As 2025 draws to a close, it’s traditional to make lists – lists of resolutions, and lists of predictions for the coming year. I’d like to draw from a custom our family has adopted for Shabbat.
Instead of singing “Aishet Chayil” (the biblical poem expressing gratitude to the lady of the house) after “Shalom Aleichem” on Friday nights, we conduct a gratitude circle, where everyone recalls one thing they’re grateful for from the previous week.
With that in mind, I wanted to extend the tradition to the year that just passed. It was a hard one, both personally – with serious physical challenges – and nationally, as the war in Gaza raged for most of the year, while antisemitism surged, culminating in the horrific attack on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, last week. Corrupt and populist politicians pontificated on every continent, inflaming unsustainable divides.
But there was good, too. Here’s my list.
Being alive
Grateful to be alive. A year ago this month, I had just started a very harsh chemotherapy regimen to address my transformed aggressive lymphoma. It didn’t work, and I was fast-tracked toward a last-gasp treatment called CAR-T, which, as I shared last week, nearly didn’t happen, leaving me weeks, if not days, away from leaving this world.
Then, at literally the last moment, the overseas lab was able to engineer the CAR-T cells for which they had previously failed, and ship them overnight to Israel. They were then injected into my body, eradicating the cancer in less than two weeks – an undeniable miracle. There’s still much healing to be done, but as Elton John once crooned, “I’m still standing.”
Iran
On a national level, Israel’s remarkable destruction of much of Iran’s nuclear program over 12 days in June-July deserves every Israeli’s gratitude. Decades of determined intimidation from the Iranian mullahs were neutralized in less time than it took the CAR-T to knock out my cancer.
This, coupled with the IDF’s previous successes against Hezbollah and Syria, the diminution of Hamas’s military (if not the group’s political) capabilities in Gaza, and the release of the remaining living hostages, has truly transformed the Middle East.
AI and chatbots
AI and chatbots. This was the year I became obsessed. I began using AI for all manner of tasks – as a surrogate 24/7 doctor when I didn’t want to burden my own physician at 3 a.m. while I was panicking over some medical anomaly; a writing companion helping me add structure, organization, and plot twists to both my nonfiction and fiction compositions; an online travel agent for quick trip planning; and a therapist to rival my real-world one.
I’ll be expounding on how I use chatbots in my writing for an upcoming column, but in the meantime I’m grateful to Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic for their pioneering breakthroughs.
Marriage
Growth in marriage. I’d be disingenuous if I said a year of hellish health hadn’t taken a toll on my relationship with my wife, Jody. Truths were unveiled that weren’t always easy to deal with, and at times threatened to derail 37 years of our relationship. But we persevered, communicated more honestly, and by confronting the scariest possibilities, have pulled through.
If anything, things have gotten better – maybe even the best they’ve ever been in our marriage. I pray that it can be an inspiration to others who are going through similarly challenging situations.
Grandchildren
Grandchildren. When Ilai, our first grandchild, was born, Jody and I fretted that we wouldn’t know how to slot in time with him, given our busy schedules. When granddaughter Roni was born two years later, we wondered how we could pick up two little tykes from separate preschools and give them both the attention they craved.
Those fears turned out to be entirely unfounded, as time seemingly expanded to accommodate family joys and work obligations. The gratitude I feel toward this change in our lives is as deep as it gets. When a two-year-old runs up to give you a knee hug, is there anything better?
Friends
New friends. There’s nothing like being critically ill to show you who your friends are – and who they might be.
I am grateful to the friends who came, week after week, to have lunch with me when I wasn’t strong enough to go out, and to new friends who stepped into the void, unbidden, and have since become some of the people I’m closest with now. No names, but you know who you are.
A parallel gratitude to delivery services like Wolt and to the growing number of chefs delivering homemade food for Shabbat, both of which made ordering tasty and healthy meals a click away.
Television
A stellar year for television. This might seem a trivial topic to conclude my gratitude list, but as I recovered from CAR-T, my energy level was not what it once was. As a result, nightly TV binges became a welcome norm. And many of the shows we watched were a delight. I divide my pop culture interests between science fiction, which I watch with my son, Aviv, and feel-good comedies, dramas, and documentaries I watch with Jody.
For the former, Pluribus, Foundation, Severance, Silo, Dark Matter, Fallout, 3 Body Problem, Travelers, and Stranger Things all hit the mark. With Jody, I’ve enjoyed Shrinking, Your Friends and Neighbors, Man on the Inside, Pachinko, Paradise, Nobody Wants This, A Body that Works, and The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. With both Jody and Aviv, we couldn’t get enough of The Bear and, lately, the surreal paranoia of The Chair Company. I’m grateful that we can consume TV voraciously and without guilt.
As Rabbi Tal Sessler writes in his book Torah for Mental Health, “Gratitude isn’t just a feeling. It’s a practice.”
So, let’s practice: A happy and grateful new year to readers near and far!
The writer’s book TOTALED: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World was published earlier this year as an audiobook. It is available on Amazon and other online booksellers in print, eBook, and Audible formats. brianblum.com