Dear TEE community,
As a young person I was enthralled by medieval Europe. I read Howard Pyle’s Men of Iron, books about Joan of Arc, King Arthur, and, of course, the brave adventures of Richard the Lionheart. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned about Jewish experience at that time and revised my romantic vision of that period. Similarly, I am uncomfortable with the valorization of other famous individuals, such as Gandhi or Roald Dahl, now that I am aware of the depth of their antisemitism.
This need to rethink the narratives we learned earlier in life has, of course, had an impact on many other stories as well, including that of Thanksgiving. As a Jew, I was taught to have a particular pride in the fact that the Christian Pilgrims had Sukkot in mind when they gathered for their feast. I took part in numerous school plays depicting a happy gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, all of us costumed in historically inaccurate feathers and buckled shoes.
Of course we now know that early encounters between indigenous Americans and European settlers were more complicated. Festivals of thanksgiving were already a native tradition long before the Puritans arrived. While members of the Wampanoag nation taught settlers agricultural and hunting practices necessary for their survival, only sixteen years following the joint gathering, colonists slaughtered nearly all the men of the neighboring Pequot tribe, enslaving the captured women and children. In the following decades, approximately three hundred thousand Indians were killed and many more displaced.
The Thanksgiving holiday we now observe had its origins in the Civil War. Various Presidents, beginning with Washington, had called for national days of thanksgiving at a variety of times. It wasn’t until 1863, under Abraham Lincoln, that Thanksgiving was established as an annual observance to be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. The proclamation asked that, on that day, Americans might, “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”
While I am uncomfortable with the “first Thanksgiving” narrative that erases the genocidal impact of European colonization, I do find meaning in Lincoln’s call to observe Thanksgiving as a day to restore “peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.” While our country is not engaged in a military civil war, the increasing polarization of our politics has created deep social divisions. If newspaper articles are any indication, Thanksgiving is one of the few times that Americans gather across those divides. In just the past week, The New York Times has published articles entitled, “How to Defuse Tension at the Dinner Table During the Holidays,” “4 Ways to Avoid Awkward Moments this Thanksgiving,” “Speak Up at Thanksgiving. Your Health Depends on It,” and “How to Actually Enjoy the Holidays.”
While these headlines make me grateful for the conviviality of my own family, they nevertheless serve as a reminder that it is all too easy to dismiss the “Americanness” of those with different views. I like the idea of observing Thanksgiving as a day to consider what unites us with other Americans and recommitting ourselves to insuring that our country remains one in which we are free to disagree with one another.
Wishing you a happy and harmonious Thanksgiving,
Rabbi Drorah Setel