New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)

Memorial Day is often confused with Veterans Day, but the two are not the same. Veterans Day honors all who have served. Memorial Day remembers only those who died. It is a day for the fallen, the men who put on the uniform of the United States and never took it off again, the ones who lie in cemeteries in France and Belgium and across the sea, or under white stone rows here at home.

For the Torah community, it is important. The Jewish people were the central target of the Nazi machine. Six million were murdered in Europe. The Allied soldiers who broke that machine were, in a real sense, fighting for Jewish survival, whether they understood it that way or not.

When American troops reached the gates of camps like Buchenwald and Dachau, they were ending the single greatest assault on Jewish life since the Churban.

There is a widespread assumption that gratitude belongs to the category of fine character traits — admirable, refining, the mark of a decent person, but ultimately –

optional.

This assumption is mistaken. In Torah thought, hakaras hatov — the recognition of a good that has been done for us — is a binding obligation, rooted in the psukim of the Torah and elaborated by the Rishonim and Acharonim. Its absence is counted among the gravest of moral failures.

The Teaching of Rav Yerucham Levovitz

In his seminal work Da’as Chochma u’Mussar (Volume III, #12), Rav Yerucham Levovitz zt”l addresses the profound nature of gratitude as a cornerstone of the development of Jewish character. He explains that hakaras hatov is something a person owes, not something he bestows.

The View of the Maharal

This is also the position of the Maharal in his Gur Aryeh on Shemos 14:7, where he cites the pasuk in Shmuel I 15:6. There, Shaul HaMelech warns the Keini to withdraw from among Amalek before the battle, “lest I destroy you with them — for you did kindness with all the Children of Israel when they went up out of Egypt.” The kindness in question had been performed centuries earlier, by an ancestor, to a nation rather than to any living individual. And yet that kindness still generated an obligation that shaped national policy generations later.

Where the Obligation Comes From

The obligation is not derived from just a single pasuk – it emerges from several, each illuminating a different facet of the duty:

“You shall not abhor a Mitzri, for you were a stranger in his land” (Devarim 23:8). The Torah commands us not to despise the Egyptians — the very nation that enslaved and oppressed us — on account of the shelter they once provided when we dwelled in their land. If gratitude is owed even to a people who later turned to cruelty, on account of an earlier benefit, the obligation must be real and binding indeed.

“And you shall walk in His ways” (Devarim 28:9). From here Chazal teach that a person must conduct himself in accordance with the attributes of the Holy One, Blessed is He. The Al-Mighty recognizes the good — and so must we. Gratitude is thus folded into the broader mitzvah of imitating the Divine character.

“And you shall eat and be satisfied and bless Hashem your G-d” (Devarim 8:10). From the word “and you shall bless” the Sages derive that one is moved to bless and to recognize the good of the host at whose table he has eaten — and from this, that there is an obligation to recognize the good toward anyone who does good for us.

“One who repays evil in place of good — evil shall not depart from his house” (Mishlei 17:13). It is forbidden to be ungrateful for a benefit received, and the pasuk attaches a lasting consequence to the failure.

“And the borrower is a servant to the lender” (Mishlei 22:7). The borrower is reckoned as significant as a servant to the one who lent to him — precisely because he is bound to him by the obligation of recognizing the good. From here the Acharonim learned that anyone who receives a benefit from his fellow becomes obligated to him in hakaras hatov.

Beyond the psukim, the Rishonim add that the intellect itself — unaided by revelation — obligates a person to recognize a good done to him. It is one of those truths that reason apprehends on its own. The Torah’s commandments here do not impose a foreign demand so much as ratify what a sound mind already knows.

A Consistent Voice Across the Sources

Numerous Midrashim point to this same principle, and the consistency is striking. The recognition of the good is treated throughout rabbinic literature as the most important of the good attributes, while ingratitude is described as the most repugnant of the bad ones. Chazal go further still: to the degree that a person is careless about recognizing the good toward a fellow who has helped him, his very faith — his conviction that everything is in the hands of Heaven — is undermined. The person who cannot acknowledge the human being in front of him who fed him or sheltered him will hardly be capable of acknowledging the Source of all good behind that human being.

From Principle to Practice: A Ruling of Rav Elyashiv zt”l

That the obligation is genuinely operative — capable of generating concrete halachic rulings about real-world conduct — was demonstrated in a celebrated decision of Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv zt”l. Uri Lupolianski, then the mayor of Jerusalem, came before Rav Elyashiv with a question: should he express gratitude to President George W. Bush for the American military support that had helped protect Jerusalem? The posek ruled decisively. Not only was such an expression of gratitude permitted — it was halachically obligatory.

How Deep the Failure Runs: The Brisker Rav

If the obligation is this serious, the failure to meet it must be correspondingly grave — and the Brisker Rav located precisely how grave. Commenting on the pasuk in Parshas Ha’azinu, “Is it to Hashem that you repay this, O people that is vile and unwise (am naval v’lo chacham)?” (Devarim 32:6), he asked what the word naval connotes. He noted that when an animal dies without proper shechitah it is called a neveilah — a carcass. Such a creature has ceased to be a living animal at all.

So too, the Brisker Rav taught, a person who is not a makir tov is an am naval — because he has ceased to be a human being. There exists a long catalogue of bad character traits: arrogance, jealousy, selfishness, a quick temper. A person afflicted with any or all of them is flawed, but he remains a human being — a damaged one, but a human being still. The ingrate alone forfeits the title. Gratitude is not one virtue among many; it is constitutive of being human. To lack it is not to be a poor specimen of a person but to have stepped outside the category.

Why the Haggadah Chose the Parsha of Gratitude

This understanding illuminates a puzzle in the Haggadah. To narrate the Exodus, the Baal Haggadah might have drawn on any of the four parshiyos of Sefer Shemos — Shemos, Va’era, Bo, and Beshalach — that describe the bondage and the redemption in rich detail. Instead, he reached for a comparatively obscure passage: the declaration of the one who brings the first fruits, Mikra Bikkurim, in Parshas Ki Savo. Why bypass the source and choose the lesser-known text?

Rav Elya Baruch Finkel answers that the four parshiyos of Shemos are history — they record what happened. Mikra Bikkurim is not history; it is thanksgiving. It is an expression of hakaras hatov. The Baal Haggadah was fully aware of the narrative parshiyos — indeed, he quotes individual psukim from them throughout Maggid, introduced by the words k’mo she’ne’emar. But the governing theme of Maggid is not history; it is gratitude. When we sit at the Seder, we are saying thank you — and that is exactly what the parsha of Mikra Bikkurim expresses.

Rav Elya Baruch draws from this a further insight. On the words “V’amarta eilav…” (Devarim 26:3), Rashi comments with three words: she’eincha kafui tova — “that you not be an ingrate.” Why does Rashi cast the purpose negatively — that you recite this so as not to be ungrateful — rather than positively, that you recite it because you are a makir tova?

The answer, Rav Elya Baruch suggests, is sobering. A person can never be adequately makir tova to the Ribono shel Olam. There is simply too much to thank Him for — every day, every minute, every breath. Anyone who imagines that by reciting these psukim he has discharged his debt of gratitude has badly misjudged the matter. He has not reached the level of a makir tova, for that level lies beyond human reach. What the recitation accomplishes — and this is no small thing — is to keep him from being a kafui tova, an ingrate. Rashi tells it exactly as it is.

This is the very idea voiced each Shabbos in Nishmas: were our mouths as full of song as the sea and our tongues as full of joyous praise as its waves, we still could not adequately thank Hashem for even one of the countless favors He has done for us. We could speak from now until eternity and never express our full hakaras hatov.

The Debts We Can Never Fully Repay

The same truth, though on an infinitely lower plane, applies to certain people in our lives. A person can never adequately thank his parents. It is simply not possible.

There are others, too, who cross our paths and alter the trajectory of our lives in ways we can never fully repay. The lesson is not that we should despair of the attempt. It is that we must at least try — as much as we are able — to express gratitude, so as to escape the terrible label of kafui tova.

The Measure of Greatness

If gratitude is constitutive of being human, it follows that the greater the person, the greater his hakaras hatov. The annals of Gedolei Yisrael, across every segment of the Torah world, are filled with examples of men who went to astonishing lengths to recognize a good. Their greatness and their gratitude were not two separate things; they were the same thing seen from two angles.

A story told of Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky. A bochur in Torah Vodaas would sleep through minyan, and nothing the dormitory counselors tried could rouse him. At their wits’ end, they came to Rav Yaakov and asked to expel the boy from the dormitory. Rav Yaakov agreed that if the boy was breeding laxity throughout the dorm, he could not remain — but he insisted on speaking with him first. The frightened bochur came to the Rosh Yeshiva’s office, certain he was about to be thrown out. Rav Yaakov asked him simply, “So where will you sleep now?” The boy answered that he did not know. “In that case,” said Rav Yaakov, “I want you to stay with me.” The astonished boy protested that the Rosh Yeshiva had just expelled him from the dorm. Rav Yaakov replied: “Your grandfather supported the Kovno Kollel where I learned when I was in Lita. I owe your family hakaras hatov — and so you may sleep at my house.”

Yet the most moving illustration concerns Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach zt”l. On a rainy winter day, Rav Shach asked his grandson to hire a cab to take him to a funeral in Haifa. The grandson assumed they were traveling to honor some great man his grandfather had known. They arrived to find the levaya of an elderly woman, attended by barely a minyan, and the grandson could not fathom why his grandfather had come. Rav Shach followed the procession to the cemetery in the pouring rain, waited until the burial was complete, recited Kaddish, and then stood over the grave in the downpour. When at last they returned to the car, he said nothing, until the grandson asked who the woman had been.

Rav Shach explained. In Europe, yeshivos had no dormitories; the boys learned in a shul and slept on its benches, with the older bochurim holding seniority over the few sleeping spots. As the youngest, Rav Shach slept on the floor through the brutal Lithuanian winters. At one point he could bear the cold no longer. Just then a letter arrived from a childless uncle who owned a business, inviting the young Shach to come learn the trade and one day inherit it. He resolved to accept and leave the yeshiva. That very night, a woman whose husband — a blanket manufacturer — had just died, and who had risen from shiva, came into the shul and asked whether anyone needed blankets. Rav Shach said that he did. With blankets beneath him and blankets above him, his nights on the floor became bearable. He decided to stay — and he became Rav Shach.

“Without this woman,” he told his grandson, “there would be no Rav Shach, no Avi Ezri, no Ponevezh Rosh Yeshiva, no Gadol Hador — nothing.” He had tracked her for decades, and when he heard she had died, he felt he had to attend her funeral. As for why he had stood over the grave in the rain after the burial was over, the grandson asked. “It is because I wanted to remember what it felt like to be cold,” Rav Shach answered. “I wanted to fully appreciate what she did for me so many years ago. That is why I stayed out there.”

The thread that runs through all of this is a single, demanding idea. Gratitude is not an ornament upon a good character; it is the foundation of one. The Torah commands it, the Rishonim and Acharonim treat it as a binding obligation, the Midrashim affirm it, and a posek of Rav Elyashiv’s authority renders concrete rulings upon it. The Brisker Rav teaches that its absence forfeits one’s very humanity, and the lives of the Gedolim show that its presence is the very measure of greatness. A person who is not a makir tova is not, in the deepest sense, a mensch.

Returning to the White Stone Rows

And so we return to where we began. On Memorial Day, a Torah Jew stands before the white stone rows and the cemeteries across the sea, and the obligation that fills this article presses upon him with full force. The soldiers who lie there did a kindness — the greatest of kindnesses — to the Jewish people, whether or not a single one of them ever knew it. They broke the machine that had been built to consume us. They opened the gates of Buchenwald and Dachau. Many of them never came home.

The kindness of the Keini, performed centuries before Shaul HaMelech, still bound a nation generations later. The kindness of an Egyptian who once gave shelter still forbids us to despise his descendants. If hakaras hatov reaches that far across time, then surely it reaches the soldier who died eighty years ago so that there might still be a Jewish people to remember him. We did not know his name. We cannot repay him. But that was never the standard. The standard, as Rashi teaches, is only that we not be kafui tova — that we not be ingrates.

We cannot adequately thank these men any more than Rav Shach could adequately thank the woman with the blankets. But like Rav Shach, we can remember what it felt like to be cold. On Memorial Day, that is what the Torah asks of us — not to discharge a debt that can never be discharged, but to refuse, at the very least, to forget.

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