I have been thinking a lot recently about gratitude. Gratitude, gratefulness, thankfulness; whatever you want to call it, it seems that there is not enough of it in our society. The in-your-face consumerism that surrounds us creates a constant feeling of inferiority. You have an LCD television? You need an LED. You have high definition cable service? You need 3D. It is simply an unending cycle of needless waste that leads us from one store to the next and warps our sense of reality.

The other day, a friend posted a link to a management guru’s website. Those of you who have ever looked for these sorts of websites before know that there are lots of them around, and each typically has some particular slant or hook. This particular site was no different, and their focus was on personal productivity and effectiveness with a bias towards inner satisfaction and renewal. Two things on the site immediately caught my eye.

Have you ever walked into services on a Friday night or Saturday morning and noticed the odd arrangement of seating? People seem to be spread out willy-nilly around the sanctuary with a few small clusters here and there. The front row is empty unless there is a Bar or Bat Mitzvah; there are some families, some singles, some couples in a seemingly random pattern, and a bunch of children in the back row. But if you were to take a mental picture (photography is not allowed on Shabbat, so we have to make do with our minds) and come back the following week, you would find that it is not so random and that people are generally in the same places. These are our assigned seats.