Balancing Gratitude with Guilt

The Jewish faith is steeped in the notion of gratitude. By expressing gratitude to our creator, we acknowledge and appreciate the blessings in our lives. The concept is termed ‘Hakarat Ha’tov’ which translates to ‘recognizing the good’. This notion is not unique to the Jewish faith; many other faiths and philosophers have spoken to this. Plato said: “A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things”.  According to the Dalai Lama: “In order to be happy we must first possess inner contentment; and inner contentment doesn’t come from having all we want; but rather from wanting and appreciation being grateful for all we have.” Hinduism teaches that “the lack of gratitude is the worst sin of all, for which there is no expatiation.”

Then there’s all the psychological backup to this concept of gratitude. Harvard Health published an article in August 2021 entitled “Giving thanks can make you happier.” PositivePsychology.com posted an article in April 2019 entitled “The Neuroscience of Gratitude and Effects on the Brain.”

So, it seems clear that for most people in the world who want to live happy lives, feeling and expressing gratitude is key.

It doesn’t always come easy though. Life’s struggles get in the way of seeing the positives for many of us. But we are clearly meant to try and be grateful for the good in our lives. For many in my age bracket, gratitude is hugely felt upon the gift of grandchildren. Many view children as a blessing, but when grandchildren come, the joke follows that the grandchildren are actually a reward for raising and putting up with their parents.

One of my daughters has 2 boys, close in age now to the ages of the Bibas brothers when they were cruelly kidnapped alongside their terrified mother. By coincidence, my son-in-law happens to closely resemble Yarden Bibas (I never uttered this opinion to my children though the cat’s clearly out of the bag now). The day these beautiful babies were returned to Israel in coffins, happened to be a day that I spent time with these 2 grandsons. The parallels were striking and did not go unnoticed by me for a moment.

I do not take any of my grandchildren for granted. As a child of survivors who never met a single grandparent, this relationship that I was gifted is treasured greatly, for which I have a tremendous amount of gratitude.

That day though, it was hard to feel grateful, because it felt insensitive to the enormity of the loss our entire nation was feeling. How could I enjoy the pleasure of these 2 beautiful boys, upon learning the horrific fate of 2 other beautiful boys, who all of Israel felt they knew and who symbolized so much in this war? I, like many others, cried helplessly upon hearing the dreaded news regarding the Bibas family. And yet, here I was, spending time with my beautiful grandsons, who I instinctively know to be grateful for. But the guilt was overwhelming. A man suffered the horror of losing his 2 beautiful boys of similar age (along with his wife) – his entire life clearly shattered; was it really appropriate to feel gratitude in that moment? On an intellectual level I suspected that this might still be the advice of our sages, but on an emotional level I felt compassionately conflicted.

I disconnected to a degree from social media during this time because it was all so overwhelming, and a good friend encouraged me to disengage in order to protect my precarious mental health in those hours. But I did see something which slipped in, and the message there was so incredibly poignant, it brought some solace on a very dark day. A message shared with me mentioned the strength and unity of the Jewish people and the associated phrase כאיש אחד, בלב אחד – translated literally “as one person with one heart”, which signifies the sense of unity of the Jewish people and how our mindset is collective for each one of us, which really speaks to the nation’s reaction to this tragedy. It was cleverly pointed out how the acronym of the word כאיש, ‘as one person’, stood for each of their names: כ (כפיר/Kfir), א (אריאל/Ariel), י (ירדן/Yarden) and ש (שירי/Shiri). The word translated ‘as one person’ stood for the entire Bibas family – we all feel the pain, we all feel the despair, we all feel the tremendous loss to our nation.

And then I thought, maybe THIS is something we can all be grateful for. To be part of a nation that can collectively feel for another, in which we each do our own small part, whatever that might be, but together our total is so much greater than the sum of our parts.

The day prior to the actual return of the coffins, I happened to attend a class on Kapos in the Holocaust, a topic I always struggled with, specifically because it goes against the grain of “as one person with one heart” and is so complicated to really make sense of. In the end, our presenter (who did a masterful job at going through the intricate layers of this topic) simply stated what we all know to be fact: there are just some things in this life that we can never fully understand or make sense of, sometimes there are simply no good answers that we can reconcile.

And it hit me that it is especially during these trying times, in precisely these difficult moments that just make no sense, and for which there are no answers, that gratitude is not only necessary but vital, because without appreciating whatever good we do have, we really have nothing to hang on to.

May the Bibas family know no further sorrow, and may the memories of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir be a blessing for our entire nation.