A Blessed Thanksgiving to All

https://www.aish.com/sp/pg/Four-Jewish-Insights-for-Thanksgiving.html?s=mm
How to unlock the door to gratitude.

After experiencing heart palpitations, Goldberg checks himself in for treatment at a prestigious, state-of-the-art hospital. A few days later he arranges to be transferred to a dingy little hospital a few blocks away. His friend comes to visit him and asks why he decided to downgrade.

“Did you think that the doctors in the other hospital weren’t competent?”

“The doctors,” Goldberg replied, “were absolute geniuses, about the doctors I can’t complain!”

“Maybe it was the nurses. You didn't like their bedside manner?”

“The nurses,” Goldberg responded, “they were angels in human form! Florence Nightingales every one of them! About the nurses I can’t complain!””

“So I guess it was the food? The food wasn't good?”

“The food, it was mannah from heaven, absolutely delicious. About the food I can’t complain!”

“Then Goldberg, why on earth did you move from there to here?!”

“Because here I can complain!”

As much as we recognise the value of gratitude, many of us are more like Goldberg than we’d like to admit. It’s the things that go wrong which stand out while the blessings of life fly under our radar. Thanksgiving is a reminder to feel gratitude to God and to those people who have brought us blessing in our lives. But how do we avoid falling into the same trap as Goldberg?

Here are four Jewish insights to unlock the door to gratitude.

1. Give Thanks for Life Itself
Life itself is a gift which we should never take for granted. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes:

We are here. We might not have been. Somehow, that makes every day a celebration, for at the core of that mystical awareness is the discovery that life itself is the breath of God.

2. Strengthen Your Gratitude Muscle
We are experts at seeing what our partners and friends are doing wrong. What we often ignore are all the good things that others do for us. Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe recommends daily exercise to develop our sense of gratitude for kindnesses others do for us. He proposes that we say thank you three times a day to people who have treated us with kindness.

3. Thank Those Who Had an Influence on Your Life
The Talmud compares teachers to stars. The great Talmudic commentator Maharsha explains that just as stars are always present even when they cannot be seen, a teacher’s influence continues even when a student can no longer see them.

Who are the people who taught you valuable lessons for life? Track them down or send them a note to let them know how much you appreciate their guidance and teaching.

What of other people who impacted on your life? Contact the person who set you up with your spouse, gave you your first job or safely delivered you children and give heartfelt thanks for the impact they had on your life.

4. Keep the Gratitude Flowing
Our matriarch Leah, inspired by gratitude, called her fourth son Judah, meaning "I am grateful." Our Sages explain that Leah was the first person in history to say thank you to God.

It is difficult to believe that none of the great people who lived before Leah ever expressed gratitude to God. How could the Sages make such a claim?

Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz explains that for most people, gratitude is a one-time instance of saying thank you. Leah did something very different. She named her son "I am grateful" so that every time she called his name, she awakened her sense of appreciation. For Leah, gratitude wasn’t just saying thank you, it was retaining the ongoing consciousness of the Source of her life’s blessing.

Don’t let your appreciation of others’ kindness end with the words "thank you". Keep the gratitude flowing and never forget the good done for you by others.

Happy thanksgiving!

THE REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNL-cpbGygg#t=14

Thanksgiving is almost upon us, and once again we’ll be treated to the usual dumbed down version of the Thanksgiving story: white Europeans landed in America fleeing religious persecution, were too dumb to farm, and relied on the wise Native Americans to help them. Then they had a meal together and learned to share, after which the white Europeans genocided the Native Americans. Let’s watch some football!
The whole story is much more interesting. And it’s also not particularly friendly to leftists.
The Puritans who came to Massachusetts on the Mayflower weren’t emissaries of religious tolerance. They actually left liberal Holland to push for “the glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith,” as it says right in the Mayflower compact. Turns out that Christianity was more important than multiculturalism to the heroes of Plymouth Rock.
And Christianity, not multiculturalism, saved the Puritans. The first winter, half the new settlers died. That was because of drought and plague, and failure to understand the crops. Then Squanto showed up.
Squanto wasn’t just a Native American refugee from the Disney movie Pocahontas. He was a Christian. Apparently, Squanto was just a boy when he met the English for the first time – he was captured and sent back to England for training as a guide. In 1614, he returned to America with John Smith – but he was then kidnapped again by one of Smith’s men, sent back to Spain, and sold into slavery.
Spanish monks bought him and taught him Christianity. He somehow ended up in England, and earned the respect of an Englishman who paid for his passage back to the New World. In 1619, Squanto went home.
But by the time he got back, his entire village had been killed by disease.
One year later, the Pilgrims showed up, settling in Squanto’s devastated village. Governor William Bradford wrote that Squanto “became a special instrument sent of God for [our] good…[he] never left us till he died.”
It was Christian Squanto, not “native Americans” generally, who taught the Pilgrims how to farm.
With Squanto’s help, the Pilgrims survived to celebrate the first Thanksgiving in 1621. When he died one year later, he asked Bradford to pray for him so that he could “go to the Englishmen’s God in heaven.”
But that wasn’t the end of the story, either.
The Pilgrims had set up a massive obstacle for themselves: their idea of a religious utopia was a giant commune. And like all communist organizations, it failed spectacularly.
Governor William Bradford wrote: “The failure of that experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years, and by good and honest men, proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times – that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God…community of property was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit.”
Both men and women refused to work. Stealing became rampant.
So, what did the Puritans do? Bradford described it: in 1623, after the first Thanksgiving, they trashed the system: “The Governor, with the advice of the chief among them, allowed each man to plant corn for his own household…So every family was assigned a parcel of land. This was very successful.”
So successful that more than a century and a half later, George Washington explained the legacy of religious purity in his first Thanksgiving proclamation: “it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” And it is with thanks to God and his principles and the pursuit of his purity that we celebrate this Thanksgiving.
Correction: The Puritans and Pilgrims were distinct groups; all references to the Puritans should be to the Pilgrims.