What are YOU grateful for?
by: Dave Belden on November 23rd, 2009 | 18 Comments »
Please use the comments to let us know!
Razi (865 - 925 CE)
If I stop to think what I have to be grateful for the list gets way long. Here are a few of the things that could very well be filling my heart as I hold hands with my family around the Thanksgiving table on Thursday, though I know I won’t say even this starter list because the meal will get cold if I do. Just saying “thanks for our health” will cover a lot of this, but how inadequately! I am grateful for:
- still having a job in this recession. With good health benefits. Thanks to all of you are still buying magazines and donating to Tikkun!
- “Western” or allopathic medicine. Just for starters in my small family I (cancer), my wife and son (caesarian birth), and my sister (meningitis) would all be dead long since without it. By the way “Western” doesn’t cover it when we recall great scientific physicians like the “founder of pediatrics,” the Persian, Razi, who learned from the Indians as well as Persians and Greeks.
- Socialized medicine. The way my mother, in England, was looked after in her Alzheimers years by nurses who came in morning and night so my father could keep her at home as he wished was something to be seen. It was all free and well managed on the National Health Service (NHS).
- I am also grateful that despite his low income my father was able to hire a wonderful woman to come in during the daytime to help, and who stayed after my mother died and my father entered his own dementia.
- Alternative medicine. It was an old naturopath (who said he had played football in Russia with Lenin) who cured me of a year long descent into gastric illness that had the doctors flummoxed, in my 20s. The Alexander Technique taught me how to get rid of the headaches that incapacitated me from age 17.
- All the people who made these kinds of healing possible. How can one fathom it? I think of the two elderly women doctors my mother took us to as children: both single, utterly dedicated, from a time when they had to choose between marriage and profession. I think of my very political and devout Christian socialist grandparents and all their Labour Party comrades in the 1920s – 40s who built the movement despite many disappointments that created the British National Health Service in 1948. I think of the scientists who created penicillin, for example, and the technical and business people who worked out how to provide it at low cost and high quality so that the poorest person in a rich country will have their life saved by it if they can get to emergency services, many of which are run by volunteers… I think of the doctor I knew in an Ethiopian hospital telling me of the woman who was brought in after a three day ride on a donkey when her baby got stuck coming out. The list of those whose struggle, work, dedication, and integrity has healed the sick is endless and humbling.
- Plumbers. And the water engineers, city planners, and sewage workers, whose work has saved more lives than all the medical personnel put together. Let’s hear it for the plumbers.
So what sphere of life shall I go to now: Food? Human rights? Education? The institutions of democracy? Prison reform? Theater? More engineering? Over to you.
I’m thankful for and grateful to the incredible people who work at my father’s board and care, waking him up each morning, washing and dressing him, feeding him, taking him for walks, hanging out with him, managing his medications, all that and more with grace and love and kindness…….. And I’m sorry that for many, in order to work here in the United States legally, they have to be separated from those whom they love for years.
Alhamdulillah, laus Deo, Baruch HaShem– I am grateful for all of the excellent teachers whom Providence has sent into my life. Not only “official” teachers at schools, but also parents, friends, fellow bus riders, taxi cab drivers, and others.
I am also grateful for all of the beauty in the world–natural, artistic, moral, and intellectual. The Pacific Ocean and the Redwoods; the Great Mosque of Isfahan and the sonnets of Shakespeare; the inspiring deeds Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa of Calcutta; and the brilliant visions of thinkers such as Avicenna, Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas.
I am also grateful for Divine Providence placing me in America. I am grateful for my ancestors emigrating to this country and braving great obstacles, both natural and social.
I am grateful to the people of Lithuania and South Korea for providing excellent hospitality when I worked in their countries as an English teacher. I am especially grateful for Lithuania saving my life from appendicitis through its health care system. I paid my dues by working but had no hospital bill, and no paperwork.
Having been a recipient of so many blessings, I hope I can be a giver as well as a taker, and be an occasion of blessings for others.
I am so very grateful for all the wonderfull thoughtful work done by you, Dave, Rabbi Lerner and others at Tikkun. Thank you.
I am grateful just for being alive and breathing, with a full stomach, warm clothes and shelter with the luxury of a bath and heating and a car and beloved friends whom I love and who love me and a world with so much good in it which I believe will, eventually, settle into peaceful solutions and out of the darkness of violence and greed.
Thank you for being Tikkun, with love, Tony
Dear Tony ~
How lovely and heartfelt.
I’m one of those friends who loves you
and is very grateful to have you in my life.
xxx
C
Dave, your work amazes and inspires me. I’m thankful for you and how your words elevate my thinking and my emotions. I make copies of some articles, such as this one, and share them with friends and colleagues.
What am I grateful for? Let me try and answer you that question! I am grateful for the fact that God let me live long enough to see that the USA is not a good, holy, and saintly nation. We are an evil, vile, and wicked nation. We start wars to see if our weaponry research can be applied in real wars and not in a laboratory controlled testing. How can I be grateful for our ongoing wars that are killing God’s children? Our Nazi Americns are grateful of such killings. Our Nazi Americans are grateful that lack of health care is killing off human beings. Our banks and financial institutions are screwing us royally. Deregulations and lack of pay raises are enslaving Americans. The middle class is being systematically depleted. Pensions and investments have been raped from us by the banksters and the crooks on Wall Street. Main Street experiences a BOHICA Day everyday. BEND OVER HERE IT COMES AGAIN!!!
We, as Nazi Americans, must remove ourselves from our constant state of denial that we are not so evil. Our evil is deep and widespread.
Well, Gerald, there was a pregnant woman in church on Sunday who had been very ill and almost lost the baby, who now wakes her every night at 3 am because that’s when the baby kicks most, and she said she’s exhausted and could either focus on the fact that she’s being woken at 3 every morning, or she could focus on the fact that she has a baby who wakes her, and she looked so beautifully happy to say it was the latter that she was focused on. So maybe even in Nazi America you might be happy to be alive, and able to breathe, and eat? I’m just wondering if you could go there. Can we agree there are some beautiful things in America, your good self included? I’m not trying to rain on your parade of misery — well, I am actually.
Dave, well said!
A Country Named Job
I am writing this letter for people who may have read the Bible. In the Bible there is in the Old Testament, the Book of Job. Job lived about 500 or 600 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. It was also around the time that God was not pleased with His people. God has given everything to the people and they were not listening to Him. They were not willing to help one another and their lives were very sinful. God was going to destroy the earth.
For some reason God was going to give the world another chance. He was going to test the world with one person and that person was Job. Job was a man of prayer and he would also praise God. God blessed Job with wealth, land, property, and family. God slowly started to take away what He had given to Job. Job still prayed and praised God. A neighbor came by one day and he talked to Job. He said to Job that God was punishing Job and Job still prayed and praised God. How could Job continue to love God? Job said to his neighbor that it was God’s will and God knows best.
God was so moved by Job’s words and loyalty that He spared the earth from destruction. Job’s behavior silenced God. God would speak only one more time. God spoke at Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River. “This is my son in whom I am well pleased.”
From Jesus’ death to the present we keep hearing that God works in mysterious ways. With God there are no surprises. No, God does not work in mysterious ways. He has given us His son and the words of Jesus. Our problem is that we refuse to listen to God’s son and His words. God has been testing the world through the United States of America. God has not chosen a person; He has chosen a country. The United States of America is now the Job of the New Testament.
Job, the country, has failed every test. Job, the country, holds steadfastly to hatred and lies. She has also embraced murders and war crimes. She has also turned her back on God and God’s son, Jesus. Christianity is no longer Job’s religion. Bushianity has taken over as Job’s religion. Job and the country’s beauty believe that they are better than God. Like Lucifer, the most beautiful of God’s angels, Job believes that God is not needed and the axis of evil is better than God. Job’s axis of evil clings to money, nuclear weapons, and Bush’s words.
I am grateful for Tikkun, for providing a forum to share ideas and compassion. I am grateful for the fact that I am alive, that I have family and friends. Like Dave, I am grateful for all of the healing I have received in my lifetime.
Here are some other thoughts that make me grateful as a Nazi American. Obama on December 1, 2009 will announce the addition of 35,000 to 45,000 soldiers to Afghanistan and $40 to 50 billion more each year for the rest of our lives. Obama is sending additional troops so we can control the oil and natural gas resources in Central Asia. Obama has ordered more killing of God’s children.
Yes, as Nazi Americans we must be not only grateful but glorified in our killing of God’s children. This is the Nazi American way as to how Nazi America resolves differences. Here are the nine glorious words in Nazi America – war, war, war, kill, kill, kill, maim, maim, maim.
Alhumdullilah, Baruch HaShem, and Namaste,
May G-d be praised for all S/He has given us, including the holy concept of Tikkun!
I am grateful for so much this year.
Grateful to live in a nation where democracy has been re-ignited across the politial spectrum and combats the evils of plutocracy and oligarchy.
Grateful President Obama and Michelle and kids grace our World and work for us as a nation to the best of their ability, which is considerable, in the White House.
Grateful for all the patriots in this nation who believe that developing our nation into a just and honorable nation is important e nough to fight for and make peace for, and though differing, remember that “there is a time for every season under G-d.”
Grateful Rabbi Lerner is feeling much better and still going strong.
Grateful that my health has improved and i am not yet dead, and have the gift of living in west virginia on a small farm in country so beautiful, among decent and good neighbors, and have my small horse breeding business up and running again, after a a few years of great hardship and far more losses than gains.Grateful my first horse whom i raised from a baby and missed more than words can express, is returned to me once again.Grateful for my lovely mares. Grateful for all my rescued dogs and my three cats that made it thorugh all the hardships healthy and happy..always grateful the Red Sox have won the world series and continue as is their heritage, to be terrific contenders.Grateful for rock music and blue grass, grateful for Bruce Springsteen and the E street Band and all the marvelous soulful bands and singers in the world.
Grateful for new friends and old. Grateful for family that i have, and all my brothers and sisters in islam and across the many payths of religions and human kindness.Grateful beyond words for the peace and the presence of Almighty Merciful G-d in my life, and the faith path of Islam given to me so long ago, that changed my life enduringly for the better.
THANK YOU FOR ASKING
I’m grateful for the love of my family and the support of my friends. I’m grateful that my parents taught me to value education and life long learning. I’m grateful that I have moved from being unemployed (since last August 2009) to being underemployed with a part time job. I’m grateful to be living in New York, where I still have other options to explore on my path to becoming fully employed again.
I’m grateful for my leg being back to 75%. I can go back to work December 5th. I’m grateful too for my offspring who teach me continually that all is struggle and that living is within the struggle itself.
I am grateful I’m not Gerald. Great teachers teach by example. Thanks for the lesson, Gerald. Now I realize how annoying I can be to my wife. I will try to think about you the next time I want to be overly critical.
I am grateful for all the family farmers and cooperatives that bring us fresh organic fruits and vegetables. The vibrancy of life can be felt, smelled, seen and tasted at a farmers’ market. Healthy food sustenance builds community and community brings true joy. What could be closer to the Garden of Eden?
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