EMBRACE/RESIST: HOW THANKSGIVING INVITES US TO WRESTLE WITH AMERICAN HISTORY AND IDENTITY

Rabbi Art Waskow, of blessed memory, taught that attending to festivals and the wheel of the seasons is what most distinguishes Jewish Americans from our neighbors. He offered this as a challenge to dominant views in the 70s, that Jews were foremost defined by the Holocaust, the State of Israel, and/or belonging to a particular institution. As a founder of Jewish Renewal, Art encouraged an informed, creative, expansive, liberational, and multivocal approach wherein Jews were to be in relationship to the past without swearing fealty to it. This approach is what Art called “wrestling with tradition:” 

For us, for me, the way to renew Jewish life has been to wrestle with the Jewish past and present. Not to bow down before it, not to turn away from it. What is wrestling? It is a close grappling that has some elements of fighting and some elements of embracing in it, at the same time and in the same process. There are both love and anger in a wrestle. In a wrestle I do not pretend my partner is the same as me––and I do not pretend I am the same as my partner. We are two; I, who I fully am; and the other, fully other. The name of the people Israel—Yisrael— means the Godwrestler, and this is our best path of living. [...]

This is how the festivals grew through the millennia and still are growing. Our most ancient forebears took festivals of the sun and moon, the birth of lambs and the harvest of barley—and wrestled with these nature festivals to create history festivals, celebrations of political liberations, and observances of military disasters. They wrestled with history and nature to create festivals that evoked and embodied the deepest yearnings, fears, and even clownings of the human spirit. In the Biblical age, they focused these celebrations on offering up plants and animals at a sacred site.

After the Holy Temple was destroyed and the sacrifices were ended, the ancient rabbis wrestled with the festivals again. They developed prayer and ceremony, food and song, that would express the same—or new—deep human needs; that would fulfill the commands inscribed deep within the human spirit by the Root of Being. They knew they were doing much that was new; they felt they were hearing commands and ideas that were old.

 (Art Waskow, Seasons of Our Joy, xii-xiii).

How can we—Jews and non-Jews alike observing Thanksgiving in America—see ourselves as continuing this lineage of wrestling?

Cannupa Hanska Luger, "Future Ancestral Technologies: We Survive You," Mandan, ND, 2021 (photo by Justin Deegan; courtesy of the artist).

Engraving depicting the attack on the Pequot Fort, published in 1638. Photo Facsimile made in circa 1870.

The dominant myth of Thanksgiving whitewashes a history drenched in blood. Before Plymouth, all across Europe, the Middle East, and in the Americas, there were autumnal harvest festivals—celebrating the land, its workers, and tis fruits. The Calvinist faith of the pilgrims shaped their once-Catholic-once-pagan English observances of this time of year, just as indigenous histories, agricultures, symbols, and languages shaped the diverse Thanksgivings of the peoples of Turtle Island. When Europeans came to America, there was no immediate, mutually recognizing, peaceful synergizing of these cultures. Indeed, the earliest iteration of the modern American “Thanksgiving” meal can be traced to the Massachusetts settlers, and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies held after the massacre of between 400 and 700 Pequots on May 26, 1637 near the Mystic River. For the next almost four hundred, years, the massacres have not ceased. The land, and its fruits, in which the European settlers found so much promise, beauty, and hope, was and has continued to be stolen. Today we celebrate the land’s bounty. Today is the Day of Mourning. What of this history do we resist? What do we embrace?   

George Washington declared a national Thanksgiving on Thursday, November 26, 1789 and would do so again in 1795. The initial Thanksgiving was a multifaith celebration, including, among a variety of clergy, R. Gershon Mendes Seixas of Congregation Shearith Israel. But the annual, national holiday was only made official by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, a few months after the Emancipation Proclamation. Before 1863, mostly white and indigenous people observed Thanksgiving. Black Americans, brought to or born in the US through human trafficking and slavery, were excluded from participation. The cruelty of this exclusion particularly palpable when, in the fields, gardens, and kitchens Black Americans were frequently much more intimate with the cycles and seasons of this land than their white taskmasters. With Lincoln’s proclamation, African American farmers could finally own land, and eat and sell its fruit. still yet, Jim Crow and its legacies, concurrent with and succeeding Northern Migration, often severed Back Americans from the hard won connection to the land. Community gardens and organizations, like R. Roots Garden and Appetite for Change in North Minneapolis, in recent years have worked to help reconnect folk to foodways and agriculture often lost in the tide of urbanization and white respectability.

Romare Bearden, "The Family (Around the Dining Table)", 1975, color photo-etching and aquatint on paper.

And all the while, Thanksgiving has become extremely popular within the African American community. In an informal 2022 poll, 92%  of Black Americans said they celebrate Thanksgiving, while 10% also or alternatively observe the Day of Mourning. 62% said they do not think or talk much about the history of the holiday but focus on family, community, and being together.

Over the next century and a half, America shifted through new technologies, regional and world wars, cultural and political revolutions, and environmental change. And it shifted in population, dramatically. Immigrants escaping untenable, even deadly homelands or just seeking better prospects, radically shifted the make up of cities and towns across the nation. And resistance to immigrants, legally and illegally, followed: the Chinese Exclusion Act, the anti-immigration bias of Prohibition, the internment of Japanese and German Americans in WWI, the influx of Hmong refugees during and following the Vietnam War, the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11, the ongoing cruelty at the Mexican/US boarder. For many, gaining from America meant sacrificing the language, culture, and traditions of your origin. But with Civil Rights and Black Pride, Third World Solidarity, new globalisms, and other cultural revolutions, immigrants and their children started seeing themselves, their heritage, and their rights with new pride. Am I American or am I Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Eastern European, Jewish, Indian, Cambodian, Persian, Arab, Nigerian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Hmong, Somali? Both? Neither?

Artist Unknown, story cloth depicting The Secret War and Hmong fleeing Laos, 1980s-1990s, Photo by Noah Vang, item at the Hmong Archive

Each individual and each generation has held different answers, sometimes represented by what foods are or aren’t at Thanksgiving. Crouton stuffing, roast turkey, potatoes, mashed and sweet; or, lasagnas, spring rolls, kua txob, tamales, kugels, jeweled rice, or roasted goose? The table ritualizes American stories, both very personal and communal, announcing and obscuring where we come from and our aspirations for where we might someday go. What the food is and how it got here tells a story of who we are.

Norman Rockwell, “Freedom from Want,” 1943.

The Norman Rockwell family becomes another myth woven into the Thanksgiving tapestry. The elevation to an ideal of one kind of (White, Anglo Saxon Protestant) family can alienate (the majority of) families who do not match this image because of family conflict, because of physical distance or immigration status, because of religious/racial/ethnic differences, because of death and sickness, because of a bio family’s disapproval of their family member’s gender and sexuality. But if we fight against a singular idea of family, Thanksgivings also is an opportunity for us to embrace and celebrate all sorts family-types , signaled in no small part, by the rise in recent years of “Friendsgivings.” Some celebrate these friendsgivings on the fourth Thursday; others feel no obligation for it to align with the national holiday. In a gathering of chosen loved ones, the dynamism of America’s story is on full display. Our distinct stories and identities merge and emerge through the foods we eat and the traditions we share around the table. The wrestling becomes an all out brawl. A magnificent brawl of life.

1st page of order from George Washington’s Inaugural Thanksgiving service written by R. Gershom Mendes Seixas, 1789

Thanksgiving prayer booklet, c. 1940

Rabbi Waskow says that in every festival, “the very interweaving of the themes of history and nature, the human life cycle and moments of spiritual experience—remind us that in some sense all the realms of life are dancing with each other. The circles of the sun, and of the moon; of a single human life between the generations, and an entire people’s history of renewal. Of every quiet act of newness, birth, creation—all are echoes of One Circle” (Waskow, Seasons, xxiv).

Our festivals allow us to celebrate the totality of who are: what we resist and what we embrace. We wrestle through the foods we prepare and eat, through what we do and do not say or sing around the table. Thanksgiving is an opportunity to investigate what it means to be America... to ask ourselves, what of this identity, this nation, this history do we embrace? What do we resist?