Thanksgiving 2020

The word “myth” has a kind of a bad rep these days. And, indeed, in normal American English the word “myth” is used regularly to refer to things that, for all they might be widely believed to be true, are not actually true at all. It’s a myth that Elvis spent years holed up on the Mir Space Station after his alleged “death.” (Mir crashed into the Pacific in 2001, so it doesn’t matter that much now anyway.) It’s a myth that you can dissolve an iron nail in a glass of Coca-Cola if you wait long enough. (That isn’t true, is it? Click here to find out.) It’s a myth that there are huge colonies of alligators living in the New York City sewer system. (Or are they down there somewhere? Click here and see what you think.) You see what I mean: when someone asserts something to be true and the response is “that’s just a myth,” it means that it isn’t true at all. And that is a usage that all fluent English-speakers understand easily.

But among scholars of religion, the word “myth” means something else entirely: not a false story that has somehow come widely to be believed, but a tale, long or short, that a nation tells and retells because it is deemed somehow to encapsulate something of that people’s inner essence, something of its self-conception, of its ideational core. The question of whether the story is historically true or not thus fades into irrelevance—it might be true or it might not be, but the reason the myth is worthy of consideration has to do with something else entirely. To give a relatively tame example, when Americans tell the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, they are suggesting that integrity, honesty, and responsibility are among the nation’s most basic values, not that they have the magic ability somehow to know what a little boy once said to his mother (or was it to his father?) sometime in the first third of the eighteenth century.

The same is true of the myths of other nations. In our country, Greek and Roman myths are taught widely in our high schools (or at least they were when I was a high school student), but tales derived from other national mythologies—old Germanic mythology, for example, or the rich mythological heritage of the Native Peoples that the European colonialists found in place here in North America when they presumed to “discover” the New World—far less so. More controversial is speaking about Bible stories as myths—and this is so even when the point is not to use that designation subtly to suggest that they may not be historically true in every detail, but rather to promote them as core stories meant to suggest something of the national ethos of the Jewish people. There really shouldn’t be anything too off-putting in reading the Bible in this way: surely we can agree that Moses would have had no specific way to know precisely what words Eve spoke to Adam in Eden long before recorded history began and still find the story moving, chastening, and engaging. And yet people regularly become exercised by the intimation that even the least verifiable detail in the scriptural narrative may not be precisely accurate in terms of its historicity. Such people would do well to read my book, Spiritual Integrity, to see how inconsonant with meaningful spiritual growth it is to insist on the truth of details you have no actual way to verify.

But I write today not to promote my book (well, maybe a little), but to apply these thoughts to my favorite American holiday, Thanksgiving.

It’s become a regular pre-Thanksgiving ritual for there to appear newspaper article after blog post after op-ed piece in which the author professes wide-eyed amazement recently to have discovered the flaws in the Thanksgiving story. The Pilgrims (a name later assigned to them by tradition, not one they themselves would have recognized) did not come here seeking religious freedom, which they already had in Holland anyway, but rather to establish a kind of religious theocracy in which they could specifically deny religious freedom to others. And weirdly omitted as well is the detail they left out when, as a first-grader in P.S. 3, I first heard the story of noble Squanto teaching the Pilgrims how to farm: that he was the sole surviving member of his tribe, the Patuxet, because the entire tribe other than himself had been wiped out by smallpox, a disease brought here by Europeans seeking to settle on land they chose to fantasize was uninhabited and thus legally unowned when they arrived here. I am also quite sure Mrs. Riskin didn’t mention the Pequot War when telling us the story of the first Thanksgiving. But to tell the story of that first feast without reference to the war that broke out within a decade between the Massachusetts natives and the English colonists, a war that ended with the massacre of almost an entire tribe and the few hundred survivors being sold into slavery, seems—to say the least—slightly misleading.

I could go on.  There’s practically a cottage industry out there that exists to ruin the holiday by forcing history into the narrative we all learned as children. (To see what I mean, click here, here, here, here, or here.) But maybe the solution isn’t to trash the holiday or to suffer over the historicity of the narrative, but to move the whole concept—the holiday itself and its backstory—from the realm of history to the realm of myth.

If we adopt this line of thinking, Thanksgiving stops being about the terrifically brutal way the natives were treated by Europeans who somehow didn’t feel ridiculous “claiming” other people’s property for their own king or queen, but rather about the image the story as told projects onto the national ethos of the American people. Reading the story that way allow us to embrace the core values that have generated its many details over the years since President Lincoln first proclaimed it as a national holiday in 1863—and foremost among them the valorization of religious freedom, of interethnic cooperation, of mutual respect between different racial groups, and of a common sense of rootedness in this soil that has nothing to do with where anyone’s parents or grandparents were born and everything to do with the will of the nation to exist as the embodiment of its own national values without reference to the ethnic origin of any of its citizens.  At its core, that is what Thanksgiving has evolved into being about. And that is what we should focus on as we sit down, even pandemic-style, to enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner.

Yes, we need to see to it that the children in our schools are given a clearer sense of what the European settlement of North American entailed for its native peoples. And we certainly need to bring to the fore forgotten episodes like the Pequod War or King Philip’s War (also, as far as I can see, forgotten by all) and make sure that our children learn about them and understand their significance. But I believe we can do that without ruining Thanksgiving…and that the key to success will lie precisely in moving the holiday from the domain of history into the realm of myth.

When you read this, Thanksgiving will be behind us. I hope you all had happy days with whatever kind of family-pod feasting the circumstances of the hour permitted you. Joan and I are planning something along those lines ourselves. But most of all I hope that the values that the holiday promote become fixed in our hearts and in the hearts of our children, and that we find it possible to embrace those values without over-emphasizing the upsetting history behind the narrative, without feeling honor-bound not to enjoy Thanksgiving because of details always omitted when we first heard the backstory as schoolchildren.