Thanksgiving and the Jews

Sermon, Shabbat Toldot 5784

It’s Thanksgiving this week, a holiday that used to be just about the least controversial one of the whole year, but has moved somewhat into the realm of the controversial recently.  Allow me to explain.

When I was growing up, the shared American holidays were New Year’s, Lincoln’s and Washington’s Birthdays, Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Almost all of those had some complications associated with them.  New Year’s Eve inevitably was filled with drunk-driving deaths and arrests and police checkpoints to prevent that.  Lincoln’s Birthday was not celebrated south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Washington’s Birthday was later combined with Lincoln’s to make it a “Presidents’ Day” three-day weekend—in fact, all the holidays were kind of manipulated to create three or four day weekends—while Memorial Day was a peculiar early beginning to the summer for most of us who didn’t have relatives who died in America’s wars—and growing up in California we then went back to school for three more weeks. 

During the Vietnam War and throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s the 4th of July became a flashpoint for dueling views of America among Americans.  Labor Day was a celebration of unionization, which was uncontroversial initially in my time but became hotly debated in the anti-union decades that followed.  Christmas was very nice for Christians, but the build-up in particular was challenging for non-Christians—you know, like Jews—who were forced to sing Christmas carols about the birth of a savior we don’t share if we wanted to be in chorus or madrigals; just saying.  Plus, months of ads for stuff and carols playing everywhere… 

Only Thanksgiving seemed to fly above controversy, unless you were a turkey. 

Incidentally, or not so incidentally, the inspiration for the original American Thanksgiving dinner was the Biblical festival of Sukkot, the feast of Booths or Tabernacles in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible.  Sukkot was also the source for the upcoming festival of Hanukkah, an eight-day and night celebration established by the Hasmonean Maccabees as a way to give thanks for their victory over the oppressor Syrians and the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem.  The emotion of gratitude and thanksgiving plays a major role in so much of what we ought to experience about religion and our world.  So Thanksgiving should fit into our lives quite well, right?

Now other holidays in my lifetime appeared while some disappeared: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was finally added in 1983 after 15 years of activism, including by singer Stevie Wonder, but it took an additional 17 years to be added in all states, including Arizona, which didn’t approve it until a public referendum in 1992.  Two states still don’t celebrate it fully; Alabama and Mississippi combine it with Robert E. Lee Day—now that’s cognitive dissonance—to have “King-Lee Day”. 

Veteran’s Day was a legal holiday for the government and for banks—of course—but not generally celebrated by most people if they weren’t military veterans or relatives.  While less controversial since it was essentially a celebration of the end of World War I, it never had the broad appeal of other holidays, and seemed to echo Memorial Day half a year later.

Columbus Day used to be a day off of school and sometimes from work while banks were closed—banks still are closed then; they take every chance they get, don’t they?—but Columbus’ very mixed personal record, and Columbus Day’s direct association with the annihilation of Native American populations and the usurpation of their lands has not endeared it to recent generations. 

But Thanksgiving seemed above all of that.  A day to show gratitude for the food we have to eat and enjoy, a day to spend with family and friends and to invite guests to share our table.  A day based, in theory, on the harvest festival of Sukkot in the Bible, the feast of Tabernacles and gratitude.  A day not tied to military triumph or a particular individual, not directly connected to any current religious practice when we can say thank you for whatever we do have. What could be controversial about that?   

I’ve always called Thanksgiving truly a Jewish holiday: what else can you call a holiday when you invite over all your relatives, including the ones you don’t like, and overeat?  Definitely a Jewish holiday!

Legally, Thanksgiving became an established national holiday consistently observed in America in 1863, in the midst of the brutal American Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it as such.  With a brief interruption during the late Depression it has remained the last Thursday of November ever since.  A great holiday to eat, drink, enjoy family and friends, watch football, and then go see a movie.

Yet when I sent out a typical Thanksgiving message to my congregation and community a couple of years ago, I discovered that some people with an indigenous heritage found Thanksgiving offensive; in fact, very offensive.  It harkened back to the white settlement of the Americas, the destruction of native peoples and cultures and the colonization of their lands by whites.

Now, the story we like to tell about the origins of Thanksgiving is, in fact, reflective of this.  Those Puritan pilgrims landing on Cape Cod and being saved from starvation by the local Native American Wampanoag tribe, and the white survivors celebrating their friendship with the tribe in October after the first semi-successful harvest in a giant feast—it sounds great, and as though they built bridges of lasting friendship across the racial, cultural and religious lines that could have divided them.  Swell.  But the darker truth is that half a century later, during King Philip’s War, the white settlers and the native tribes in New England fought a brutal war of extermination that ended with the near total destruction of the native Americans in the region, and their essential replacement by white European—primarily English, Scotch and Irish—settlers.  The Wampanoag tribe itself, the one that saved the settlers from dying that first winter and spring, was wiped out.

No less a figure than Mark Twain put it this way: 

Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months, instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual compliments.

Whew.  I guess I understand the native problem with Thanksgiving. 

Now it is also worth mentioning that we Jews have experienced more persecution, over a longer period of time—millenia, in fact—than any other people in the history of humanity.  We know from persecution and communal suffering.  And we had nothing to do with the brutal conquest of the indigenous Native Americans either in South or North America.  In fact, while they were taking it on the chin from European settlers we were suffering in ghettos and Judenstrasse and from brutal pogroms all over Europe.  Or we were second-class citizens in the mellahs and Jewish quarters of North Africa and the Middle East.

So when we Jewish Americans celebrate a festival of gratitude in the autumn we aren’t actually rejoicing in the triumph over indigenous peoples; we are just enjoying a great meal with family and friends and being in a nation that, in general, has been an incredible haven of freedom of religion and identity. 

Now we can learn some valuable lessons from all of this.  In this week’s portion of Toldot, Isaac ends up in a series of disputes about water, as Sophie’s Drash said.  Water policy in arid lands has been a major issue for many centuries, and it remains so today right here in Arizona.  Back then, Isaac, in a series of conflicts that mirror some his father Abraham had in the previous generation, had a choice.  He could contest the issue, or he could move on, avoid the conflict and build a life and a future beyond the conflict.  He moves to a new location, digs more wells, and continues the growth of his family and destiny.  It is a positive response to a negative stimulus, and in the end, Isaac has much to be grateful for.

At a time of shocking Antisemitism right here in America, it’s extremely important to share not just the negative, but the positive that can emerge from such challenges.  It’s why we need, especially now, to reach out—as we will next week in two interfaith and multifaith services—to others who share the desire to build community and create good in our society.  It’s how we can create bonds of support and love that we canM feel especially grateful for.

Because, my friends, we need holidays of gratitude, times to give thanks.  It’s much too easy to take all that we have for granted, and to simply complain about what we do not possess and miss what we do.  Holidays often have murky origins, to be honest, and the way they come to be celebrated may not be closely tied to where they come from.  St. Valentine, namesake of Valentine’s Day, was a virulently anti-Semitic pope.  Christmas was originally a pagan winter solstice celebration.  Passover, while very ancient, is connected to much older spring celebrations held throughout the world.  How a holiday starts is not necessarily how it eventually turns out.

We need a time to offer gratitude for what we have.  We need a day to focus on family and friends.  We need to make the effort to bring guests to our tables to share in our bounty. 

So, in my view, enjoy your turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes and pies, and particularly enjoy your family and friends this Thursday.  And come to these interfaith services that we are offering—free of charge—to demonstrate that we appreciate the friendship, love and support we are receiving. 

Then we can, in this time of challenge and threat, have a holiday of true thanksgiving.