10 Dec WHO LEFT THE FLOWERS AT OUR DOOR?

Last week, my doorbell
rang but when I
answered it, there was
nobody there. Instead, I
found a vase of flowers
outside the front door
with a note. Flowers on a
random weekday? There
wasn’t a birthday or anniversary to mark. Who
could they be from? I opened the card:
To our beloved shadchanim – can’t believe it’s
been 26 years! With endless appreciation, we
are forever grateful, Love, Ezra and Rena.
Twenty-six years ago, Yocheved and I set
up mutual friends and now, for no particular
reason, out of the blue, they sent flowers to
say thank you. This wasn’t the first time they
expressed their gratitude, it isn’t that they
remembered a debt they had never repaid.
They had thanked us numerous times before.
Yet, because their gratitude had not diminished,
they felt compelled to still say thank you again.
Most people don’t realize how much a simple
gesture of thanks can mean to the recipient of
it. In 2018, Psychological Science published
a study of 300 participants who were asked
to write a letter of gratitude to someone who
positively impacted them from long ago.
Participants wrote to their parents, friends,

coaches, or teachers. The writers were asked to
predict the degree of surprise, happiness, and
awkwardness the recipients would feel after
receiving their gratitude. The study found that
those writers expressing gratitude consistently
underestimated how much people appreciate
being appreciated. The recipients of the letters
reported feeling less awkward and in fact
much more appreciative than the letter writers
predicted. Being appreciated and receiving
gratitude proved to make someone’s day
much more than those expressing thankfulness
thought it would.
In last week’s Parsha, when Leah names
her fourth son Yehudah, the Torah tells us
she did so because םעפה הדוא תא ׳ה, it was
an expression of gratitude to Hashem. The
Gemara (Berachos 7b) goes so far as to say
that, in fact, Leah was the first person in history
to say thank you to Hashem. This doesn’t seem
to make sense. Adam HaRishon said, “Tov
l’hodos laShem.” Noach thanked Hashem,
Malkitzedek expressed gratitude to the
Almighty. Eliezer communicated appreciation
for Divine assistance, and the pre-Leah list
could go on. How could the Gemara make
such a bold assertion when it seems from the
Torah not to be true?
Rav Yeruchem Levovitz explains: most people
say thank you in order to pay off a debt of

gratitude. Someone does something nice for
us and, as part of an unofficial quid pro quo, we
say “thank you” to them in an effort to settle up
the score. Each of the earlier people who said
thank you did it once, one time, to pay a debt.
Leah was the first to understand that gratitude
doesn’t conclude, it doesn’t end. If we see
gratitude as more than a debt, we never stop
expressing it.
Leah named her son Yehudah, literally meaning
thank you. Every time she called out his name
– “Yehudah come for supper, Yehudah did
you do your homework, Yehudah get ready
for bed,” every time she called his name, she
reawakened her sense of appreciation and
fulfilled her commitment to never take him
for granted. Unlike the others who said thank
you and paid off their debt of gratitude, Leah
formulated a thanks that was felt and expressed
each and every day on a consistent basis.
Rav Yeruchem explains that Leah expressed
this commitment when she gave Yehudah his
name. We normally read םעפה הדוא תא ׳ה as an
explanation for why the new son was called
Yehudah. Rav Yeruchem suggests that we
read Leah’s expression with a question mark –
םעפה הדוא תא ׳ה ? Should I only thank Hashem
this one time and then move on? No way, I will
continue to thank Him over and over again.
A shadchanus gift represents paying off a debt

of gratitude once and done. Flowers twenty-
six years later for no reason demonstrate

that the appreciation never ended, or as they
wrote, feeling forever grateful.
The Torah endorses, encourages, and urges
us to be grateful. We are call Yehudim, says
the Chiddushei HaRim, because we are a
people of gratitude. We don’t just pay a debt
of gratitude, like Leah, we say thank you
over and over, we feel endless thankfulness
and boundless gratitude for the good things
in our lives.
Charles Plumb, a U.S. Naval Academy
graduate, was a jet fighter pilot in Vietnam.
After 75 combat missions, his plane was
destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb
ejected and parachuted into enemy hands.
He was captured and spent six years in a
Communist prison. He survived that ordeal
and one day, when Plumb and his wife were
sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table
came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew
jet fighters in Vietnam and you were shot
down!”
Plumb did not recognize this man and was
perplexed. “How in the world did you
know that?” asked Plumb. “I packed your
parachute,” the man replied, “I guess it
worked!”
That night, Plumb couldn’t sleep. He kept
wondering what this man might have looked

like in a sailor uniform. He wondered how
many times he might have passed him on the
ship without acknowledging him. How many
times he never said hello, good morning,
or how are you. Plumb was a fighter pilot,
respected and revered, while this man was
just an ordinary sailor. Now it grated on his
conscious.
Plumb thought of the many lonely hours the
sailor had spent on a long wooden table in
the bowels of the ship carefully weaving the
fabric together, making sure the parachute
was just right and going to great lengths to
make it as precise as can be, knowing that
somebody’s life depended on it. Only now did
Plumb have a full appreciation for what this
man did. After that encounter, Plumb began
travelling around the world as a motivational
speaker asking people to recognize who is
“packing their parachute.”
Have we thanked those who contributed
to the lives we are blessed to live? Imagine
if our kindergarten teacher got a note from
us thanking her for nurturing us with love.
Imagine if our high school principal, our
childhood pediatrician, our housekeeper who
cleaned our childhood room, out of the blue
got a gesture of gratitude showing that we
cared enough to track them down and say
thank you after all of these years. Did we
express enough appreciation to the person
who set us up with our spouse, gave us our
first job, safely delivered our children?
Research shows that expressing gratitude has
mental and physical health benefits, including
lower rates of depression and better sleep,
improved relationships, and success at work.
Be thankful. Stay thankful. And keep
demonstrating gratitude, for your own benefit
and for the benefit of someone who will be
thrilled to know you still appreciate their role
in your life.