Five years ago a group of Jewish educators in Colorado launched an initiative called Clean Speech. In a world where social media was increasingly becoming a source of hateful and divisive language, they wanted to encourage people to take greater care over how they spoke to each other.
Thousands of people signed up to a 30-day journey to better their speech through daily videos and education.
Sensitivity of speech is something whose importance we recognise but spend far too little time focusing on and trying to improve, when there is so much Jewish wisdom available in this area. At the end of every Amidah, we ask God to “guard my tongue”.
Since then, the idea caught on elsewhere: New York, Cincinnati, Toronto. We at Seed also liked it so much that three years ago we launched a campaign here, partnered by Gift. We added parent-child learning across dozens of schools, community magazines and partnered with shuls; thousands got involved learning about the power of positive speech and avoiding negative speech.
Last year alone, more than one thousand people signed up to receiving our daily video and 70 schools and communities took part; Ernst & Young hosted a Clean Speech conference for sixth-formers to learn about speech in the workplace.
This year our focus for the Clean Speech Project UK is on expressing gratitude. Whereas past years focused on avoiding lashon hara, harmful talk, this year we decided to go for the underpinnings – to focus on cultivating a sensitivity that would act as the foundation of positive speech in general.
We’ve even spoken to TFL about gratitude boards at some bus stops and train stations.
This year’s new Clean Speech Project ten-day book has a section for daily study, challenges, accompanying videos and guest articles, as well as a family section with stories to read to children.
Expressing gratitude is a crucial part of our lives. An article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that on days when one partner reported feeling more appreciated, he or she tended to appreciate their partner more.
Various studies call gratitude a “natural antidepressant”, a catalyst for core positive hormones that manage our emotions and relieve anxiety.
AJ Jacobs, in his fantastic book Thanks a Thousand, records how he traced the production of his cup of coffee, determined to thank each person involved in every stage of the process: from harvesting the coffee beans, transporting the coffee, producing the cups, serving the coffee, cleaning the shop.
He even called the woman who does pest control for the warehouse where his coffee was stored. “I said to her, ‘I know this is weird, but I want to thank you for keeping the insects out of my coffee,’” he wrote. “And she said, ‘Yes, that is weird but I really appreciate it.’”
The very fact that something is necessary for so many aspects of our life often indicates that it is part of our religious nature; anything that God deems important for our functioning must have an area of Godliness, especially something as refined as gratitude.
Judaism places a great emphasis on gratitude, which has a different level to its secular counterpart.
In the common perception of gratitude, “thanks” is a word of exchange when someone does something for you. At best, it is a relationship builder. In Jewish thought, gratitude is a building block towards developing an entire perspective on life. Gratitude is not a response; it is a cast of mind.
The first word we utter in the morning is modeh – “I am grateful”. In the words of Rabbi Sacks, “We are genetically predisposed to pay more attention to the bad than the good… it takes focused attention to become aware of how much we have to be grateful for. That, in different ways is the logic of prayer, of making blessings, of Shabbat and other elements of Jewish life.”
Most major sins in the Torah are laced with a lack of gratitude: from Adam’s blaming his wife for his sin to the Jews complaining in the wilderness, from Midian setting out to curse the descendants of Abraham who had saved their ancestor, to the spies complaining about the land of Canaan.
Gratitude is foundational – the Ohr Hachaim commentary writes that gratitude is the most important trait a person can acquire. The Sefer Hachinuch comments that gratitude is enshrined in the fifth of the Ten Commandments to “honour your parents” because it is central to all our relationships. And Chovot Halevavot points out that it is gratitude to God that necessitates us choosing to perform His mitzvot.
Gratitude is a brain-training exercise to focus on the good, but not to stop there. Its ultimate goal is twofold – to make a person realise that we need others, we are not self-dependent and self-enclosed. And in doing so, it leads us to God: recognising His kindness and our dependence on Him.
In our Clean Speech Project UK book for this year, we outline seven keys to developing “the seven habits of highly grateful people”:
* See the need – realise that we need others
* See good – notice that others are providing good to us
* Say good – express those sentiments in words
* Use the right words – be specific and heartfelt, and communicate it directly (face-to-face better than text!)
* Even if it’s a person’s job, or the person does something regularly, that doesn’t mean they deserve any less of a thank you
* Use gratitude to provide the bedrock to relationships
* Make your gratitude meaningful
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Rabbi Fine is education director of Seed. The Ten Days of Gratitude campaign starts on February 2. For more information, see cleanspeech.co.uk
