A father is weeding the family garden with his young daughter. They are bickering. “If I can stop whining,” the daughter says to her father, “you can stop being such a grouch.”

This is the story Martin Seligman tells as the moment he realized his psychology research into depression was all wrong. His five-year-old daughter’s rebuke made him realize how his orientation was all wrong, that focusing on the way other people grouse doesn’t help them or you. That’s when the lightbulb went off and he founded the Jewish-adjacent positive psychology movement.

Thanksgiving. A day to collectively stop whining and being so grouchy, and orient ourselves around thanks-giving. Giving and thanks, inextricably linked as we know they must be.

But why make it a one-day thing? As positive psychologists teach, focusing on developing nurturing character traits such as gratitude enhance our well-being in profound ways. So, get this: the weekend of Thanksgiving this year coincides with Rosh Chodesh Kislev – the start of the month where we celebrate light in the midst of darkness, and the surprise of miracles, culminating in Chanukah beginning on December 25. For families celebrating Christmas and Chanukah, the coincidence is perhaps helpful. For all of us, it is a reminder that all religious traditions are the pointing-towards that which is indescribable and larger than life itself.

It is all too easy to lose our orientation to gratitude and light in the daily unfolding. Our culture, in this moment, likes to focus on anxiety and grievance; gratitude and joy become counter-cultural in a way. Maybe that is starting to shift. I hope it is. Maybe we can help it shift, even as we work to make the world into the place we want it to be, to fill it with justice and love and kindness and sincerity. And maybe we can get there by taking this time, from Thanksgiving weekend to Chanukah, to do that.

Several years back, one of my most fun, and nourishing, spiritual practices was a daily gratitude group. Four friends and I commited to emailing each other every day a train-of-thought list of things we were grateful for. We tried not to get stuck, repeating the same things every day. We tried to look for new things to add to the list. We found the smaller, more specific, we got, the more we got out of it. We found that the discipline of committing to one another was important. We found that reading one another’s lists was just as meaningful as writing our own.

I’ve long thought about resurrecting that practice. So here goes, and I hope you’ll join me.

I hereby invite you to commit to a daily gratitude practice, stretching from this Thanksgiving weekend through Chanukah. Begin today, if you like, or Saturday night/Sunday, which is Rosh Chodesh Kislev. We won’t pretend it’s a forever thing; in fact, making it a finite, temporary activity lends it a power of its own. Tell me something is forever, and I run the other way. But just a few weeks? Well, I can do anything for just a few weeks. As the the months of our seasonal-affect-disorder kicks in, where we feel the shortening of the days and distance of the sun, it will be good to light one another up in this way. Yes, we will light lights during Chanukah; how can we use these weeks now to prepare by lighting some inner lights of our own?

I’ve created a WhatsApp group for Gathering Gratitude. Every day, post a train-of-thought list of what you are grateful for. Try not to repeat the same things every day. Try to find new things to brighten your eyes and vision. If you’re not a WhatsApp person, or it feels too public that way, make it a private journaling practice by designating a notebook just for this practice these next few weeks. If you go that route, drop me a note so I can support you along the way.



That’s it. It’s nothing fancy or difficult. But by the time we get to Chanukah, we will have kindled in ourselves the light of gratitude, of giving thanks each and every day. We will have shifted our inner orientation a bit, and in that way set ourselves to kindle lights of warmth and light and love when Chanukah, and our darkest days of winter, arrive.

This invitation is for anyone and everyone to join in. The Oheb Shalom community is diverse and there is every reason to think that our shared gratitude practice will only deepen by inviting friends beyond the Oheb circle, too. That these weeks map onto our Christian family and friends’ practice of Advent feels auspicious. That is, after all, the essence of Thanksgiving: a day when we remember the mythic sharing across tribal, ethnic, and religious lines the blessing of being America. A day when that mythic sharing can reinspire us to do the same and to pursue justice and peace in a country founded on the premise of diversity and giving thanks for our blessings.

I close with a Thanksgiving blessing, that you might use at your Thanksgiving table today. It was written by Rabbi Naomi Levy (Talking to God):

For the laughter of the children,
For my own life breath,
For the abundance of food on this table,
For the ones who prepared this sumptuous feast,
For the roof over our heads,
The clothes on our backs,
For our health,
And our wealth of blessings,
For this opportunity to celebrate with family and friends,
For the freedom to pray these words
Without fear,
In any language,
In any faith,
In this great country,
Whose landscape is as vast and beautiful as her inhabitants.
Thank You, God, for giving us all these.  Amen.