Your Faith is Very Great

God believes in us more than we believe in Him... and we have a daily way of reminding ourselves of that reality.

It is appropriate for a person to say, as soon as he gets up, “I give thanks before You, living and existing King, that You compassionately returned my soul within me; Your faith is very great.”

Mishnah Berurah 1:10

The short prayer Modeh Ani, “I give thanks before You,” is commonly recited by Jews upon awakening. Along with the Shema, it is one of the first prayers children learn, and it is part of the liturgical heritage of religious Jews, accompanying them throughout their lives.

It is, therefore, both understandable and ironic that most people recite Modeh Ani automatically, giving little thought to the messages that it contains. When people say the same prayer every morning that they have been murmuring since they were children, and they say it as soon as they’re ready to get out of bed, they likely give it less thought than it deserves; yet the fact that this is the first thing they say upon arising indicates that it must include substantial ideas.

I’m thinking about Modeh Ani today after reading an article which indicated that it deserves to be taken more seriously - and that article was, perhaps surprisingly, written to discuss the National Football League in general, and the Super Bowl in particular.

Gregg Easterbrook writes Tuesday Morning Quarterback as part of his exceptional All Predictions Wrong column. This week, after the American football season concluded with the Super Bowl, Gregg reminded his readers of some of the messages people can learn through participating in team sports, including this gem: “Injured athletes may be described as ‘day-to-day.’ Every morning remind yourself that you and everyone you love are always day-to-day.” And that’s exactly what we do when we recite Modeh Ani.

In this short article, I will identify four ideas that emerge from the four clauses of Modeh Ani. These concepts are quite simple, perhaps even obvious; I am not innovating a profound new understanding of Modeh Ani, but instead merely explaining the words that we say. Still, I hope that this is a worthwhile endeavor, for as Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto wrote at the beginning of his classic book Mesilat Yesharim, “I did not compose this work to teach people that which they don’t know, but instead to remind them of things they already know and which are obvious and well known… To the same degree that they are well known and their truth is revealed to everyone, so too is the prevalence of forgetfulness regarding them.” 

With that, here are four lessons that we should internalize every time that we recite Modeh Ani.

I give thanks before You: The opening words of Modeh Ani indicate both that human beings are dignified, and that they owe their very existence to God. The term lefanecha, “before You,” is far from obvious: who are we, dust of the earth, to speak “before the King, King of all Kings, the Holy One, Blessed is He” (Aleinu prayer)? Yet we brazenly speak to God, talking to Him in the second person, recognizing that the One Who created everything cares about us more than we care about ourselves. God is our Creator, but He is also our Friend - and that means that we have the ability as well as the right to speak to Him. 

For that reason, we open our eyes, recognize that we have been granted another day, and immediately tell God - Who is there by our side - that we appreciate the gifts of life and time that He has granted to us once again. We understand that life is precious and that we dare not take it for granted. The best way of remembering that life is not obvious - that we are all day-to-day - is by acknowledging that it is God’s daily gift to us. Everything else that happens during the day is secondary, for the moment we wake up, we immediately notice that the most important gift possible, the gift of life itself, has been granted to us once again.

It is worth noting that Modeh Ani atypically uses the first person singular, rather than the plural. Jews generally address God by talking about what He has given us as a people, and what we as a people need from him. The gift of life, however, is so individually precious, that we change our standard formulation and avoid saying that He has granted life to all of us. Instead, we emphasize the individual life that I possess, that I have been given. And if I have been given this individual life, I know that I need to use it - today and every day - to implement the will of God as best as I can.

Living and existing King: We call God by different names, and think of Him in different ways, based on how we perceive Him at any given moment. When Moses stood before the burning bush, God appeared as the One Who is always with Israel in the midst of their pain (Rashi on Shmot 3:14); as the Children of Israel crossed the Red Sea, they saw God as a warrior (Shmot 15:3); after the sin of the Golden Calf, God allowed Moses to perceive Him as the Compassionate One (Shmot 34:6-7). As we awaken each morning, we think of God as the living and existing King - that is, the One Who somehow embodies the same life that we now thank Him for imparting to us. We experience renewed life, and immediately understand that this is an unconscious form of imitatio Dei, allowing us to be like God Himself. The Torah explains that human beings were created in the image of God (Bereshit 1:26); this is both a statement of reality, as well as a normative goal. The first and most obvious expression of this reality is that we, like the living God, are alive - and because that life is metaphorically derived from the living God, we equally recognize that we must use that life to become like God not just in fact, but in deed. Life as a biological reality makes us like God in one way. Life as an expression of achieving righteousness makes us like God in an even greater way. (See Kohelet 9:5)

You compassionately returned my soul within me: We do not merely thank God for returning our soul to us, but emphasize that this is an act of compassion. This daily reminder serves as a corrective to a common religious mistake.

Many religious people fall into the trap of thinking of God as some kind of omnipotent test monitor, evaluating us constantly and watching us at every moment so that when we inevitably make mistakes, He can immediately cry out, “Gotcha!”

We certainly affirm belief in reward and punishment, and we also know that God does not ignore anything that we do, whether good or bad. (See, inter alia, Baba Kama 50a and Tomer Devorah 1.) That belief is a far cry, however, from the incorrect assumption that God is essentially out to get us… yet it remains extremely easy to fall into the trap of equating divine justice with constant divine anger directed toward each of us.

We must remember that God is on our side, that He is rooting for us, that He wants us to succeed. Yesterday, perhaps, we were not the people we should have been - but God is compassionate and gives us another chance today.

Many of us wake up and wonder how today is going to be yet another disaster. When we say Modeh Ani, we remind ourselves that the fact that we have another day is an act of compassion, not cruelty. Maybe - just maybe - today will be a successful day. Maybe we will look back at today and say, “I did everything I was supposed to do.” After all, the fact that we have this chance is an expression of divine love, not divine judgmentalism.

Your faith is very great: God compassionately gives us another day so that we can again try to be the people we were meant to be. But He does more than simply give us another chance; He believes in us. He thinks that we can do it. God has faith in His creation.

This was expressed beautifully by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory: “At some point on my religious journey I discovered that more than we have faith in God, God has faith in us. He lifts us every time we fall. He forgives us every time we fail. He believes in us more than we believe in ourselves… The greatest source of grit I know, the force that allows us to overcome every failure, every setback, every defeat, and keep going and growing, is faith in God’s faith in us.”

Faith in God is crucial, but as soon as we open our eyes each morning, we remind ourselves of its indispensable corollary, that God has faith in each one of us. Each day is not another chance to fail, but another chance for God’s faith in His creation to be vindicated. Yesterday we did not give God reason for faith, but His faith in us is “very great” - and that means that today may yet be the day where we show Him that He was right to believe in us.

What a beautiful way to begin each morning! We start by acknowledging our own value, and recognize that this value comes from being made by God, and being alive like God. Life is an endless opportunity, and we know that God compassionately tells us to forget about the past, and instead focus on what we can accomplish in the next 24 hours. And most crucially, we remind ourselves that even if we have lost faith in ourselves, God’s faith in our ability and inherent goodness is inexhaustible and will never be extinguished. We may live lives that are day-to-day; but as long as we have one more day in front of us, God is confident that we can make today a day filled with goodness, divinity, and love.

God believes in us; we should believe in us, too.