Learning to give thanks in the New Year

In the spring of 1991, I was preparing to leave New York and begin my rabbinic career in New Orleans. One of the doormen in the building I then lived in stopped me as I was going out. “I want to show you something,” he told me, and he opened up the Daily News.

He pointed to a picture of people paddling boats to ferry pregnant women to New Orleans’s Baptist hospital. New Orleans had suffered yet another hurricane, and the streets were so badly flooded that cars could not pass. I knew New Orleans sometimes had hurricanes, but still, the scene was disconcerting. Neither of us had ever seen anything quite like it. “That,” he declared, “is your new city.”

I took a close look at the picture. “I’ve got news for you,” I told him. “Those boats are paddling past the house I’m about to move into.”

Last fall, many of us watched scenes just like this one, not in New Orleans but right here in Merrick and Bellmore. As in New Orleans more than two decades earlier, streets were so badly flooded that boats floated by, though in this case they were not paddled by humans but simply borne along by the current. I saw destruction on a scale I had never witnessed before, and hope never to witness again.

And yet, in spite of all of this, I say we should give thanks. We should give thanks because things could have been worse. In 2005, who can forget the scenes from the New Orleans Superdome in the aftermath of Katrina, which resulted in numerous deaths and the largest population movement in the United States since the end of the Civil War. Our destruction was measured mostly in dollars and cents rather than human lives.

We should give thanks because people helped one another with numerous random acts of kindness. Those who had generators provided opportunities for people to charge their cell phones and computers. Those who had hot water offered others a chance to take showers. Those who had heat took into their homes those who had lost their boilers to flooding. I spent days helping individual congregants, but couldn’t have done it if one of our own members had not stepped forward to fortify me with nutritious meals.