Sophia Stepansky, National Ambassador of Education, NJ NCSY
Gratitude is the Attitude
Everyone knows the classic underdog story: a basketball team that is unskilled and inadequate magically pulls themselves together to defeat the best team in the state. Whenever you hear a story of an underdog being victorious, you automatically get that heart-warming feeling that anything is possible because if that underdog was able to overcome feats, so can you. This classic underdog story is what happened to the Jews thousands of years ago. The Jews were enslaved for over 200 years to the world power, Egypt. Yet the Jews were able to leave Egypt unscathed, while the Egyptians got their fair share of punishments.
After the Jews left Egypt, they traveled but they weren’t free yet because the Egyptians began chasing after them. So the Jews hurriedly crossed the Sea of Reeds but when they looked back after the crossed to the other side, they saw that their old captor had drowned and they were finally free.
What was their immediate reaction? Instantaneously they turned to G-d and thanked Him for everything He had done. They sang and danced, sort of like a pre-Shabbos ruach, because of their gratitude to G-d. They didn’t even hesitate to thank the One who made this happen, they didn’t take a second to say “Hey man can you believe we got ourselves out of this mess?” They didn’t bother to congratulate themselves because they were so aware that they didn’t get released from their enemies’ hands due to their actions, rather they aware it was G-d who pulled all of the strings.
In the classic underdog story, everyone thinks about the hard work that the team put in, but usually everyone glanced over G-d’s role in the whole event. The team feels so proud of their accomplishments, as they should, but do they ever take a step back and say “if G-d didn’t help us be successful we wouldn’t have gotten far”? Usually in the excitement of winning, G-d is forgotten, but after the Jews were finally free they did not wait one second to recognize how this was really able to happen, G-d.