Toldot 2019: A Jewish Thanksgiving
I received an email earlier this week from a Jewish organization with the subject line, “Is Thanksgiving a Jewish holiday?” To answer clearly yes or no would be an oversimplification at best. Sure, gratitude is a wonderful Jewish value, harvest holidays are a thing we - along with many others - do and have done over time but can we unilaterally declare a day a Jewish one without acting that out?
Is Tuesday a Jewish day? What about Sunday, my kids go to religious school on Sunday...does that make it more Jewish than Tuesday when they go to public school followed by Taekwondo?
The question I would like to ask this morning - and in full disclosure to, provide but one answer to - is how do we make it so? Not “Is Thanksgiving a Jewish holiday?” but how do we make it a Jewish holiday? Just as we make each of the moments of the rest our lives Jewish, the Sundays, the Mondays…and the 4th Thursdays of November.
I propose that we make it so by acknowledging the difficult parts of our past, the reality of the present and the adaptations necessary to bring to life what some might call the messianic age, and others, a just, equitable future. Certainly there are other ways to make our days Jewish, having a gratitude practice, saying 100 blessings a day, maybe the motzi over challah rolls before you dig into the turkey - or today, the leftovers.
But I would also say that making this holiday Jewish involves glancing back at the less savory elements of the origins of the Thanksgiving narrative, seeing how they still play out in the present, and then doing teshuva, making a turn in another direction, to evolve ourselves, our families and this country.
In this proposal for how we make our days ‘Jewish’, Torah is at the center. This week we read a story of our people receiving blessing and bounty through deception and exploitation of weakness. Jacob, in partnership with his mother, first exploits his elder brother Esau’s ravenous hunger by offering him lentil soup in return for his birthright and then later deceives his father Isaac by dressing up as Esau and receiving the blessing deemed for Esau in his stead. Isaac is ready to give a blessing of prosperity and plenty to what he assumed would be his eldest son, and instead it is given to Jacob. Instead, Jacob receives both the birthright and the blessing and flees for fear of retribution from an angry and now powerless Esau.
There are some parts of this story that are compelling. Rebecca coaxed Jacob to game the system based on a prophecy given her while pregnant that her younger son would rule the elder. Rooting for the underdog and subverting hegemony are certainly something I can get behind, and are resonant with critical moments in the experience of Jews over time..
But the story of this family, a founding narrative of our people, is complex, and filled with imperfect characters and actions. Conspiring, lying, exploiting weakness. Every year, this too is handed down as part of our inheritance, to be discussed, debated and reflected upon. The rabbis of old, with great reverence, attempted to redeem the characters and try and smooth over the complexities. And we do this with our own families too - the difficult stories, of hurt, boundaries transgressed, we redeem the characters sometimes and try to smooth over those complexities, for a variety of reasons. It is understandable, and has its place, and is often done with good will, even forgiveness and perspective in mind.
However another option is to reflect upon these complex histories and imperfect characters and learn from their mistakes, perhaps choosing to do things differently. Think of it as a transgenerational project of teshuva, of trying to do better ‘next time,’ teshuva is sometimes framed as learning from a past mistake in such a way that when you encounter the same situation again later, you make a different, improved choice that redeems the past action.
If it is a ‘Jewish’ practice to look at the stories and histories we inherit and not only try to smooth over the imperfections, but learn from them, even departing from the actions of those who came before, how do we make Thanksgiving a “Jewish holiday,” in THIS way?
David Silverman, Professor of History at George Washington University, in his recent book, This Land is Their Land obliges us to do so by doing something not easy, taking a critical look at the history of the holiday of Thanksgiving itself. He acknowledges this will be hard on the living and a New Yorker review of his academic work describes why, “this approach questions the creation stories that uphold traditional social orders, making the heroes less heroic, and asking readers to consider the villains as full and complicated human beings.”
This may be hard on the living, but it is something we do. We do this. We do it with ourselves on Yom Kippur. We do this with the Torah, with Rebecca, Jacob and Esau as they grapple with a prophecy that the traditional social order will be upended, and continuing with the deception and exploitation that results in one people receiving another’s blessing.
So too with Thanksgiving. In Philip Deloria’s article “The invention of Thanksgiving” he writes that, “We falsely remember a Thanksgiving of intercultural harmony. Perhaps we should recall instead how English settlers cheated, abused, killed, and eventually drove a Native tribe into a conflict, known as King Philip’s War, that exploded across the region in 1675 and 1676 and that was one of the most devastating wars in the history of North American settlement.”
The holiday of intercultural harmony and cornucopias of plenty on which I was raised, and to which I still hold a place in my heart because it is a source of memory, and family connection, was created
And not created on Plymouth Rock in 1621 but instead over 300 years, as various pieces of history were stitched together and leveraged at different moments in American history to serve wholly different agendas - to undergird principles of religious freedom, to reinforce an ideology of manifest destiny, or to sow unity during the Civil War, such as when Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.
As one scholar points out, the Natives who showed up at the first Thanksgiving did so not because they were invited. It is more likely that they were honoring a mutual defense treaty with the pilgrims, one likely forged from their own weakness’ as a result of a devastating plague. When the Native Americans heard shouting and shooting in the camp, they recalled their obligation to defend the new arrivals, took up arms and approached the settlement cautiously. What they found instead was that the Pilgrims were having, not a solemn feast of gratitude but a raucous, drunken party.
So, how do we make Thanksgiving “Jewish”?
That holiday. The created one. The created one rooted nonetheless in a difficult but important to reconstruct, politically charged, perilous, even violent narrative? There is no single way and perhaps it is folly to try, but we start by seeing the ways in which these narratives, some stitched together and others muted by time, still play out today. By looking around with wide eyes and seeing very visibly, many of the elements of that narrative still present today:
treaties honored, and those abandoned.
groups whose weaknesses are exploited for others’ gain,
those building questionable alliances when their power is at stake
And still others struggling to preserve connection and culture, independence and dignity
What if this story - as messy and yet as instructive as our Torah - is one we re-read each year around this time - in order to remind ourselves what has changed, and what is still the same? This, I believe is what Judaism has to offer to Thanksgiving, a critical look backwards and forwards.
A chance at teshuva and change in the present and a rededication of self, family and country to a better future.
