Tzoris and Thanksgiving

Sermon Shabbat Toldot 5783

I have often contended that Thanksgiving is truly a Jewish holiday.  What else do you call a festival focused on overeating, in which you must invite all of your relatives, including the ones you don’t like, for a giant meal?  A Jewish holiday!  No doubt!

I’ll never forget the complexity of the seating arrangements at my house growing up, and the delicacy of deciding who could sit next to whom and who could not be placed in hearing distance of which relative.  For example, my mother and her brother Max, who had never gotten along their entire lives, had to be placed pretty far apart, but Max, a successful pharmacist and TV personality but a socialist by politics and an atheist in belief, also had to be placed far from his cousin Bernie, a successful OBGYN to the stars—he had been Marilyn Monroe’s gynecologist, believe it or not—who was much more conservative politically than Max and loved to goad him.  My Bubbie Irma needed to be away from the philistine commentary of cousin Bernie, too, for she was Victorian in social outlook.  My twenty-something cousin Gary might or might not show and would certainly be late and so always had to be placed at a seat that would be accessible once the dining room was immovably full of people crammed around the various linked tables arranged to accommodate everyone in a dining room quite a bit too small.  Of course, my mom’s friend Roche´ would talk nonstop, so she had to be near someone who didn’t mind that, or, preferably, was hard of hearing.  And don’t forget that there are two side seats for each guest, and you don’t want to separate husbands and wives, and some people take up more room, and kids have friends, too.

In truth, only my mom and eventually my sister Deborah had the combination of personal knowledge and human perception to successfully arrange our seating for a peaceable Thanksgiving dinner.  In my view, the only thing more difficult in my house growing up than figuring out the seating at Thanksgiving was doing so for Passover Seder...

And let us not forget that my mom and sisters had to be available to help run back and forth to the kitchen bringing immense platters of food and clearing dishes.  Kitchen work was unapologetically sexist in those days, except that when I got old enough to help, my mom drafted me, too, regardless of gender. 

I genuinely hope that your own Thanksgiving dinner guest experience was simpler than mine as a child, and that you have good reason to give thanks this year for all that you have. 

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.

Last year at this time I had the challenging experience of debating someone, by text and Facebook messages, who felt that associating a holiday so often based on the white conquest of Native Americans in North America with anything Jewish demonstrated the privilege that I must feel as a white male in our society.  In fact, on my ical today is not Black Friday at all, but Native American Heritage day, which is certainly a better theme than “let’s see how much we can run up the credit cards the day after Thanksgiving.”

Now the argument that I ended up in last year was serious and emotional.  I had sent out a general email that said, essentially, “Have a happy Thanksgiving, enjoy your family, Thanksgiving is based in Jewish ideas of a holiday of gratitude, etc.”  This bright and highly educated person took serious issue with my rather bland and generic happy holiday message, and said that the genocide of Native peoples in this Hemisphere as nothing to celebrate.  I responded that a holiday of gratitude for what we have should be non-political, that thanksgiving is a universal religious motivation, etc.—and that went exactly nowhere, as this person, partly native in her heritage, believed firmly that Thanksgiving was, at least symbolically, really about the brutal eradication of the Native American way of life on two continents, North and South America.  And they then consistently accused me of living in a world of white male privilege and being unable to understand native trauma.  No matter what I said, it only seemed to make it worse.

The argument only softened when my lovely wife Sophia suggested I note that my own ancestors were persecuted, tortured, expelled and slaughtered for two thousand years on several continents.  We Jews truly bore no responsibility for the destruction of Native American cultures.  We surely have been the victims of historical persecution for longer than anyone on earth, and the horrific attacks we have experienced have come perilously close to genocide on more than one occasion.

At that, the argument turned, and we somehow ended up almost on the same side.  But I must admit: I decided not to send out a “Happy Thanksgiving” message this year…  Discretion may yet prove to be the better part of valor.

This whole discussion brings up an interesting and serious problem that is finally being examined in more serious ways these days.  Jews in the west often have white skins, and aren’t so obviously distinguishable from majority cultures in North America or Europe, and through hard work and education we have climbed the social ladder to great success in many walks of life, but, frankly, we are not actually, um, “white” to many people.  And, generally speaking, we often don’t think the same way that people who grow up fully accepted by the larger society do.   

And there is good reason for this.  There have been many examples of the renewed normalization of Anti-Semitism in our society in recent years.  On the left, Anti-Semitism typically isn’t even viewed as racism at all; after all, Jews don’t have black or brown skins—never mind that many Jews do, of course—and hating Israel and denying the Jewish right to a state aren’t viewed as racist attitudes but often as “progressive ones.”  Which makes it possible, and popular, on the left to voice frankly hateful Anti-Semitic views with impunity.  On the political right, a recurrent, ugly and at times deadly Anti-Semitic subculture has embraced neo-Nazi conspiracy theories first ginned up centuries ago about Jewish control of the world.  Jews are demonized as the progressive liberals who are allowing immigrants to flood our cities or permitting woke perspectives to destroy our social morality.  Both views can’t be true, of course. In fact, neither are true at all. 

You see, of course, we can’t win here, apparently not even during Thanksgiving weekend.  But maybe winning is not the point at all.

Because 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.

In recent years the rising tide of Anti-Semitism has become a focus for far too much of our Jewish world and its myriad organizations.  That is not to say that it doesn’t matter.  But it is to say that there is so much in Judaism that is joyous, meaningful and incredibly positive, that celebrates simcha, as our own Congregation Beit Simcha does, that we ultimately need to look there for our own sources of goodness and blessing.

We Jews have known suffering over our long history.  Now, in our own period, at a time when the challenges we face are so much less threatening than the ones our ancestors experienced, we have much to celebrate.  And certainly a great deal to be thankful for, this weekend and always.