The Difference Between Gratitude and Thankfulness

If I am thanking God that someone has recovered from an illness, do I not have to contend with the fact that it was God who made this person sick?

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For a religious person, the arrival of good news is an occasion to thank God.

But often, a disturbing thought follows in the wake of this act of thankfulness.

If I am thanking God that someone has recovered from an illness, do I not have to contend with the fact that it was God who made this person sick?

If I am thanking God that the war has ended, do I not have to contend with the fact that God brought on the war in the first place?

These are the uncomfortable consequences of pure monotheism. There is no devil to blame. No dark forces outside of God’s control. Only the One, the All, the Ground of Being.

This is one of the fundamental theological problems put forth in the classic book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” by the late Rabbi Harold Kushner.

“The Bible repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, without raising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.”

To this problem he suggests theistic finitism—the idea that God is all-good but not all-powerful. God wants the best for us, but simply doesn’t have the power to make it happen all the time.

“If God is a God of justice and not of power, then He can still be on our side when bad things happen to us. He can know that we are good and honest people who deserve better. Our misfortunes are none of His doing, and so we can turn to Him for help.”

This is comforting. But it is unrecognizable to me as Jewish.

The sacred cow that Kushner believed himself to be tipping over was God’s omnipotence, but in truth, his thesis tears at God’s oneness. If God is the source of some things but not others, then He is not the One, the All, the Ground of Being.

Rather, he is a benevolent actor within creation—one with good intentions but glaring limitations—more reminiscent of Superman than God.

This is not how the Torah understands God, nor how Jews have traditionally positioned ourselves in relationship to reality.

Of God, Isaiah wrote the following: “Maker of light and creator of darkness, doer of peace and creator of evil, I the Lord do all of this.”

Light Flowing Forth from the Blackness - Robert Fludd

And in the Mishnah, it is written that “one is obligated to recite a blessing for the bad that befalls him just as he recites a blessing for the good that befalls him, as it is stated: ‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.’”

In truth, there is no good without bad, no light without shadow, no up without down. There is no life without fragility, without change, without loss. No creation without this often agonizing balance of elements.

This is the nature of this brittle, violent, quaking, beautiful world. The question then is simple. Facing all of this, do we take up a posture of gratitude and bless life; or do we curse it.

We might also ask what else life could be? What else would we have it be?

Returning to Kushner’s examples of the widow, the orphan and the needy—do we suppose that a truly benevolent God would give us a world where nothing is ever lost, where nothing ever changes or fades away?

Such a world would also be a world where nothing new ever comes into being. Such a world, scrubbed of death, would not truly be alive. Rather, it would be a kind of sculpture. A molten image of the kind the Torah warns us against being seduced by.

This doesn’t mean that we must say “thank you” for every misfortune that befalls us.

Thankfulness has always raised theological difficulties for me. I do not believe that God “gives” in the manner of a human giver. I do not believe that God has “given me” a certain misfortune, not as a test and not as a punishment.

Nor do I think that the theological difficulty goes away if we only focus on positive things. I find it equally problematic to imagine that God has “given me” a clean bill of health or a warm home when He has not “given” these things to others.

Here we must understand the difference between thankfulness and gratitude.

I say thank you to someone for something that they have given me as a gift. My thankfulness is thus directed at the giver in reference to the gift.

Gratitude, on the other hand, is not directed in any particular direction nor does it have a particular reference. I am in a state of gratitude when I recognize all of life as a gift.

Thankfulness separates the world into its parts, accepting those we like as “gifts” and stammering as it attempts to explain away the rest.

Gratitude embraces all of what is, including what is painful for us, and still sees in it beauty and holiness.

This does not mean we do not mourn. This does not mean that we take every hit with a smile. This does not mean we wander through life like enlightened automatons, unmoved by loss.

It means only that we refuse to limit God’s place in the world to the good, the pleasant, the comfortable, and the safe.

The human heart, of course, knows this on an intuitive level and has no difficulty seeing the God even in the darkest corners of creation.

A famous Hasidic teaching has it that “there is nothing as whole as a broken heart.”

In brokenness, in sickness, in heartache, in desperation—in these bleak moments we sometimes find ourselves in touch with a kind of raw and ragged holiness unmatched by anything we experience when we are untouched by life’s hard edges.

We saw this when former hostage Omer Shem Tov expressed a longing for the closeness with God he felt in Hamas captivity, which he no longer feels with the same intensity now that he has returned home.

Contrary to what Rabbi Kushner suggests, it is not so easy to make God’s place in our lives uncomplicated.

These are not easy ideas to communicate. Often one is accused of suggesting that people should be thankful for misfortune, for disease, for loss. Indeed, such a suggestion is obscene and dismissive of our humanity.

But to suggest that we should be grateful for God’s creation, in which “there is a time for everything” and also an end to everything, is at the heart of the Torah’s teaching, and is the very essence of Judaism’s vision of life as a blessing.