From the Desk of Cheryl Hauer
I love Thanksgiving. It’s got everything: that wonderful anticipation of something special when you wake up on TG morning; smells of wonderful food filling the air; a raucous family dinner; a ton of dirty dishes and lots of leftovers. It’s a day when it is okay to talk about being grateful, thankful for all that you are blessed with, God’s presence in your life in the good times and bad; a time when even your agnostic Uncle Harry can’t object to a little innocent ‘God talk.’ And all without the crazy pandemonium that accompanies so many other holidays.
It's the perfect family holiday for those of us who have family members who aren’t believers. Like I said, it has everything, and it is not a religious holiday, so some of the angst is off the table at the get-go. And who can resist all those adorable pictures of healthy-looking Pilgrims munching on wild turkey and corn on the cob with their Native American friends? Oh, wait …
As wonderful as today’s Thanksgiving is, the holiday has a bit of a checkered past and historical inaccuracies abound. Some historians say that the celebration in Plymouth in 1621 wasn’t really the first Thanksgiving in America. They say it hearkens back to 1565 when a Spanish fleet landed on the shores of Florida and planted a cross where the city of St. Augustine would eventually stand. The local Timucuan tribe welcomed the newcomers with a shared festival meal.
However, that piece of history has gotten lost as the Pilgrims have taken center stage in our modern recognition of the holiday. That first Thanksgiving Day, probably celebrated somewhere between late September and early November in 1621, was indeed a religious holiday for America’s new settlers who had suffered a horrendous first year in their new homeland. Famine and sickness had devastated their community and those who remained did indeed want to set aside a day to thank God. There would have been few women at the party, however, since over 70% of the females who left England on the Mayflower died in that first year.
Thanks to the help of the Wampanoag, a Native American tribe who had lived in the region for centuries, those who made it through that first winter were able to establish their first settlement. After 12 months in the land, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag feasted together for 3 days … but probably not on turkey. Local vegetables and seafood would have been at the heart of the menu, along with venison provided by the Native American guests.
The holiday showed up again in 1623 when it was officially recognized as a religious holiday by the growing Plymouth community. For the next two centuries, it appeared occasionally as different communities among the growing colonial presence also acknowledged Thanksgiving as a religious holiday. George Washington and the Continental Congress called for an official Thanksgiving Day in 1789 to commemorate the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. In 1817, the state of New York adopted Thanksgiving Day as an official holiday, as did several other states, even though they were all on different days. During the Civil War, both the Union and the Confederacy called for days of Thanksgiving after major victories. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation inviting all Americans to celebrate Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November. He asked that the nation give thanks for the country’s victory in the Civil War, remember those who suffered and died during the war, and ask God to heal the land. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Sara Josepha Hale, a little-known historical figure who influenced Lincoln’s decision, after years of impassioned lobbying for the holiday to be officially recognized. In her spare time, Ms. Hale wrote songs, the most famous of which was Mary Had a Little Lamb.
It wasn’t until 1941 that Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the establishment of the third Thursday in November as the Federal Thanksgiving Day holiday. His motives were not religious, however, reasoning that moving the holiday back a week would boost the economy by giving shoppers an extra seven days for their Christmas shopping.
A look at the darker side of Thanksgiving’s history, however, reveals centuries of anti-Semitism in America. During the colonial period, the Jewish population was quite small but very prosperous, as well-connected traders handling imports and exports within Britain’s Atlantic Empire. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism remained pervasive and state-based, beginning as early as the mid-1600s, when in 1654, the Governor of New Amsterdam referred to the Jewish people as a ‘repugnant’ and a ‘deceitful race,’ and sought to have them expelled from New Amsterdam. The celebration of Thanksgiving as a specifically Christian holiday contributed to the isolation of Jewish communities in the fledgling country which continued well into the 20th century. As time went on, some States openly refused the Jewish community from participating in Thanksgiving celebrations and anti-Semitic attacks on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries commonly occurred around the holiday.
However, after WWII, as the holiday began to take on more of a community, family-based day to be grateful, the divide between Jews and Christians began to diminish. And today, thankfully, more and more people from both communities are seeing the day as those early Pilgrims did.
While we cannot be certain about what motivated those Pilgrim settlers to initiate a feast of Thanksgiving, it is likely that they consciously drew on a model well known to them from the Bible they cherished. Seeing themselves as new Israelites in a new ‘promised land,’ the Pilgrims surely found inspiration in the Bible, in the Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, in which God commands the ancient Israelites to observe the Feast of Booths, in Hebrew, Sukkot, “To rejoice before Adonai your God,” at the time of the fall harvest. ~Rabbi Elias Lieberman
From the historical connections of the Puritans to Sukkot and the Torah, to the primary importance in Judaism of saying thank you to God for all our blessings, Thanksgiving is a holiday steeped in Jewish values.
And from Talking to God by Naomi Levy, a Prayer for the Thanksgiving Feast that all of us should fervently offer to the Lord;
For the laughter of children,
For my own life breath,
For the abundance of food on this table,
For the ones who prepared this sumptuous feast,
For the roof over our heads,
The clothes on our backs,
For our health,
And our wealth of blessings,
For this opportunity to celebrate with family and friends,
For the freedom to pray these words
Without fear,
In any language
In any faith,
In this great country,
Whose landscape is as vast and beautiful as her inhabitants.
Thank You, God, for giving us all these. Amen
Blessings and Shalom,
Issachar Community