Thanksgiving 2023

 

As I’ve written many times in this space, Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday. I have only the happiest childhood memories of the holiday, most of them featuring my mother’s family gathered around my grandmother’s dining room table in her apartment on Eighty-Fourth Street in Bensonhurst. And I have nice memories of the earlier part of those Thanksgivings as well, the several hours that my mother and her sister, my Aunt Ruth, would work with my grandmother in her kitchen preparing the meal while my father and my Uncle Herb were assigned to amusing me (or, as my mother would have said, “doing something with me”) while the womenfolk did their thing in the kitchen. (Holiday roles were distinctly gender-specific in our family back then.) And so we’d go for a walk in the neighborhood, usually wandering down Bay Parkway or along Eighty-Sixth Street to see what was going on in the neighborhood or, in the last years of my grandmother’s life, to check on how much progress had been made on the Verrazzano Bridge, then just being built. Those were happy times and even now, after all these years, I remember them fondly and gratefully.

I have other nice memories as well, for example the one featuring my late mother-in-law organizing a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for her new American son-in-law when we came to visit Toronto in the first year of our marriage. (The only strange part was that Joan’s mother had somehow come to think that part of the fun involved actually dressing up as Pilgrims, to which minhag she dutifully nodded by buying a kind of white cap that seemed to her to suggest seventeenth-century New England and then wearing it at the table.) I was beyond touched by the whole thing and, even to this day, the memory of my first Thanksgiving outside of these United States remains one of the nicest of them all.

I have other nice memories too—our strange ex-pat Thanksgivings in Germany, for example, featuring roast chicken since there simply were no kosher turkeys for purchase anywhere in the Federal Republic, at least not as far as I could see—but that was all then. And this is now. Tradition bids us gather around our dining room tables and speak openly about our sense of thanksgiving, of gratitude, of appreciation for the bounty of the world. It shouldn’t be that complicated: we actually do all benefit from the bounteous earth and from the wealth of natural resources with which our nation has been blessed. And yet what Jewish soul can give him- or herself over to the “normal” sense of uncomplicated thankfulness the holiday exists to engender while so many hundreds—including babies, including a newborn, including little children—are being held captive by a fiendish and barbarous enemy that has shown no sign—or at least no public sign—of being willing to return these innocents to their families and to their homes.

Or is that the wrong way to approach the issue? Joan and I are going to have Thanksgiving at our home, as we always do. (I am writing this before the holiday although you will read it the day following.) One of our children, our son Emil, will be in Boston for the holiday with his husband Adam and their baby. (Adam is from Boston, which is where his mother still lives.) But our other children will be with us, as will also be our son-in-law’s parents and a friend of our older son Max who has no other place to go. So we will have a full house. I can already see the scene in my mind’s eye. The table will be set beautifully. Four of our five grandchildren will be present. As I contemplate what this week will yet bring, I feel overcome with the thought that gratitude is not merely being happy you have some specific thing you have in your life. It’s much more complicated than that, I realize—and has more to do with the fragility that inheres in life than with just being pleased with the things you’ve acquired over the years. My heart aches constantly these days for the hostages held by Hamas, but particularly for the children and for the babies, for those poor souls—some not even old enough fully to understand what has befallen them, some almost definitely unaware of the fate of their families, all but the babies no doubt terrified of what every next hour might bring. But I know enough of Jewish history—more than enough, actually—to understand that their story is not about some tragedy that befell them out of nowhere, but rather about the nature of Jewish life, about the precariousness that inheres in Jewishness itself.

We live our lives on a razor’s blade, all of us. The world is awash in cruelty, in prejudice, in savagery. And things can change on a dime: the anti-Semitism our Jewish students are facing on America’s college campuses, for example, would have been unimaginable for most of us even just a few years ago, let alone when I myself was in college. And yet here we are in a world in which a credible death threat against Jewish students in one our most prestigious Ivy League universities actually led to the arrest the other week of someone who apparently actually was planning to kill Jewish people. All of this, we all know.

So the real question is how to respond to it. With worry, certainly. And with action and not just words, just as certainly—Joan and I went to Washington last week specifically to be present on the Mall when almost 5% of Jewish America gathered to support Israel. But there’s a spiritual part of this as well and that is the part that coincides, at least emotionally for me, with Thanksgiving.

I know that when I look out at my table on Thursday, I will be seized, at least at first, with anxiety, with uncertainty born on my inability to know what the future will bring to all the assembled. (I know myself at least that well.) But my plan is to deal with that ill ease by summoning up a sense of deep, abiding gratitude to God for the gifts that the holiday will have put right before my eyes. My home. Joan. My children. My children-in-law. My grandchildren. All of us gathered under one roof, all of us safe and sound, all of us well-fed and relaxed, all of us together.    

I have responded to October 7 in many different ways. I have lost track of how many emails I’ve sent to our senators, to our (so far still-seated) representative in the House, to the President himself, all of them expressing my hope that the United States will never waver in its support for Israel. Joan and I keep sending checks out as well—to the FIDF and to the American Friends of the Magen David Adom, but also to other, less well-known charities doing things in Israel on a smaller scale for displaced families, for bereaved families, and especially for the families of the hostages. But on Thanksgiving, I plan to respond emotionally and spiritually to the challenge of the day not by becoming angry or anxious, but by allowing myself to be filled to overflowing with gratitude to God for the gifts that will be right there before me. I plan to look out at my family, at my people, and despite everything I know of the world—despite everything I know of Jewish history, despite all I’ve read and learned about the history of anti-Semitism, despite all of it—to allow myself to be filled with the deepest sense of gratitude for the moment and for all that that moment will be capable of suggesting about the future.