The Injustice of Thanksgiving

If you’ve kept up with the headlines this week, you might be tempted to question life’s fairness: a shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, terror attacks in Jerusalem, a mass-shooting at a Walmart in Virginia, ongoing bloodshed in Ukraine, antisemitism on the rise. On any week these events would be cause for despair but how are we to make sense of them at this time of giving thanks in particular?

Our sages and teachers can help us to achieve a greater sense of perspective at moments like these. Rabbi Eugene Borowitz, of blessed memory, was one of the leading theologians of the past fifty years. I was lucky enough to be his student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion where he taught for almost five decades. In his great work of Jewish theology, Renewing the Covenant, Rabbi Borowitz teaches that often in life “…we are tempted to itemize all the occasions on which…” we might say: “’I didn’t deserve that.’” For Rabbi Borowitz, this mostly refers to those moments when “we found God or the world unresponsive.”

He points out however that it “does not often mean all the good that comes to us on which we have no claim, life being the obvious case.”

Just as, perhaps, we didn’t deserve much of the misfortune that has befallen us, he reminds us that we didn’t deserve the blessings–the good things–as well. On those things, too, we must admit that we have no legitimate claim.

Rabbi Borowitz continues: “If we wish to be fair when we speak about God’s justice and ourselves, then we must begin with all that God has given us that we had no right to or had not earned. In my experience, what God gives most people hour by hour most generously exceeds what, as a simple matter of justice, they deserve. When one lives in gratitude, the absence of justice stands out primarily in the astonishing benevolence showered on most people.”

It’s a powerful and much needed reminder, especially at times like this when we might find despair welling up inside of us as we reflect on the sad state of our world.

But if we pause for a moment and consider the extraordinary gift of life itself, we can find the path back to gratitude. Life is a miracle that we have no right to and that we did not earn. While we might justifiably take credit for some of the good things that have come our way throughout our lives because of wise decisions we have made or hard work we have done, our existence itself–the very existence that has made everything else in our lives possible–is in its entirety a gift given to us by others.

Here’s how journalist and author Bill Bryson puts it in his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything:

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.”

Life is an undeserved miracle. So for that “injustice” at least, let us be grateful. There really are blessings all around, blessings which we didn’t earn, blessings for which we should give thanks.

Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback is the Senior Rabbi of Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles, California.