On Pilgrims, Jews, and Thanks
By Leonard Fein
Think on it: Suppose the Pilgrims had bumped into a wild boar instead of encountering a turkey. Thanksgiving's centerpiece would be on oinker rather than a gobbler, and we (and our Muslim neighbors as well) would be locked out of America's fall-time feast. Or suppose the songs associated with the day were Thanksgiving carols, as easily they might have been, instead of two hymns that speak of God but not of Christ. Double-locked out.
Instead, we have a quintessentially Jewish holiday, the family gathered from far and wide around a festive table. Not for nothing did Barry Levinson, then still reticent about his Jewish thing, transform the obvious seder of his film, Avalon, into a Thanksgiving celebration. In my own Baltimore, which preceded his by a scant five or six years, the Jews were not yet quite ready to do Thanksgiving. I remember no parental complaint when, erev Thanksgiving, my friends (chaverim, really) would pile into the back of a moving van and head 40 miles away to Habonim Camp Moshava to spend the whole of the weekend at our annual camp reunion. (Turkey? We mostly made do with peanut butter, the luxury of meat loaf reserved for Shabbat.) Back then, Thanksgiving belonged to the Pilgrims, austere and remote, and our only connection to America's days of yore was via Columbus, who maybe was a Jew, and the fact that he set sail, or so we were taught, as the Jews of Spain were in the process of being expelled. Pilgrims? No thanks.
Back then was long ago. As tentative as the immigrant generation was regarding its claim on America's symbols, we of the second generation came to understand that those symbols claimed us. And in Thanksgiving's case, without any of the ambivalence or the inherent alienation of feeling claimed - claimed and excluded at the same time - by Christmas.
So: Food, family, and - quietly - thanks, both general and specific . . .
for a resuscitated peace process, bumpy though it is, and for all those good people here who have devoted themselves to its support - most notably, in the week in which the Israel Policy Forum held a stunningly successful dinner in honor of Prime Minister Barak, for Jonathan Jacoby, who has fashioned the IPF in his image: bold, thoughtful, passionately devoted to Israel's security and, with the Prime Minister, wise enough to understand that peace is the swiftest and most certain path to that security;
for the thousands of volunteers in the 32 cities that have affiliated with the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy, people of all ages who are plainly delighted to be able to spend an hour a week helping a young child learn to read, who know that "tikkun olam" is not a nice term we employ so that we can feel good about ourselves but the title of a lifetime agenda;
for Jewish philanthropists, large and small, whose idiosyncrasies are often infuriating but whose generosity, passion, and concern for the greater good soften so many of life's edges;
for Amos Oz, who reminded us in a lecture the other day that all those who are wondering when Israel's civil war will start have missed the point, which is that all the shouting and the traded insults that are hurled back on forth each day in Israel are the civil war, that for Jews words have always (well, almost always) been the preferred weapons;
for all the gifted writers and composers and performers who have gifted us in turn;
as every day, for friends and family, and for the kindness of strangers.
Nothing exists without its opposite. Now that America's holiday season has begun, we are bound to take note of this year's Scrooge, to whom few thanks are due. I refer, of course, to mayor of New York City, he who has ordered the police to arrest homeless people who use the sidewalks of New York as their bedrooms. The notion that one can seek to remove the homeless without raising a finger to expand the stock of affordable housing is unacceptable. New York City is not a French prostitute to be doused with perfume in order to hide what she's been up to. The issue before New York is not a cosmetic issue, the Mayor's offended sensibilities notwithstanding. Few street people are on the streets out of choice, and their resistance to shelters is hardly a puzzle. As disturbing as it is to see them sleeping in the entryways to the better stores, the much, much greater offense is the one they experience. A prediction: The ones who sleep on Madison Avenue and the like will be hassled, removed, perhaps arrested; the ones who sleep in Hell's Kitchen or one of New York's many other nondescript neighborhoods will be left alone. The Mayor's policy is about the look of things, and not the thing itself.
Oh oh. The list of "no thanks due" is a long one, too long to be contained within this space. I am thankful I do not have the space, thankful that by and large, the thanks outweigh the regrets and the irritations, thankful that nothing prevents me from saying she'hecheyanu on a day invented by austere and remote people whose devotion to the Bible does not begin to explain how they came up with so Jewish a holiday.
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