Show Your Gratitude
Show Your Gratitude
This Dvar Torah was originally published in Torah && Tech, the weekly newsletter I publish together with my good friend Ben Greenberg. To get the weekly issue delivered straight to your inbox click here.
In this week’s Parshah, Parshat Va’era, we read one of the most famous stories in the Torah. G-D, through his messenger Moshe, punishes Egypt with ten plagues in order to change Pharoh’s mind and get him to allow the Jewish people to leave Egypt.
Reading the stories, we see that most of the plagues came about through some action on Moshe’s part, three of the plagues went through his brother Aharon. Specifically, the plagues of blood and frogs came about when Aharon raised Moshe’s staff and hit the Nile River.
Why the change?
The sages teach us that Moshe didn’t want to hit the Nile because he felt a sense of gratitude to the river.
When Moshe was born, his mother id him in a basket that she placed at the edge of the river to hide him from Pharo, who wanted all Jewish babies killed.
Because the river had saved his life as an infant, Moshe didn’t feel it right to smite the river, despite it being an inanimate object and wouldn’t “notice” the offense, and had his brother Aharon do it instead.
Often at work and in our personal lives, we are quick to call people out when we feel they have wronged us. Unfortunately, we are not always as quick to acknowledge when someone has done something good for us. All too often, we take it for granted and barely recognize it, if at all.
At a previous team I was on, we had a system where every week, we would write feedback to another team member on a rotation. That system had many benefits, both for us as individuals and as a team. But one of the main benefits was that it forced me to think of something good about the teammate I was writing the feedback for. After all, no one wants to write a whole letter with just negative. It forced us to really think back and find the things we were grateful for as well.
Deliberately spending time to be grateful can be helpful to you and force you into positive thought patterns (it’s hard to focus on negative thoughts when you’re always on the lookout for positive things to write about), but don’t leave that positivity to yourself! Share it with others, compliment them openly, send the feedback to their managers (I’m sure they’ll appreciate it come performance review time :)
If Moshe could show his gratitude to an inanimate river, we can surely show our appreciation to the people in our lives who helped us get to where we are.
The sages teach us that Moshe didn’t want to hit the Nile because he felt a sense of gratitude to the river.
When Moshe was born, his mother id him in a basket that she placed at the edge of the river to hide him from Pharo, who wanted all Jewish babies killed.
Because the river had saved his life as an infant, Moshe didn’t feel it right to smite the river, despite it being an inanimate object and wouldn’t “notice” the offense, and had his brother Aharon do it instead.
Often at work and in our personal lives, we are quick to call people out when we feel they have wronged us. Unfortunately, we are not always as quick to acknowledge when someone has done something good for us. All too often, we take it for granted and barely recognize it, if at all.
At a previous team I was on, we had a system where every week, we would write feedback to another team member on a rotation. That system had many benefits, both for us as individuals and as a team. But one of the main benefits was that it forced me to think of something good about the teammate I was writing the feedback for. After all, no one wants to write a whole letter with just negative. It forced us to really think back and find the things we were grateful for as well.
Deliberately spending time to be grateful can be helpful to you and force you into positive thought patterns (it’s hard to focus on negative thoughts when you’re always on the lookout for positive things to write about), but don’t leave that positivity to yourself! Share it with others, compliment them openly, send the feedback to their managers (I’m sure they’ll appreciate it come performance review time :)
If Moshe could show his gratitude to an inanimate river, we can surely show our appreciation to the people in our lives who helped us get to where we are.
Shabbat Shalom!
Yechiel