Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah overlap this year:
Back in 1888—the only other time Hanukkah and Thanksgiving converged—the weekly Jewish American newspaper, The American Hebrew, “encouraged readers to enthusiastically embrace both holidays, because Hanukkah is itself a holiday of Thanksgiving,” says Dianne Ashton, author of the recently published book, Hanukkah in America: A History. The message was, “when it’s Thanksgiving, you can completely join in with American society” to celebrate this ecumenical holiday, she says. “But not with Christmas, because it is a Christian holiday.”
Ultimately, “Thanksgiving is a civic holiday with spiritual overtones,” says Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis. Regardless of your religion or lack of faith, the holiday “speaks to gratitude, to forces greater than ourselves, and calls upon us to help others,” she points out.
Allison Benedikt is not a fan:
Because my favorite thing about Thanksgiving is that it’s secular.
I know, I know, we’re supposed to be giving thanks to “our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” as Abe Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation establishing the holiday put it. But for most Americans, Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday. It is a food and football holiday. We eat, drink, watch parades, argue about politics, and give thanks. In my family, at least, the gratitude is secular—we give thanks to each other. The most common choked-up toast at the table: “I’m just so lucky to have all of you.” I don’t want my religion or anyone else’s pulling up a seat.
Some of this is because I am intermarried. I cannot tell you what a relief it is to have this one major holiday—the best one!—that isn’t in some part about what I am and my husband is not (Jewish), or what he is and I’m not (Christmas-celebrating). Given the latest survey of American Jews—58 percent of whom are intermarried—I suspect we are not alone in those feelings. Thanksgiving, for all its colonialist origin-story problems, is the one great holiday where you don’t have to explain to your kids why Mom believes this and Dad believes that. One great holiday that all of your neighbors celebrate, regardless of background.
Which brings to mind a classic passage from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral:
[I]t was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff–no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people–one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion for the Christians, where everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.
The Dish 