Dear Friends:
What follows was written by Pearl Kazin and published in The New Yorker in November 1955.
“At P.S. 125, as soon as October was folded back on the calendar, we began paying intense, if somewhat baffled, homage to the glories of Thanksgiving.
“Most of us were the children of immigrants from Vilna or Minsky or Odessa, who rarely budged from Brooklyn, and we had to sing loudly our praises for the gathering of the harvest and the bounty of the land as the trolley cars clanged by under the windows of our classroom. Day after day, we devoted ourselves to that old American holiday first conceived, we were told, in a bleak place called New England, by the Pilgrims, also known as ancestors. These ancestors spoke English without an accent, did not have to pass through Ellis Island when they reached the golden land, and who had come to these shores to escape religious persecution.
“There was a song we sang every November – ‘We gather together and ask the Lord’s blessing. He chastens and hastens His will to make known.’ We sang it with loud and cheerful assurance as Miss Johnson thumped away on a piano. Like Christmas carols, this Thanksgiving hymn had the lure of the forbidden. I would come home on November afternoons, my face pink from the autumn air and the grandeur of Thanksgiving, and sing ‘We Gather Together’ until my mother, who would be working on a dress for one of her customers and never seemed to be listening, would suddenly hear ‘the Lord’s blessing’ and exclaim, ‘What kind of a song is this for a Jewish girl to sing! Stop this minute, it’s not nice; somebody might hear you.”
This excerpt speaks to the puzzlement that our turn-of-the-twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish ancestors had about America and its customs. A holiday celebrated by people of different religions and of various ethnicities was as unknown to them as was a national celebration based on a common secular value, in this case ‘gratitude.’ At first, Jews were so separated from American society that they ignored Thanksgiving, but as many of them became acculturated through public education and the media, the rabbis were asked to rule whether or not it was kosher to celebrate the holiday. Many of their early rulings reflect their total isolation from American society, proving that you can take the rabbi out of Poland, but you can’t take Poland out of the rabbi. Most rabbis ruled against observing the holiday based on the Torah principle that Jews may not participate in the celebrations and rites of a foreign people. Others noted that Thanksgiving pays tribute to Christian Pilgrims and to pagan indigenous Americans. Some rabbis expressed concern that the preparation for the feast associated with Thanksgiving might limit the time for Shabbat preparations. One rabbi went so far as to question the kashrut status of the turkey since the bird was unknown in Europe. Today, most Hasidic and many Yeshivish families still abstain from celebrating Thanksgiving. It’s less an act of defiance or even conscious intention than an expression of their continued isolation from secular America.
I grew up in a family that went the other way. My paternal grandparents were American-born, usual in my day. Although they were strongly identified as Jews, their religion was socialism. They loved America and the freedom it afforded them. Because of the early death of my grandfather and the poverty that my grandmother suffered during the Depression, my father and his siblings had no Jewish education. My father’s religion became democracy. His heroes were American presidents and generals. So the morning after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, my father was the first in the city of Philadelphia to enlist in the Navy. He would have made a career of it, but my mom, the only one whom he loved before ‘country,’ wanted a normal family life that would be anchored on land. Still, it was American rites and rituals that defined our family. The family candy store was closed for half a day for civil holidays – Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day – and celebrated by flying the flag, and with picnics by a lake with hot dogs and burgers. Similarly, although our polling place was at Joe Rizzo’s barber shop a block away from the store, my parents closed the store for an hour every Election Day with a sign reading “Gone [sic.]Votin’” to announce to the world that they were fulfilling their responsibility as citizens.
The only day that the store was fully shuttered was on Thanksgiving. A week in advance, my mother would steal time from her shifts in the store to begin preparations for Thanksgiving dinner. The “sides” were oven-ready by the morning of Thanksgiving with the cooking time marked on their foil covers. At 11:00, my father would place the turkey into the oven after considerable debate over temperature and time. Aunts, uncles, and cousins began to arrive at noon in anticipation of the seating at 4:00. Dinner officially began when my grandmother placed the framed photograph of Franklin Roosevelt, which she kept on her nightstand, at the center of the table. My father would then make his toast to the United States with Franks black-cherry soda, which was followed by the communal singing of (yes) “We Gather Together” and Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”
I first read Mordecai Kaplan’s “Judaism As A Civilization” in college in a seminar titled “Jewish Existentialists.” I found comfort in Kaplan’s theology – I could have written it, I thought – and I liked his emphasis on community. But what resonated with me most was his insistence that Jews in America live in two civilizations, which meant that Judaism would be redefined by democracy, and that America would benefit from Torah values of justice, equality, and social responsibility. Thanksgiving was the parade example of how that might be celebrated not only by Jewish Americans, but by citizens and residents from all backgrounds.
Kaplan also taught us about the evolution of Judaism, which can be applied to American civil religion, too. Though Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day have become “Festivals of the Discount Mattress”, Thanksgiving, grounded in the non-denominational, sacred value of gratitude and which is centered in the home, has become a time for us to give as well as to thank, to do our part to correct the societal imbalance especially regarding food and hunger thereby observing the mitsva of Torah later iterated by the prophet Isaiah to feed the hungry. Now that’s the fulfilment of Kaplan’s dream of living in two civilizations.
With gratitude,
Lee
