Dear Friends,
I love the summer! I love the heat. I love dinners out on the deck surrounded by the sounds of birds and insects. I love the slightly slower pace of life. However, as July comes to an end, I start to feel the pull of the fall creeping in. At my house, we are in that strange part of the summer where the calendar seems both full and empty at the same time. My kids are at camp, which means that I’m not balancing work, home life, and the mom taxi service that I seem to run during the school year. While I miss them and look forward to the letters that they do their best to send, I will admit that I don’t miss the piles of laundry or the wet towels on the floor.
It won’t last, of course. In what feels like the blink of an eye, they’ll be home with stories, laundry (so much laundry!), and an impressive collection of T-shirts and socks that used to belong to a bunkmate. School supplies are already taking over the aisles at Target, the High Holy Days aren’t all that far away, and I can see the shift in the pace of life coming very quickly. Summer has this funny way of making us believe we have all the time in the world—right up until we suddenly don’t.
Maybe that’s why a few words in this week’s Torah portion, Eikev, caught my attention. Moses tells the Israelites that God is bringing them to a good land with plenty for them to eat. He then says: “V’achalta v’savata u’veirachta”—”You shall eat, you shall be satisfied, and you shall bless.” (Deut. 8:10). These words may be familiar to you because they eventually become part of Birkat Hamazon, our prayer after meals. They’re familiar, so it may be easy to overlook what they’re actually saying.
The Torah doesn’t tell us to offer a blessing before we eat. We do bless food before we eat, but that is not biblically mandated. It doesn’t even tell us to bless while we’re still hungry and hoping for enough. It tells us to bless after we’ve eaten, after we’re satisfied, after we’ve experienced abundance.
Many of us know that when things are hard, when a loved one is ill, when things feel out of control and overwhelming, that prayer, reaching out to one another, and our tradition can feel comforting. But when life is simply good, we may not feel that pull quite as naturally. We may just move right on. We cross one thing off the list, add three more, and let ourselves get caught up in the next moment, the next project. It’s easy to spend our time thinking about what’s next, and perhaps we forget to notice the good that is already there.
Our tradition quietly pushes back against that instinct. We are gifted Shabbat, which arrives each week with the same gentle invitation: stop. Sit down. Share a meal. Put the phone away for a little while. Notice the people around the table. Pay attention. The rabbis instruct us to recite “meah brachot kol yom,” 100 blessings a day. Recognize that holiness isn’t found only in life’s extraordinary moments. More often than not, it’s hiding in the ordinary ones. We are given opportunity after opportunity to engage in the practice of gratitude. Our tradition understood, long before modern society did, that creating a practice of mindfulness and awareness could lead to health and happiness, but that as human beings we needed help to remember to engage in this way.
As we turn the calendar to August, I hope I—we—can resist the urge to rush headlong into the next season. There will be plenty of time for school shopping, committee meetings, holiday planning, and all the wonderful busyness that awaits us. For now, maybe we can savor one more summer evening, one more walk after dinner, one more good book on the porch, one more phone call with someone we love, one more story from camp. And perhaps we can remember to express our gratitude for these moments.
By building opportunities for gratitude into our routines, the rabbis teach that gratitude may not always feel like the natural response, but it could be! Maybe that’s what Moses is trying to teach us—to build in these opportunities so that they do become natural. It’s an invitation to pause, to breathe, and to say “thank you.”
Wishing you a Shabbat filled with rest, gratitude, and just enough quiet… unless you have campers who are coming home this weekend. In that case, I wish you a full refrigerator, a working washing machine, and a heart full of stories.
Shabbat Shalom,
Cantor Rebecca Moses