Spirit and Story Archive

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The Thanksgiving Story

By Steven Greenberg

A people that forgets its founding stories eventually runs out of steam. We repeat this so often at CLAL that it has become something of a mantra. Much of the work we do in our programs at CLAL could be characterized as a recovery of multiple Jewish stories. By remembering our stories, by telling them again through the lenses of our own contemporary experience, we deepen and expand our Jewish identity.

A people that neglects to celebrate its stories will fail to communicate to future generations the emotional depth, the joy and the sadness entailed in living out the stories. By the celebration of Thanksgiving, we join the founding fathers and, in this case, mothers in their earnest desire to be part of the great American project.

With holidays there are always two stories to tell. There is a story that recalls the original event. It is always a mythic story. In addition to this mythic tale, there is the story of the creation of the holiday, the story of how a particular people came in time to adopt a holiday, and how they decided to mark its memory with rituals. The story of how a holiday was made can be neglected or even suppressed. It is suspect because it reveals the piecemeal construction of shared memory and meaning. It admits that "things weren't always so." In foregrounding the social processes of meaning making, it can seem to undermine the original myths.

But in a post-modern spiritual world, this second sort of story can become just as sacred as the first. It honors both the original miraculous, transformative event, as well as the work of people to make sense of the event and carry its message forward. This second story is about the hard work of getting the first story heard, of carrying its message into the hearts, minds and hands of the people.

The first story of Thanksgiving goes something like this. The Pilgrims set anchor at Plymouth Rock on December 11, 1620. Their first winter was devastating. At the beginning of the following fall, they had lost 46 of the original 102 who sailed aboard the Mayflower. But the harvest of 1621 was a bountiful one. And the remaining colonists decided to celebrate with a feast-including 91 Indians who had helped the Pilgrims to survive their first year. The feast lasted three days and was quite extravagant. The menu included wild fowl, boiled pumpkin, fried corn fritters, fish, berries, watercress, lobster, dried fruit, clams, venison, and plums.

The second story of Thanksgiving goes something like this. More than fifty years later, on June 20, 1676, the governing council of Charlestown, Massachusetts, held a meeting to determine how best to express thanks for the good fortune that had seen their community securely established. By unanimous vote, they instructed Edward Rawson, the town clerk, to proclaim June 29 as a day of thanksgiving.

It was another hundred years, however, before all 13 colonies joined in a thanksgiving celebration. This Thanksgiving Day, held in October 1777, while associated with the pilgrim holiday, commemorated the patriotic victory over the British at Saratoga. But like the Charlestown Thanksgiving, it too was a one-time affair.

George Washington wanted to proclaim a National Day of Thanksgiving in 1789, but discord among the colonies prevented it. Many felt that the hardships suffered by a few pilgrims 150 years before did not warrant a national holiday. And later, President Thomas Jefferson scoffed at the idea of having a day of national thanksgiving.

It was Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor, whose efforts beginning in the 1820s eventually led to what we recognize today as Thanksgiving. Hale wrote many editorials championing her cause in her Boston Ladies' Magazine and, later, in Godey's Lady's Book. Finally, after a 40-year campaign of writing editorials and letters to governors and presidents, Hale's obsession became a reality when, in 1863, President Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving.

Since then, the date was changed only once, by Franklin Roosevelt, who moved it forward one week to the third Thursday in November in order to create a longer Christmas shopping season. Public uproar against this decision caused the president to move Thanksgiving back to its original date two years later.

We have much to be thankful for. But this year, we might also consider giving thanks to those who worked to create this holiday and give it its ritual form. The pilgrims of Plymouth, the township of Charlestown, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Sarah Josepha Hale most of all wanted us all to feast with our families and friends and to remember that being thankful is more than a feeling. Through the power of this fixed date on the calendar, Giving Thanks becomes an explicit duty year in and year out that we pass down from generation to generation, as Americans.

As Jews, Thanksgiving has played an important role in the overlapping of our American and Jewish identities. It is the only holiday that may rightly claim to be both Jewish and American. It is the only explicitly spiritual, yet not overtly Christian, American holiday. Indeed, while its expression is non-denominational, its origins, in effect, are Jewish. The first pilgrims may have been a rather severe bunch of Christians, but they had a deep loyalty to the Hebrew Bible. It should come as no surprise then that their celebration of deliverance and bounty following the harvest of 1621 was modeled after Sukkot, the Jewish celebration of the autumn harvest.

In my family, Thanksgiving always had the feel of a liberated Pesach. No changing of the dishes, no terror of hametz, no long seder, but the same family members would show up for my mother's cooking on both holidays. Similar kinds of conversations buzzed around the table during both holidays. Folks would catch up on each other's business, talk about the old neighborhood, tease each other, and laugh together. A number of us would find quiet moments in twos to talk more intimately with each other while washing up the dishes in the kitchen.

There were, however, a few noteworthy differences beyond the food. When I was ten I learned the Dutch hymn, "We Gather Together" that had long been associated with Thanksgiving, and I insisted that we all sing it. Over the years, this became our traditional Thanksgiving musical ritual. We sing this before dinner as a kiddush of sorts. Then comes the "Hagaddah." In my teens, we began to ask my mother to tell her "coming to America" story before Thanksgiving dinner. We had heard a number of her immigration stories before this, but, when she had the opportunity to tell them on Thanksgiving, they became fuller and included details that we had missed or never heard. When grandparents attended, we would ask them to do the same. The ritual in practice depends upon who is in attendance at the "seder," and who can tell a story of coming to America, a story of trials and difficulties and of thanks and gratitude to this country for its freedoms and opportunities. Our family Thanksgiving seder rarely has taken longer than fifteen minutes, but it is enough to make us all aware of the story, our Pilgrim's story, our American story, and our Jewish-American story. And then, as Jews and as Americans, we bless God who takes bread from out of the earth and then we eat more turkey than we should.

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