As we pause to celebrate Thanksgiving and spend some time appreciating the blessings that fill our lives, I want to share with you the wisdom of my favorite Jewish philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel:
We are all infatuated with the splendor of space and the grandeur of things that fill the space we live in. “Thing” is a category that lies heavy on our minds, tyrannizing all our thoughts. In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is “thinghood”, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. Things of space are not fireproof. Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is truly eternal in time. What we plead against is man’s enslavement to things. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things. (Based upon the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel as expressed in The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man)
This Thanksgiving, take the time to appreciate the moment.
