By Richard Pineda
On April 29, 2022, I suffered a massive heart attack. Four days after being stabilized I had triple bypass surgery to address the arterial issues that caused the heart attack. That first night I was admitted, I was terrified and I started two notes on my phone; one for my then 5-year-old daughter and the other for my wife.
I was writing them goodbye notes, couched in the language of love and gratitude. Laying in the hospital bed in the days after the surgery I cherished the grace of being given another chance at life; another chance to make a difference. In those moments when you confront your mortality, your overwhelming desire is to express your love to those that matter and to do things that can make others’ lives better.
A day after the surgery my good friend Peter Svarzbein brought me a plastic yellow container shaped like an ark with several coins in it. The container, known in the Jewish tradition as a pushke, allows for coins to be dropped daily to affirm gratitude and create a commitment toward philanthropy.
Peter’s coins were symbolic of his gratitude for my survival and the gift of another day of life. The notion of tzedakah, improving the world, comes from the Jewish faith tradition. Once the plastic ark is filled, its contents are to be donated to a good cause.
The ark became a way to explain mitzvahs or good deeds to my daughter, Francesca. It was the perfect vehicle to center gratitude and deliver consistent, thoughtful donations to several charities.
The intentionality required for these positive efforts was excellent food for thought, and changes giving from being reactive to much more proactive.
We started our pushke with coins for “Uncle” Peter, for my cardiac care team, for the friends that came to my side to sit or to help my wife.
Every religion has some direction for living an ethical and kind life; this tradition brought me to a conversation with Rabbi Levi Greenberg one morning about a year after my heart attack.
The rabbi had seen me present on a panel about extremism a year after the Walmart shooting. During my remarks, I told my pushke story and made the case that it was a useful tool to help temper my sadness over the shooting and find light in the darkness, just as my friend has helped me in my time of despair.
Rabbi Greenberg has long championed the ark project and was moved by the commitment to the ark by my daughter and me. In our conversation, we were of the same mind to focus on children and their power to understand gratitude and kindness, unburdened by so many filters and biases that often overshadow adults.
I recognized early in my own life that gratitude should be a hallmark of my life because I knew I could not have gotten to my station in life without the support and kindness of others. If you have known me for any amount of time, you have likely received a note from me.
Handwriting an appreciation is one of my most sincere expressions of gratitude; something else I am teaching my daughter. Our family has centered kindness and gratitude, because no matter the challenges of our contemporary world I want my daughter to be an advocate and practitioner of these qualities.
The ark, misplaced in our move to San Antonio, has been replaced by another container no less significant for my daughter, because it reminds us all to be grateful and to mark that gratitude with a commitment to philanthropy.
By dropping a coin once a day, the practice of charity is normalized and builds a commitment for my daughter. Gratitude, kindness and hope know no ideology nor canonical boundary; they lay in the heart, even if it is a damaged heart.
To learn more about the ARK project, go to chabadelpaso.com/ark or email rabbilevi@chabadelpaso.com.
Richard D. Pineda is a native El Paso and director of the Liza and Jack Lewis Center of the Americas at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.
The post Opinion: How a plastic yellow ark helped me turn a heart attack into a lesson in gratitude and giving appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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