Thankful memories: Turkey Days spent with my mother
Mom, who was raised in Buffalo in a family of Orthodox emigrants from Eastern Europe but strayed from strict observance when she left home, and became more traditional as she aged, religiously commemorated Thanksgiving.
Her parents, unfamiliar with US customs, did not prepare a Thanksgiving meal when she was young. Later, living with her folks, she convinced them to make a holiday meal that day. Then, she got married, and …
Every year, at our modest home, no matter how busy she was raising a family and helping Dad with his home-based business, she would start weeks ahead preparing for Thanksgiving: Inviting guests. Decorating the living room walls and table with artistic Pilgrims and turkeys. Shopping for a turkey – Empire, when I began keeping kosher. Bread crumbs for the stuffing. Sweet potatoes. Canned cranberry. Filling for the pumpkin pie.
Standard fare, whose seductive smells filled the house. But for Mom it was more than the food. It was an excuse to host her friends for a meal – old friends, and friends of her children who became Mom’s new friends.
We inherited her love for Thanksgiving. We would no more miss holding a Thanksgiving meal than we would miss making a seder on Passover.
For Mom, it was a chance to show thanks, really show thanks. Before we could set a fork into the feast (after Mom would watch that morning’s Macy’s parade on TV), Mom would have everyone around the table declare what he or she was thankful for that year. It was usually things like friends, family, health, a job.
Standard fare. But for Mom it was a chance – for her and her guests – to express a sense of gratefulness. Especially, for living in the United States, where Jews were able to freely and openly live as Jews.
For her parents, who had left anti-Semitic, pogrom-ridden northeast Poland (now northwest Belarus) at the turn of the 20th century, who had settled in Buffalo and joined a thriving Jewish community, who had achieved every immigrant’s goal of owning their own home, the US was a land of once-unimaginable economic and religious opportunity. Dad, who was raised by secular parents in pre-war Berlin, and had escaped the increasingly dangerous Third Reich, with the help of Protestant friends, a half year before Kristallnacht, also settled in Buffalo; he married there, raised three children, and acquiesced in Mom’s insistence that we receive a Jewish education.
For Mom, like many of her Jewish peers, the US was a land of golden possibilities.
“This country has been very good to us,” as Jews, Mom would tell us, as well as any Jewish people she would meet who would foolishly tell her that they did not plan to celebrate Thanksgiving. These people, usually self-identified as Orthodox, would explain that Thanksgiving is not a Jewish holiday and that they felt no obligation to participate in it.
Some people might reflexively tell Mom that for a believing Jew, “every day is Thanksgiving.”
Mom would have none of that. No clichés, please! “There is nothing about Thanksgiving that is against Judaism,” she would tell the scoffers. “It’s not Jewish to give thanks?”
Jewish tradition was on her side.
“One of the cardinal principles of Judaism is gratitude,” Rabbi Berel Wein wrote in a blog some years ago.
“Jewish prayer is an ongoing seminar in gratitude,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in an essay seven years ago. “Birkot ha-Shachar, ‘the Dawn Blessings’ said at the start of morning prayers each day, are a litany of thanksgiving for life itself: the human body, the physical world, land to stand on and eyes to see with.”
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who issued several rulings on the permissibility of celebrating Thanksgiving, declared in one of them that halacha recognized no prohibition in eating a joyous meal, complete with turkey, on the last Thursday in November.
Mom was on firm theological ground. Was thanks any less legitimate if it was offered informally, impromptually, at a meal of turkey with all the trimmings, in one’s lingua franca, than in a formal, siddur-based setting, in Lashon HaKodesh?
The non-Thanksgiving crowd may not have started to host Thanksgiving meals after Mom’s tongue lashing, but they would not be foolish enough to again inform her again of their alternative plans on that upcoming Thursday. Maybe she made them consider her point of view.
In some Orthodox circles, the debate over the propriety of Thanksgiving – is it assur, is it muttar? – is an annoying occurrence each November. Proponents of both positions argue the merits of their point of view in shul, in Internet threads, in newspaper columns.
Why do they waste their energy trying to convince people on the other side of the yes/no divide that their answer is halachically and hashgafically correct? There is clearly no mention of the holiday in Tanach or Talmud or other rabbinical sources, or no clear prohibition. So don’t observe it! Nothing about Thanksgiving customs violates Jewish mesorah, there is no connection to idolatrous religions, so don’t make a fuss about people who, as we say, hold by it.
It reminds me a story I read about Israeli elections in the early year of the State. Should Torah-observant Jews take part in the vote, or boycott it? Advocates of both sides brought the controversy to a prominent Chasidic rabbi. “Relax!” he told them, probably in Yiddish – neither opinion is so vital or so clear cut, the issue is not so life-and-death, that you have to spend your time arguing about it.
Ditto for Thanksgiving. If you observe it or don’t, it’s not crucial to your Jewish identity or level of Yiddishkeit. Either way, you can keep Shabbat the next day.
That’s my derech.
And Mom’s. She was not threatened by other Jews’ choice to ignore Thanksgiving.
Ner Israel yeshiva in Baltimore reached an apparent accommodation; I was there on Thanksgiving a few decades ago to do an interview; at lunch, the dining room served turkey; no “yom tov” decorations, no seasonal side dishes, as I recall, but a recognition that some talmidim there appreciated a taste of the familiar fowl.
For several years, whether away at grad school or working in the Greater New York area; I would go home for Thanksgiving; that tradition dissipated in recent years, for various logistical reasons; but I have fond memories of Thanksgiving with Mom.
In the days before the holiday, I would eagerly help her prepare the Thanksgiving food, stuffing the turkey and helping to fill the pie. Not that I was such a good son; but my reward for helping out was a small glass dish of excess stuffing and extra pumpkin chiffon. Yum!
“Do your Orthodox friends observe Thanksgiving?” Mom would ask me each year. She often knew that the answer was “no,” and the answer made her burn. “How could a Jew not be grateful for living in this country?” Especially Orthodox Jews. Her Orthodox parents had feared living Jewish lives in their Old Country homeland. Not so in their adopted home.
While Mom, as an adult, did not lead, by the usual definition, an Orthodox lifestyle, her belief in the importance of expressing thanks was definitely and definitively Jewish. As observant Jews, we start each day with Modeh Ani, thanking G-d for restoring our soul.
Nowadays, I always join some of my kosher-keeping friends for a Thanksgiving meal. Mom taught me that treating that day like any other weekday at the end of November is shortchanging the spiritual potential of that day.
And for that I am thankful.
