Let’s be grateful for our blessings

Rabbi Julia Margolis

Bet David Shul, Morningside

We read about a dramatic and unsettling tale of family disharmony, a tragic story with Esau selling his birthright to Jacob, who turns around and steals the blessings that his blind father thought he was bestowing upon Esau on his deathbed.

We all have our personal chronicles of our own family, perhaps because I am an only child, sometimes its easier for me to see many families from a certain perspective and to see how they are caught up in their internal fights, there is often no affection, and togetherness.

They’re perhaps too busy to appreciate that every day is a privilege to spend with your loved once. In our days we are caught up in modern technology and we spend so much of our time on different networks, or group chats that we start to forget the basis of our own “chronicles”.

We can so easily get drawn into arguments and foolish disagreements over nothing really. That many times one should caution one’s self to stop, to take a step back and take a moment to appreciate what is surrounding one. We need ultimately to study how to recognise the blessings we are in each other’s lives.

We need to be grateful for each moment; unfortunately often such gratitude is too late. We should complain less in order to teach our next generation that complaints rarely bring anything good, in most cases we find ourselves on the receiving end of the opposite.

We are all very busy in our work, homes and lives. I am both a mother and a rabbi. Some days I’m more a mother and some days more a rabbi. One somehow does one’s best to make it all work, I just know in my heart that it all feels right, and when the going gets tough I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, knowing I will get there in the end.

The experience of coupling motherhood with a career is something women fought for in the last century. The opening of the doors to women in the rabbinate was very much a result of the Women’s Liberation Movement. And Judaism is no doubt all the better for it.

I’m trying to follow in the steps of my role-models, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, Regina Jonas – the first female rabbi, ordained in Germany in 1935 and murdered in Aushwitz in 1944. Another role-model is my mother, Rabbi Rubinstein serving her congregation also far away from Israel.

We must always seek truth in our world, and not be afraid to live according to those truths; not be afraid to speak up when those truths are questioned; knowing that we have received a gift from our ancestors, and passed this down through the generations of mothers following them.

This Shabbat Toldot, let’s think about our blessings, encourages us to focus on building our internal gratitude, and to thank G-d out loud for all these blessings. Perhaps if Jacob and Esau, Isaac and Rebecca had done the same, then the entire course of Jewish history would have changed for the better. But we must hold close to our faith, to the lessons we can learn from it, and even closer must we hold to and appreciate the blessings our spiritual parent continues to bestow upon us – generation after generation – even if we are only aware of a few of the many, let us be truly grateful for them.