Hakarat Hatov: Noticing the Good

The Charlotte Jewish News, November 2022

By Shira Firestone, Editor

Thanksgiving is not a Jewish holiday, but it is one of the holidays that many American Jews still recognize and celebrate in some way. My Jewish Learning explains, “… among the broader American Jewish community, Thanksgiving is widely celebrated and even embraced as an opportunity to lean into Americanness. In the 19th century, it was not uncommon for synagogues to hold services on Thanksgiving, as was the custom for a time among American churches. Historian Jonathan Sarna asserts that Thanksgiving is one of four annual holidays — Passover, Hanukkah and the Fourth of July are the others — that together promoted what he called a ‘cult of synthesis,’ the idea that Judaism and Americanism reinforce one another.” So here we are, about to celebrate yet another holiday. (It’s a busy time of year, having just concluded more than a month of significant Jewish holidays.)

The name of this particular holiday suggests that we are called on this day to do something, namely to give thanks. In Judaism, we don’t wait for a special day on the calendar to offer thanks. Judaism teaches that even before getting out of bed in the morning we are to offer our thanks – Modeh anee lefanecha melech chai vekayam, she-he-chezarta bee nishmatee b’chemla, raba emunatecha. I offer thanks to You, living and eternal God, for You have mercifully restored my soul within me; Your faithfulness is great.

However, there is a state of being, an awareness, that precedes the act of giving thanks – and that awareness is known as gratitude.

Though gratitude and thankfulness are often used interchangeably, the Hebrew, hakarat hatov hints at a distinction between the two that appeals to me. Hakarat hatov, often loosely translated as “gratitude,” literally means “noticing the good.” We might focus on the part of that phrase that emphasizes that which we are to recognize — the good. As a habitual worrier, I know my instinct is to first notice what I don’t have or what I fear I will lose. I wish I could say it is either in my nature or that I’ve developed the practice to first notice the good. It’s not, but it’s something I aspire to.

But when I consider the phrase hakarat hatov, I am drawn to the word notice. Noticing, or recognizing, reminds me that the good for which I’m thankful already is — with or without my awareness, with or without my attention.

My friends and I rented a cabin in the mountains this past weekend. It was remote and we had to carpool in the vehicles that could handle the rocky, steep terrain to get there. We were rewarded with a breathtaking view of the Blue Ridge Mountains from our deck and the absence of any man-made sounds. After a busy summer drowning in noise pollution, this is what I most looked forward to.

Each morning I took my coffee to the deck and sat in the quiet and watched the moon set and each evening I drank my tea to the setting sun. I familiarized myself with the shapes on the horizon and with the tallest, oldest tree closest to where I sat. Each time I sat on the deck, the shapes on the horizon were the same. The tree, which had been there since before I was born, was still where I had last left it just hours before. I became aware that those mountains and that tree did not set themselves up for my pleasure prior to my arrival. They were already there. They were there when I was back home, unaware of them, caught up in my own fears, anxieties, and dramas. Even as I sit here now on my computer, again hearing the cars outside my window instead of the wind through the leaves — that mountain ridge and that tree are doing what they did when I left them. Shifting my attention to other things did nothing to alter their presence.

It reminds me of what the Haida Indian said to me as he taught me woodcarving, and what has been said of sculptors and poets across the ages. Art, like gratitude, is often not about creating something, but removing that which isn’t the thing itself. So it is for me with hakarat hatov. It is in the chipping away at the thoughts, beliefs, and habits that distract me that I can begin to recognize the good that was already there underneath.

Not surprisingly, November is National Gratitude Month. So as I enter into this month, I’ll try yet again to do what I so often fall short of. Pausing. Pausing to notice. Because when I pause to notice, the good can’t help but reveal itself to me, because it has already been there all along.

Shira

Shira Firestone, Editor CJN

Feature photo caption: View of Blue Ridge Mountains from our deck. Photo credit William Ballantyne