Thanksgiving Thoughts

Thanksgiving morning. My ex-husband pulls up in the driveway a few minutes after 8:00am to pick up our daughter. My son bounds up the stairs to give me a hug; I pull him in close. “Happy Thanksgiving, kiddo,” I say, kissing the top of his head.

I pop my head outside to wish my kids’ father a happy Thanksgiving, too. They are driving down to Long Island to the home of one of my first cousins, for the annual gathering of aunts, uncles, and cousins on my mother’s side that has been going strong since my grandparents got married on Thanksgiving day, 1938.

My wife and I have our day planned out. We will take it slow this morning, then have tickets for the 12:30pm showing of "Queen & Slim" at the mall. Later, we’ll cook a meal together of mashed potatoes and butter and beautiful cuts of steak from our local butcher. We rarely cook and eat together, so this feels like a special occasion unto itself. We plan to listen to “Thanks for the Dance,” Leonard Cohen’s latest and last album, which she has already listened to twice and describes as “beautiful and brilliant.”

The kitchen window is open, letting in a cool breeze. The day is mild and quiet. My thoughts keep going to how for many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning. I wonder how we can go on celebrating something that has genocidal origins. The dissonance can be dizzying.

I think of the Reconstructionist movement of Judaism and the perspective that in addition to being a religion, Judaism is an evolving civilization. The imperative is to consider what the teachings, traditions, rituals, customs, and commandments mean in the ever-changing context of the broader social and cultural fabric and demands of our times.

The demands of our times, of course, are not only many; they are seemingly infinite. Last night, I read this passage from Deuteronomy 15:11: “For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land which is why I summoned you to open your hand to the poor and needy kinsman in your land.”

The idea of Thanksgiving the majority of Americans grew up with and keep is that it is a time to come together, to welcome each other to the table, to share in the abundant harvest the land has given us. We love the image of joining hands, just as stories of racial harmony are easier to swallow than ones of ongoing structural and systemic harm that enable us to dissociate from painful truths. These words from Torah, though unrelated to Thanksgiving, help steer me back to what I would like to believe is the spirit of the holiday.

How do we honor what’s meaningful to us about this day on a personal level – gathering with family, giving thanks – without causing further damage? It is a question I grapple with year after year. Perhaps it's not possible and we need to create new traditions from scratch. That may seem radical, because it is.

In the past few days, I’ve found myself wanting to reach out to so many individuals to say, I am thankful for you and your presence in my life. May you be well; may you know peace; may you feel loved. I suppose this could be true year-round, and it is.

There is no unity in our country, and this hurts my heart. The idealistic part of me would have us all gather somehow, not to set aside our differences per se but to create opportunities to confront them, to hear how our beliefs and blind spots hurt each other, to heal, to break bread, to apologize, to make reparations, to tell our children: Our comfort must not come at the impossible cost of another’s freedom, personhood, or safety.

So I come here to write, not knowing if these thoughts cohere into something useful but with the intention of communicating a twofold message: This is a day of sorrow. And this is a day of giving thanks. I wonder as I type the words whether both can be true, and am not at all convinced that the answer is yes.

Earlier, standing in the driveway with my first cup of coffee, I breathed deeply of the cool morning air and observed the shapes of bare branches against the pewter sky. Three ravens cawed between tall pines before landing in their look-out points.

I wanted to lie down right then, on the ground, to speak somehow to the earth itself, to say thank you, to say I’m so sorry, to say we must do better by you and each other. We must continue to heal the past by how we enter the present moment.

My hands are open. There are needy kinsman in my midst.

My beloved children are on their way to New York and my wife is in the shower as we prepare for our own quiet celebration at home.

I am wishing you, dear reader, a day of meaning and connection. May we hold gratitude and abundance alongside accountability and wakefulness.