Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Host:As the world around us races forward in search of tomorrow's breakthroughs, join us as we discover the insights that have shaped Jewish life for centuries. Together, we'll study with Judaism's greatest minds, exploring timeless wisdom that continues to guide and inspire. You're listening to Inside the Jewish Mind JLI podcast.
We've all been taught to say please and thank you since we were kids. But what if there's more to gratitude than just good manners? In this 2018 talk, educator and psychologist Dr. Rona Novick explores gratitude as a powerful practice that can transform not just your mental and emotional well being, but even your physical health. Drawing on timeless Jewish wisdom, she offers practical tips to help you weave gratitude into your everyday life. Let's dive in
[00:00:56] Rona: In the past week, through my office door or just through my life, the following things happened. A mom came into my office working with her children around improving their behavior and complained that as soon as she had given her child a prize for some good behavior, the child immediately said, what do I get next?
No thank you. No wow, this is great, but good. And what do I do when I next make my bed or do my homework or something like that? A 12 year old boy was sitting in my office complaining that a sister who's nine is a pain because whatever mom gives her, she just wants more. She's never satisfied. And then around the Shabbat table last week, an adult who's about to make a simcha, about to make a celebration for someone in their family, did nothing but complain about the aggravation and the expense involved in making a celebration and hosting a celebration.
This is where we are. We are in a place where people have forgotten to count their blessings and to say thanks for what they have and focus instead on the glass being half empty. And it's costing us. It's costing us dearly in terms of our psychological well being.
Now, I said this in one of my earlier talks this week. What is a psychologist doing? Why am I interested in gratitude?
The field of psychology, and particularly my field, clinical psychology, had its origins in studying disease, looking at the abnormalities in human behavior and trying to understand them. About 25 years ago, in what is just amazing irony, Marty Seligman, a psychologist who became famous studying depression and learned helplessness, said, wait a minute. We go into communities and schools and hospitals and we study sick people.
We look at people who've had horrible trauma and horrible life circumstances and we see the impact it's had on them. And we've learned a lot by doing that. But wouldn't we Learn more by looking at the people who survive and thrive. What if we went into the inner city and looked at all the horrible risk factors that every kid growing up in violent areas faces and find the kids who make it to college and succeed in life and see what's happening with those kids that gave birth to the field of positive psychology, a field that said let's identify those traits and characteristics that allow people to be resilient, to survive and thrive, whatever life throws at them. And ladies and gentlemen, gratitude is one of those traits. Gratitude is one of the things that makes us stronger. We are not weak people. By saying thank you, thank you very much, I really appreciate it, thank you. It doesn't weaken us, it strengthens us. And so I want to talk today about how do we cultivate an attitude of gratitude, what role it can and should play in our lives?
Now, gratitude is actually much more than saying thank you. Gratitude is a felt sense of wonder, of thankfulness and appreciation for life.
My husband and I were on vacation three weeks ago now, two weeks, I don't know, it's all a blur. We went to Vail, Colorado. Boy, did I have an appreciation for life because I got seriously altitude sick.
And it's just, it's very funny. You can't make these things up. As I was leaving the Urgy Care center with portable oxygen, two medicines and feeling much better now that I had my little oxygen going and I'm feeling so stupid that a woman who's years old is here in these high altitudes to hike and they must be laughing, saying, oh, this out of shape metropolitan Jew is coming to hike in Colorado. And of course she gets altitude sick. As we're leaving the urge center, my husband says, look at her. And I said, the receptionist, I saw her on the way in. He says, no, look at her. I look down on the floor, sprawled flat out, laying on the floor moaning, is a very vigorous looking young 20 year old woman who had the same altitude sickness. It's genetic, it has nothing to do with your age, thankfully. And we did hike and we did get to not 14,000ft, but we got to 10 and 12,000ft mountains and it was absolutely stunning. But talk about a sense of wonder.
Talk about being odd. Mountains do it to me every time. I mean, I just, the Canadian Rockies, Colorado Rockies just put me on a mountain and I feel gratitude. I just, I can't help it. I look around and say, I can't believe God made, I mean this, I. And I can't believe I'm here and I made it to point in my life where I can experience this. That's gratitude. It's not the simple, you know, thank you to your waitress, although that's important too. But it's a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life. I was just reading over blog posts that I'm editing for a book, and I wrote a post once, flying on a plane that, you know, it's like one of your worst nightmares when you're flying on a plane and sitting next to you as a 2 year old.
So it was a long flight, sitting next to me as a two year old. And the two year old begins narrating from the moment we get on the plane. Mommy, mommy, the plane has a window. Mommy. The window seat goes up, it goes down. Mommy, look, the seat. The train comes down. Mommy, mommy. Well, then we start taxiing. Mommy, we're going. Mommy, we're faster. Mommy, Mommy, we're flying!
That sense of awe. Kids are so good at it.
We tamp it down and grow out of it. But I felt like, oh my gosh, if every one of us in an airplane could feel that every time we fly, that exhilaration, that sense of wonder and awe, it's just amazing. As a psychologist, I have to tell you why I'm interested in gratitude and what it correlates with what thankful people do better. You have this picture, this slide, of all of the benefits of gratitude, which include we sleep better and have more energy, we have improved health, lower blood pressure, less cardiovascular incidence, the respiratory system does better, better breathing, just in general, fewer physical symptoms, fewer doctor visits for people who are gracious, who experience gratitude. Participants with gratitude reach their goals more, they accomplish more, they are more likable. And as I talked about in one of my other workshops, friends are one of life's protective factors. They're like armor that gets us through life's tough times. If you don't have a friend, get one. You'll live longer. People with friends live longer. People who are isolates die prematurely. So who do you want to be with? Do you want to be with the friend who has a capacity for awe and gratitude? Or do you want to be with the chronic fetcher who's more likable? Who do we want to spend time with? We want to spend time with people who experience gratitude. People with gratitude support others. And the interesting thing about supporting others is that when we help others, we invariably strengthen ourselves. We invariably feel better. Through the process of having purpose and meaning and serving others, we have stronger love lives.
If we are people who experience gratitude. So there are all of these benefits of gratitude. So why are people clutching and why are those people in my office and those kids asking for more, more and more? I want, I want, I want, I want what gets in the way. So there are two biases, cognitive biases, cognitive habits, ways of thinking that get in our way that I want to talk about. One of them is habituation and the other is the responsibility bias. Before we get to that, I just want to say a word about gratitude and Jewish thought and the role it plays in its centrality in Judaism.
How do we say Jews? What's the word for Jews?
Yehudim.
Jews are Yehudim. Where does the root for Yehudim come from? Huda? It comes from the word thanks. And we're told in the Torah that when Leah gave birth to Judah, she says she conceived again, she bore a son, and she said, this time I'll praise the Lord. And she calls his name Judah. And she left off bearing because she got rid, Rashi explains, she got more than her share. She got more children than she was supposed to have, more children than her sister did, more children than the other handmaids. And because she got more than her share, she expressed her thanks. And that is the name that defines us. We are yehudim, we are thankers, we are the thankful ones.
In addition, the Vayika Rabba writes that when Moshiach comes, please God, quickly in our days, speedily in our days, we should all be blessed to witness the coming of the Messiah. But when that happens, all sacrifices will be defunct. There will be no further need for sacrifices except the Korban Toda, except the sacrifice that is brought to say thank you, to show gratitude.
The two other proofs I have for the centrality and the power of Hakarat Hatov of giving thanks in Jewish life.
And there are many, many others, I'm just giving you some examples. The Rashi explains that when the plagues were visited In Egypt, the 10 plagues, you may remember that one of the plague was that the river Nile turned two blood. Moses could not start that plague. Rashi explains why could Moses not start the plague on the river Nile? Because it was the River Nile that saved him and that gave him life. When he was sent away to protect him, he was put in a little ark of bulrushes and shipped down the river where Pharaoh's daughter found him. So in thankfulness for the life saving measures that the Nile provided for him, he was not the one who cursed it in the plagues. And finally and we did it this morning in our morning davening. We do it every day in our davening when we pray, we have someone in the front who is our shaliach. He is our emissary, the chazan, the shaliach tzibor, whatever you want to call him. He is the one who says the entire Amidah. He says the entire central prayer of the Jewish prayer service. He repeats it out loud.
There's one part of the prayer. He's. He's our agent. He's speaking on our behalf to God. But there's one part of that prayer that he cannot say for us. We say it with him. It's modim, Modim. Thank you, God. We can't give that over to someone else. We can't say to someone else, be my agent and go thank God for me. It is so central to who we are, our relationship to God, as one of saying thanks, of expressing our wondrous awe. We can't delegate to someone else. We have to do it ourselves. So it is central to who we are as Jews. It's very much a part of Jewish living.
What gets in the way. What gets in the way are habituation and responsibility bias. So think about the things that you don't notice.
Can you give me an example of something in your life you don't notice?
Yeah, I'm sorry. Breathing. You don't notice your breathing. It's automatic now. If I told you to focus on it, you'd notice it. None of us notice. This room actually is very good. Most rooms, when you speak, if we were really quiet, we would hear a hum. We'll hear the air conditioning click on. We'll hear a condenser. We'll hear some electronic buzzing of a light. This room's actually very good. Of course, I want to make an example. This room has none. We don't hear any sound. But even if it was here, we would have habituated to it by now. We would have totally ignored it. We're so used to it that our brain tunes it out. And that's what happens. That's what gets in the way of gratitude. Greg Kresh, a researcher on gratitude and on habituation, discovered the following phenomena. If you drive to work, commute to work, and on your way to work, you have nothing goes wrong. You get to work on time, no flat tires, no major accidents. You drive home that afternoon, same thing.
You don't notice your commute.
Nothing pops up. It's just, oh, yeah, I went to work, I came back. You don't notice it. You're Habituated, it was a fine commute. If, on the other hand, you drive to work, you have a flat tire, there are four accidents that keep you hung up. The AAA guy takes an hour to come.
You then drive home and it goes smoothly.
You really notice that trip home.
You really feel, wow, what a difference it makes to have a trip with no flat tire, with no accidents, with no waiting for aaa. Can you tell that I commute on the Cross Bronx Expressway daily? It's the worst Parkway in the U.S. yeah.
It's so funny you mentioned breathing. I mean, like, who notices breathing until you're 8,000ft up?
And I'm telling you, you notice because you're huffing and puffing when you go to the kitchen to get a drink of water. Like everything, it was really amazing to us. Also, people acclimate better. And so people are jogging by us and we are walking like this, just getting used to the altitude. So you do you really notice it when it's gone. But when we live.
When we live a life of plenty, when everything's going well, we don't notice that everything's going well because it's just par for the course. It's just what we assume.
You have a quote there that is one of my favorite Mishnahs from Pirke Avot, because it's very puzzling. It was very puzzling to me initially in the second part of the Mishnah there, Rav Shimon says, if someone is walking on his way while repeating his studies, and he interrupts his learning and says, how lovely is this tree, how lovely is this newly plowed field. It's deemed by scripture, by Torah to be as if he was guilty of an offense punishable by his life.
When I first read this, I said, oh, my goodness. But I'm always saying, look at that mountain, look at that sunset. Look at that. Am I guilty of an offense? Is that terrible? But look at Bunim's commentary on this Mishnah. Rav Bunim writes, judaism wants us to enjoy life in this world and experience the pleasures which stem from a contemplation of the beauties of nature. But too many of us do that appreciation of nature merely as nature. And we fail to see in nature's great beauty and its wonder and mystery the hand of a creator, the Master of the universe. There is nothing wrong with noticing our breathing, with noticing the beautiful trees, with noticing. But we have to, at the same point that we're noticing it, say, thank God.
Thank the awesome and amazing creature. I'm being that allowed me to have this experience, I heard. And if you ever have an opportunity to hear Rav Twerski, it's. It's a delight. He is not only a very wise Jewish sage, but he's also a physician. And he was speaking to a group of parents and he said, do you know.
Do you understand what it takes for the two human eyes to focus together, to give us depth perception? Do you understand how many muscles and minute nerves and mechanisms go into the simple task of you being able to see how far away something is? And that if those things do not work in perfect harmony and concert, you wouldn't have that ability? It's an absolute moment by moment, nace, moment by moment miracle that we experience in the human body. And he used that as one example, even went on to how the kidneys work and how the lungs work, and that we. We are walking, breathing miracles. We don't often enough say thank you. This is amazing. But it's not just amazing because look at that sunset. It's amazing because we know where this came from, the danger of habituation.
Rabbeinu Bachia writes about this in Chovas Halevavos, that people grow up surrounded with a superabundance of divine favors which they experience continuously and to which they become so used, so used to, that they come to regard these as essential parts of their being. When their intelligence develops, their mental faculties become strong. They foolishly ignore the benefits the Creator has bestowed on them and do not consider the obligation of gratitude for divine beneficence, for they're unaware of the high degree of the boon.
You have the opposite. When you read writings from the camps during the Holocaust, you have a clear evidence of how, when you are not living with plenty, how you have a sharpened, heightened ability to experience gratitude and to recognize all the gifts around you.
Eddie Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish writer known for her diaries and correspondence from Westerbrook concentration camp, wrote, but as life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude. A crumb of bread, you know, a little bit of meat in the soup was a boon. It was a wonderful thing.
There is a term that has been coined in the popular literature called affluenza, the virus of affluence.
And it may be that it's affluenza that we all are living in times of great plenty. I mean, thankfully for most of us in our communities, although there may be people struggling, we're not living through the Great Depression. I think all the time about.
And some of us have. The people in this room who are young won't know what I'm talking about, but some of us have marks on our arms from the smallpox vaccine. Right. My mother recalls, and I'm not that old and she's not that old, but she recalls the fear of polio and what it was like to raise children and to be a child with polio still being a scourge. That totally, you know, it didn't always rob the life, but that impacted the lives of children, of young people and of adults. And nowadays, do anyone. Does anyone get polio? We've basically eradicated it. And economically, most of us, in our culture, in our communities, we don't see people struggling at the level of destitution that at times was much more widespread. That's not to say that there aren't places in the world where unfortunately people are struggling terribly.
But it may be that it's affluenza. It may be that it is that this affluenza contributes to our habituation bias, that we are so used to having everything that it is difficult for us to notice how much we have. And one of the things that I find among today's parents is an enormous reluctance to say no to their children.
Because we have the ability to say yes, because we can buy them, get them, give them, take them, bring them. We do, but it's a mistake.
We're robbing this generation of the opportunity to experience gratitude, to understand the value of things, to feel awe and wonder, to anticipate and wait for things, to manage their impulses. If we don't say no, and to those of you who are parents and grandparents, and you're thinking, yeah, but if I say no, they won't like me. If I say no, they'll be angry. Okay, that's okay. They'll survive. And not only that, but this is what I say to parents all the time.
If you believe that, your child will never hear no, they will win every ball game they will get every part in a play. Everyone they want to date will date them. The first person they fall in love with will marry them. Life will go swimmingly. They'll get every job they want, every raise and every promotion. Then don't ever tell them no. They don't need to be prepared. But if you believe, as I believe, that somewhere in their life someone will tell them no, then wouldn't you rather they hear it first from the person who loves them more than life itself, shouldn't you be the one who teach.
You can't have everything, but it's wonderful that you have what you do. When my children were growing up, Power Rangers were very big and Fao Schwartz, this amazing toy store was on Fifth Avenue. And we had a family custom that for the Israel Day Parade, we would meet on the steps of FAO Schwartz to watch the Israel Day Parade. It also was convenient because it had a bathroom. So if your kids needed the bathroom, you'd go into. FAO Schwartz, which we told our children when they were little, was a toy museum, because things were much more expensive on Fifth Avenue than they would be in our local toy store. Our kids were very smart and they said, ema, if this is a toy museum, how come it has 70 Power Rangers? There's usually only one of everything in a museum. If I get one, there'll still be 60 there for other people to see. So, you know, the gig was up. But we still said, we do not buy things in FAO Schwarz. That's our looking store. Then we go to the buying store if we want to buy something for a birthday or a special event. But the point is that we have to fight against habituation.
Yes, second bias.
The second bias is the contribution bias.
If you're with a partner at the moment, you can try this. If not, try it later. Think about something that you and your partner do together. Business partner, spouse, friend. Think about something you do together. An event you planned together, a party you made together, a dinner you made. And each of you independently write down on a piece of paper the response to this question. What percentage of the work for this event did I do?
How much of it was me, never mind my partner.
If you do this, whether you're business partners, spouses, no matter who you are, your two papers, when you look at them together, will add up to more than 100%.
We always assume that we are doing more of the effort and the labor we're putting in more than anybody else's. We overestimate our contribution.
It's been done repeated in study over study, over study. It's really, to me, a phenomenally interesting finding, by the way. It improves. You can improve your accuracy if you simply ask your partner beforehand, how much do you think you contributed? Then you're going to be accurate. Then that keeps you honest. But otherwise we have limited knowledge of what others contribute or what they think they contribute. And we're going to always think we did more than we really did. Now, what does this have to do with gratitude?
Well, guess what? If I think that Life is going great because of my efforts and not because of God. If I think that I made a great party because of my efforts and not because you cooked some things for me or the caterer was really helpful and I'm not going to have gratitude. I'm not going to show gratitude if in my praying I say, yeah, life is good, life is terrific because I work hard at it. I'm a dedicated mother, I'm a hardworking employee. That's why things are going well in my life. If I believe it's all me, why would I thank God?
So we have to fight against this bias that says, I'm the one, I'm responsible. I did this in order to be open to feel that sense of awe and wonder and gratitude at the people who did do this, at God who does in all kinds of miraculous, silent and unseen ways be responsible for things in our lives.
What is the antidote to these two problems, to habituation and to this responsibility bias? There's really one antidote and it's focus. It's, where do I put my focus? What do I look at? What do I examine? What do I think about what's my, you know, I have to do some mental housekeeping and clean house up here.
Very interesting. The research on improving our lives by bringing more gratitude in it is so simple, it's. It's embarrassingly absurd. Write it down.
Just write it down. Every night, write down three things that you're thankful for. It will change your life. You can't just think it. You can't just say, I'll do it. Get a journal. Put something beside your bed, open an app on your phone. Write it down every day. Three things you're grateful for. Listen to this study. Emmons and McCully. Three groups. Group one wrote about what they're grateful for that had occurred during the week, every night. Three, they wrote something they were grateful for for a week. Group two, God bless them, wrote about daily irritations. This bothered me. This person was annoying. I didn't like that the checkout lady got my order wrong, et cetera. Group three was told just right about anything that happened today. No emphasis on positive or negative. After 10 weeks, what do you think happened? Group one was more optimistic. They felt better about their lives. But here's the kicker. They also exercised more and had fewer visits to doctors. It changed their medical status. It changed the way they were living their lives. Group two and group three had no positive effects. I think Group two, nobody wanted to be with anymore.
Somebody's writing down irritations every day. They're probably not such happy campers.
We can find examples in Torah of this need to focus at all times. There's a very interesting sequence in the Torah where there's a discussion of the holidays, of our celebration of the holidays. And right smack dab in the middle of that celebration story comes when you reap the harvest of your land. Don't touch the corners of the field. You know, we are obligated to leave the gleanings for the impoverished, for people who don't have means to come and take from the gleaning. Leave them for the poor and the stranger. I am the Lord your God. Why in the middle of a discussion of holidays, is this plopped right there? So the commentators tell us that the holidays are our spiritual high. They're when we're giving thanks. They're when we are all together making pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem. We're feeling wonderful. We're thankful to God. We need to be reminded in the midst of those spiritual highs to not habituate. Don't think it's like this for everyone. Don't think it's like this every day. Remember, there are people less fortunate. Take care of them. Be thankful for what you have. That's the message that the Torah is giving us here.
I've given you two other quotes here, which I'll get to in a minute.
I want to say another word about another issue about gratitude. That research is growing on the relationship between gratitude and generosity. And a phenomena that's being called gratitude contagion or upstream generativity, basically paying it forward. You may every once in a while hear these stories on the news about one person pays for the person behind them at a toll, and the next person pays and the next strangers, they don't know each other. There are now chains in the thousands of this upstream generativity of people saying, I'm thankful for what I have. I want to take care of the person behind me every once in a while. You'll see on Facebook, you'll see in posts in social media, making the rounds of someone who left a tip and a note to some waitress saying, thank you. Here's $100. Here's $1,000. You took good care of me. I'm going to take good care of you. We heard the story last night that rabbi shared of unbelievable generosity of Uri the plumber and how it came back to him. So here's my personal. My personal experience with this. My mom lives in Delray Beach, Florida, where they have the wonderful shopping Store Publix. Anyone here from Florida? You know Publix? They're so nice to you in Publix. They're really lovely. So she calls me and says, rona, I have a story for your gratitude lecture. You have to tell this story. I can't believe this happened. I'm shopping in Publix. The woman in front of me put something on the. The. The checkout line, and I don't recognize what it is. And I say, what is that fruit? She says, oh, they're white apricots. They're amazing. And I says, oh, I'll have to try them next time I'm here. The woman checks out, and the apricots are still. And she takes the apricots and she puts them into my mother's cart. She's paid for them. She puts them in my mother's cart. My mother says, no, wrong cart. They go in your cart. She says, no, I want you to have them.
My mother says, I have nothing to give to you. She says, you gave me a smile.
Do you know that? My mother took her grapes and she gave them to the person behind her.
That's what gratitude. That's how gratitude and generosity go together, and they make the world so lovely and amazing. Here's my second public story that it's not really about grand gratitude, although it is, because my mother was unbelievable, great, unbelievably grateful. She's checking out again at Publix, and the checkout girl says, oh, my gosh, I'm so happy to see you. I've been waiting to see you for a month. Your shift, my shift, and when you shop hasn't been together. Wait right here. My mother is thinking, what did I do? Did I give a bad check? What's wrong? What happened? She comes back and she hands my mother $20.
She says, the last time you were here, your bills, you were just from the bank, your bills stuck together. You gave me an extra 20. I've been waiting to see you, to give it to you. You believe this?
Just absolutely amazing. So you know, my mother now is unbelievably grateful to Publix, and they've earned her loyalty forever. And she will always shop at publix. The Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner on the Maral in Pachad Yitzchak writes the following. When a person receives a benefit from his fellow, a seed of chesed is planted in the world. If the nature of Chesed is functioning healthily and properly, the seed cannot but give rise to additional Chesed. But if the person is an ingrate. It is as if he uproots the sprouting of chesed with his bare hands. If we're not thankful, it's as if we pull the Chesed out of the world. Without a doubt, uprooting a planting of Chesed is even more antithetical to the essence of Chesed than it simply is being uninvolved. It's worse than if you did nothing and ingrate damages and destroys the very attribute of Chesed, one who is ungrateful to his fellow. It's as if he's ungrateful to God because his denial is a response not just to the particular act of Chesed done to him, but also to the attribute of Chesed in the broadest sense. We are B'tselem Elokim. We are made in the fashion of God. And as God is a generous giver and a grateful entity, we have to be that. I end with two quotes and then I'll take any questions and comments that you have. One is from Piglet.
Piglet noticed that even though he had a very small heart, it could hold a rather large amount of gratitude.
All of us have really endless abilities to be grateful. Sometimes I think we need to tap that child in us that says I'm flying. It's amazing, it's awesome. And we have to be able to be that person who has unbridled excitement and wonderful wonder at the world and expresses it and is open. And by the way, someone asked this question on the mindfulness panel. How do you communicate this to children? We communicate this to children by living it out loud so much. You know, we. My, my. I. I was raised in an age of bread and butter notes. Anyone here know what a bread and butter note is? Bread and butter notes are if you're invited to someone's house for dinner, you write a thank you. Dinner was lovely.
We were told if you were invited to someone, you write a thank you note. Thank you for dinner. Lovely. That's how we were raised. I had to. When my children went off to their year in Israel, I said, you know, a lot of people are going to invite you for Shabbat. You're going to be at different people's table. You know that you never go to someone's house empty handed. Do you know that you bring a hostess gift if you don't know about their kashrut, bring flowers if it says one of them was their Shemitah year. If there are issues about flowers, bring a bottle of wine, bring a book, bring something. But you Don' Go empty handed. But we have to actively teach this if we want the next generation to show gratitude. And by the way, we have to adapt our teaching because no one writes bread and butter notes anymore. People write texts and emails. And we have to recognize that sometimes the thank you is going to be an Instagram post or some other. I don't know, I'm not up on all the latest technology and social media things, but sometimes the thanks are going to be delivered in very different ways. But our children have to see us do it in order for them to learn how to do it. And Anne Frank, how wonderful it is that no one need to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. Every thank you we give changes the world. Every moment of awe and gratitude that we experience changes the world. I'll give you one moment example of where I think it really made a difference. And it also made a difference in the way that we are understood and we are seen. I have the. I have the merit to often be a scholar in residence on Passover programs. And so here I was at a very lush resort checking in with thousands of tired, hungry Jews who had traveled all over and were now trying to get into their hotel room. And of course they all want to check in 20 minutes ago. They all want to be in the pool 20 minutes ago. They're all starving because just like here, it's been about 15 minutes since their last meal and they are not making it easy for the people at the checkout line. Now, I already have my room key, but it's not working. My electric key card is not working. Not a major issue. But I go up to the. I wait my turn, I get up to the person in line and I say, it's not going to be like this all week. People are just very edgy because they've been traveling. A lot of them have kids and they're pakalach. They have all their packages and. And I just want to thank you for having us here this week and for having this program here. The person said, you made my day, you. But now it's all worth it. It's sometimes we have no idea how the impact that we're going to have when we express gratitude. If you want one mitzvah, one thing that's going to change your life. There is a short prayer that is said after you go to the bathroom. Asher Yatsar, it's called. Those are the first two words. And it basically thanks God for keeping everything working in your body. And it goes on to say the Prayer basically says, because even if one of these things is flawed, I couldn't survive.
I began meticulously saying that when my father got ill and I realized how fragile our bodies are and how complicated and miraculous they are. And it changed the way that I think about my physical health and my phys. I don't take it for granted anymore because really, I have this regular reminder that talks about this miracle that I'm experiencing on a regular basis and that I'm grateful for. I so bristle at this. Parents also will say, why should I thank my child for making their bed? That's their job. Why should I thank them for doing their homework? That's their job. Well, because it primes the pump. Let's just be pragmatic here. Thankful people get more. So if I say thank you, sweetheart, you did your homework so nicely tonight. There's a better chance of you doing that homework tomorrow night. That's just the reality. There's, by the way, a wonderful book written by a New York Times reporter called Everything I Learned About Marriage I learned from Shamu.
This Shamu the whale. This author was given an assignment to go study how they trained the killer whales in SeaWorld. Before all of the stuff came out about, you know, it's bad and it's not good in it, but they use behavioral principles to train killer whales. And she went home and began using those very same behavioral principles on her husband, who was very messy. So every time her husband would get the socks closer to the hamper, she would say, oh, thanks, honey. You, you got the socks almost in. Well, thank you, honey. That's a great job. Thank you, honey. I love it when you put your, your socks away. I really appreciate that. She just started shaping his behavior. It's a behavioral technique. It's used in animal training all the time. She felt guilty as the week was going on. She felt guilty that she was doing this to him without his knowledge. And she said, I have to come clean. She said, honey, you know, I'm doing the story. Should I move the wheel? I'm seeing how they train the wheels. I've been training you all week to get your socks in the hamper. And he said, I know. I've been training you all week. Have you noticed we haven't eaten out once? You've made home cooked meals every night. I've been using the same stuff on you.
If we think that we do not impact the behavior of those around us and that if we do it deliberately, it's somehow manipulative, we're crazy. What we should do is impact the behavior of those around us in healthy and helpful ways. And so a spouse saying, you work very hard to bring in the rent and put the food on our table. Thank you. Our family couldn't work without you. Yeah, it's your job. But it doesn't mean I don't say thank you. I mean, I say thank you to the reservation agent. I say thank you to people. They're doing their job. But that doesn't mean I have to say, just do your job for me. No, thanks.
I mean, what a horrible world it would be. So I think for Shalom Bayis, you absolutely say thank you. You absolutely say, I appreciate that. And marriage is a partnership. It's meant to be a partnership. So you have to establish, you know, how that partnership is going to work. In terms of Shalom Bias, I think that we have to be open and clear about who does what, and we have to be thankful for every contribution that every person makes to the family in whatever way that they do, even if that's their job. Thank you all very much. Go be thankful.
[00:42:18] Host:That's all for today. Thanks for listening to Inside the Jewish Mind, a JLI podcast. Be sure to join us every week for fresh insights and timeless Jewish ideas. As always, stay curious, keep learning, and we'll see you next time.
