Overwhelmed with Gratitude

Nothing like a health crisis to remind you of the preciousness of life

Dear Friends,

I have spent the past couple of weeks preoccupied with my health. A puffy, swollen calf turned out to be evidence of a blood clot in my leg. Ultrasounds, CT scans, a stay in the hospital, IV drips, blood thinners - all of this was new to me, who had somehow blissfully avoided any major health crises for my first seventy years. The scans showed small embolisms throughout my lungs. My only symptom the past months had been feeling unusually short of breath during my workouts.

Two weeks later, the medication is working wonders. The clots are dissolving, the swelling is almost gone, and my familiar energy has returned. It appears that I didn’t just dodge a bullet; I dodged a hail of bullets. I am blown away by my luck. As usual, words can only begin to approximate the wonder and gratitude that I am experiencing, but I must try.

I am grateful to the researchers and scientists who have devoted themselves to understanding the workings of the human body, and to painstakingly crafting diagnostic methods and treatments that can restore people to health. Because of them, I am able to live. May they be supported, respected and honored in all of their holy work.

I am grateful to all of the health care professionals and caregivers whom I encountered these past weeks. Thanks to the expertise of my physical therapist and my doctors, the problem was accurately identified. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how ponderous and frustrating our health care system has become, driven by profit, mired in bureaucracy, and rife with inequity. Even as I got swept up into that impersonal labyrinth as I entered the hospital, almost every person I encountered was kind to me, and concerned for my well-being. Because of them, I am able to live. May they too be supported, respected and honored in all of their holy work.

In the siddur, the Jewish prayer book, is a series of prayers of gratitude one is to recite every morning. I love and embrace these prayers as they help me frame my day with thanks before I can relapse into complaining. Perhaps my favorite is the blessing in gratitude for our functioning bodies. It originates in the Talmud (Berachot 60b) and is quite ancient:

Blessed are you, Source of Life, our God, who shaped the human being with wisdom, making for us all the openings and vessels of the body. It is revealed and known before your throne of glory that if one of these passageways be open when it should be closed, or blocked up when it should be free, one could not stay alive or stand before you. Blessed are you, miraculous Source of All, the wondrous healer of all flesh.

I give thanks for my circulatory system, an estimated 60,000 miles of blood vessels bringing life to the trillions of cells that make up me.

I give thanks for my digestive system, transforming organic matter into the energy that sustains me.

I give thanks for my nervous system, a wondrous network of electric impulses that governs my behavior and somehow allows me to be aware and to act.

I give thanks for my lymph and excretory systems, allowing me to clear out the waste that my body no longer needs. For endocrine, and bone marrow, and liver, and lungs, for them all.

I give thanks for my senses, through which I experience being alive.

I am endowed with an unfathomable symphony of interactions that allow me to stay alive and stand before the mysterious Source of Being. Stunned into wordless awe by the unlikelihood of my own being, blessed to enjoy another day, I breathe my gratitude.

May you too be so blessed.

With love, and Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

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