WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Over the years, I’ve personally observed Yom Kippur, Passover and Hanukkah. This year I’m adding a fourth Jewish holiday, Thanksgiving. Here’s two reasons why.
Thanksgiving as a Jewish Holiday, Too
Among the incomparable Jackie Mason’s many nail-on-the-head captures of American Jewish life are two insights in particular. In one, Jackie is asked “Can an American Jewish man be a janitor?” “Certainly,” Jackie replies with no equivocation. “The man is a janitor … but he owns the building.” The other depicts four U.S. Reform Jews in deep Talmudic study assembled. “I never eat pork,” says one, “only shrimp.” “But never at home,” assures the second, “only in a restaurant.” “Only in a Chinese restaurant,” qualifies the third. “And only on Christmas,” chimes in the fourth.
I extend this Reform principle of everyone as his own rebbe to Jewish holidays. Annually, I’ve observed just three. On Yom Kippur, I forego breakfast and lunch and spend the day in a chair re-reading what’s been called a rather dull book (talk about Repentance – I wrote it) on our Jewish people’s uninterrupted three thousand-year physical presence in our homeland of Israel. During Passover, (talk about Plagues) I subject myself to two full servings of bitter herbs, eight brimming cups of Passover wine, and endless boxes of matza. On Hanukkah nights, I sit in a room darkened but for the menorah’s candles, contemplating our Jewish heroes and our martyrs of long ago, and of not so long ago.
This year, I’ve declared and am celebrating a fourth Jewish holiday. I call it “Thanksgiving.” (Not so far-fetched. Amb. Ettinger had a column this week on Thanksgiving’s Mayflower founder – about as far heritage-removed as a U.S. WASP can get from American Jews – having himself explained his holiday’s Hebrew Testament roots. And if your turkey’s big enough, Thanksgiving can be a real Jewish Diaspora holiday – extending over two nights.)
The real-life genesis of this new Fourth Jewish Holiday commemoration of mine was my recollection this week of a pair of questions Lee and I had been asked in the Q&A following our PowerPoint [Hi, Henry] talk on Jewish homeland-delegitimizing media expressions to a big Evangelical Christian group. “Do American Jews,” we were asked, “regard America as exceptional? And, what’s wrong with American Jews? Why aren’t they more supportive of Israel?”
America as More Than ‘Exceptional’
We replied in terms justifying a day of American Jewish Thanksgiving. “Our people has an institutional memory,” we replied, “extending back three thousand years, most of the past two thousand of them spent as minorities in the lands of peoples of other religions. Gazing back at our people’s experiences over those years in those lands, we don’t regard America as ‘exceptional.’ We regard America as Unique.”
By this, I don’t naively regard the U.S. as having been saintly in its treatment of its minorities. A Native American (aka American Indian, aka Redskin) chief appeared one time to then Israeli Premier Shamir in a dream, and said to him, “Yitzhak, let me tell about ‘Land For Peace.’”
As for all that the American people lost through Slavery followed by Jim Crow, I give you one of my heroes, a pitcher named Satchel Paige, in a league of his own so far above the “major leagues” that it’s said that Joe DiMaggio knew he’d make it to the majors when he got a hit off of Paige in an exhibition game. I saw Paige effectively pitch an inning once in a Phillies (or maybe it was A’s) game. He must have been in his sixties, still all arms and legs. Imagine if he’d been allowed in his twenties. (I have two other ball-player heroes, Jackie Robinson, read his book Baseball Has Done It, not about the integration of baseball but about the impact baseball’s integration had on beginning to end “separate but [ho-ho] equal” in America; and Hank Greenberg, a genuine hero to American Jews at a time and place American Jews really really needed a hero.)
And then there’s that third American minority that mainstream Americans have not always treated fairly, us. I can’t get the failed voyage of the St. Louis out of my head. And I know that the U.S. shamefully joined Britain in intentionally not helping Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust. (If you don’t believe this but can’t bring yourself to read Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews in its entirety (I can’t), then read the damning summary in chapter 20 of Yoram Kaniuk’s sterling bio of Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus.) I know, e.g., about the extreme right-wing torch-bearing marchers in Charlottesville, chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” Hell, if you read the recent surveys’ statistics, we’re not even replacing ourselves. And I know about lots of other discriminations over the years against American Jews by majority Americans.
What makes America Unique is not that it hasn’t committed these sins against its minorities, which it has, but that it seems to me that virtually alone among the nations, America consciously strives to be better. And that’s grounds for all of us annually to commemorate a Thanksgiving.
American Jews and Israel
As of this writing, we American Jews can only stand in anxious wonder whether Israel’s right-wing (which most Jewish Americans don’t like, even detest) will for the second time in a row snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and fail to come up with a right-wing coalition. If they succeed in forming a government, it’s a relieved onlooker’s Thanksgiving for me.
But I think, here at by us American Jews’ home, there’s increasing rabbi and grassroots resistance to what’s increasingly rightly perceived as disrespectful attempted interference in Israeli people’s affairs by the official institutions of America’s Reform and Conservative Jewish movements, from within and not just from outside by the right. I cited two Conservative interferences last week, one condemning potential Israeli cabinet appointments and one on Israel not adopting liberal Americans’ causes. Then there was the open letter not long ago of ninety-some non-Orthodox U.S. rabbinical[!] students decrying Israeli “apartheid,” and before that by the Reform and Conservative movements and others calling for “two-states” with borders hewing to “the 1967 borders” and against “West Bank annexation.” Growing resistance to all of this is, by me, worthy of American Jews thanking the Almighty for having kept us alive and sustained us so that we might celebrate this year’s Thanksgiving.