Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’ (Deut. 8:11-17)
The worst thing that could happen to them, warned Moses, would be that they forgot how they came to the land, how God had promised it to their ancestors, and had taken them from slavery to freedom, sustaining them during the forty years in the wilderness. This was a revolutionary idea: that the nation’s history be engraved on people’s souls, that it was to be re-enacted in the annual cycle of festivals, and that the nation, as a nation, should never attribute its achievements to itself – “my power and the might of my own hand” – but should always ascribe its victories, indeed its very existence, to something higher than itself: to God. This is a dominant theme of Deuteronomy, and it echoes throughout the book time and again.
Since the publication of the Nun Study and the flurry of further research it inspired, we now know of the multiple effects of developing an attitude of gratitude. It improves physical health and immunity against disease. Grateful people are more likely to take regular exercise and go for regular medical check-ups. Thankfulness reduces toxic emotions such as resentment, frustration and regret and makes depression less likely. It helps people avoid over-reacting to negative experiences by seeking revenge. It even tends to make people sleep better. It enhances self-respect, making it less likely that you will envy others for their achievements or success. Grateful people tend to have better relationships. Saying “thank you” enhances friendships and elicits better performance from employees. It is also a major factor in strengthening resilience. One study of Vietnam War Veterans found that those with higher levels of gratitude suffered lower incidence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Remembering the many things we have to be thankful for helps us survive painful experiences, from losing a job to bereavement.[3]
Jewish prayer is an ongoing seminar in gratitude. Birkot ha-Shachar (The Morning Blessings), ‘the Dawn Blessings’ said at the start of morning prayers each day, form a litany of thanksgiving for life itself: for the human body, the physical world, land to stand on and eyes to see with. The first words we say each morning – Modeh/Modah ani, “I thank you” – mean that we begin each day by giving thanks.
Gratitude also lies behind a fascinating feature of the Amidah. When the leader of prayer repeats the Amidah aloud, we are silent other than for the responses ofKedushah, and saying Amen after each blessing, with one exception. When the leader says the words Modim anachnu lakh, “We give thanks to You,” the congregation says the a parallel passage known as Modim de-Rabbanan. For every other blessing of the Amidah, it is sufficient to assent to the words of the leader by saying Amen. The one exception is Modim , “We give thanks.” Rabbi Elijah Spira (1660–1712) in his work Eliyahu Rabbah[4] explains that when it comes to saying thank you, we cannot delegate this away to someone else to do it on our behalf. Thanks has to come directly from us.
Part of the essence of gratitude is that it recognizes that we are not the sole authors of what is good in our lives. The egoist, says Andre Comte-Sponville, “is ungrateful because he doesn’t like to acknowledge his debt to others and gratitude is this acknowledgement.”[5] La Rochefoucald put it more bluntly: “Pride refuses to owe, self-love to pay.” Thankfulness has an inner connection with humility. It recognizes that what we are and what we have is due to others, and above all to God. Comte-Sponville adds: “Those who are incapable of gratitude live in vain; they can never be satisfied, fulfilled or happy: they do not live, they get ready to live, as Seneca puts it.”
Though you don’t have to be religious to be grateful, there is something about belief in God as creator of the universe, shaper of history and author of the laws of life that directs and facilitates our gratitude. It is hard to feel grateful to a universe that came into existence for no reason and is blind to us and our fate. It is precisely our faith in a personal God that gives force and focus to our thanks.
[1] See Robert Emmons, Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
[2] Danner, Deborah D., David A. Snowdon, and Wallace V. Friesen. “Positive Emotions in Early Life and Longevity: Findings from the Nun Study.”
[3] Much of the material in this paragraph is to be found in articles published in Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life @ http://greatergood.berkeley.edu.
[4] Eliyahu Rabbah, Orach Chayyim 127: 1.
[5] André Comte-Sponville, A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life. London: Heinemann, 2002.