THE TRUE MEANING OF THANKSGIVING

Here it is, the day where we gather with those nearest and dearest to us to celebrate an American holiday commemorating an event we're not sure ever took place. Now don't get me wrong. I love Thanksgiving. I love preparing the food, eating the food and for the fifth year having everyone in our home. Thanksgiving evokes some wonderful memories for me especially the many years spent at my Auntie Sylvia's house with our family. She was the cook I always aspired to be. Whatever cooking talent I inherited came from her. (Sorry, Mom.) But there is more to this holiday than food and family - oh and let's not forget football.




The history is problematic. For one thing, we use this holiday to memorialize the Pilgrims. We recognize them for their courage to cross the mighty Atlantic Ocean and start anew in a wild country far from home for a chance to practice religious freedom. It's not that simple. For one thing, although we refer to them as the Pilgrims, evoking their quest for a better life, they were actually referred to as the Puritans. The reason they had originally left England and the reason for that name was because they objected to the "Catholic"practices of the Protestant Church of England and their goal of was to "purify" the church of these practices. But that didn't mean they believed in religious freedom. Theirs was a rigid set of beliefs and there was no tolerance for any of the group who didn't toe the line. William Bradford, the leader of the Puritans, had observed in Holland that some of the members of his group in his words wanted to “use their owne libertie.” In other words, they wanted to be free to make their own choices. This was not acceptable. So he drew up the Mayflower Compact. Rather than being the early example of democracy that we were taught about in elementary school, it was actually used to bind those on the Mayflower to follow the dictates of the leader or not even be allowed to go on shore when the ship landed. And why leave Holland? It was not because the Dutch refused to let them practice their religion. It was because Holland was considered too open-minded and the Puritan leaders were afraid that members of their flock would be lead astray.



The story of the first Thanksgiving is equally complicated. The "first Thanksgiving" was a feast to celebrate a successful Fall harvest as had been the tradition in England. Only 53 of the original 102 colonists had survived that first winter so they had reason to celebrate. There are only two contemporary accounts of the event. They both mention that 90 members of the Wampanoag tribe were present, including their chief Massasoit and a young man named Squanto who served as a translator. How did he know English? Because he had been captured by members of and earlier expedition and held as a slave in Europe for many years. We don't even know if they were invited guests. The settlers spent some time before the feast hunting for game. There is some speculation that the natives were concerned about this activity and came to investigate. Just like some of us welcome people into our home on Thanksgiving because we feel we have to, the 53 settlers may have looked at the 90 Wampanoag warriors and decided the better part of valor was to share their feast.



And did that feast include such "traditional" foods as turkey, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie? Probably not. The colonists didn’t have potatoes, nor did they have butter or flour necessary for making pies. The pilgrims hadn’t even built their first oven by the time of the first Thanksgiving. The accounts we have only mention fowl and deer, but guesses can be made based on the types of food they often wrote about such as mussels, lobsters, grapes, plums, corn and herbs. There is no actual proof that the colonists ate turkey at the feast either. Turkey wasn’t even associated with the Thanksgiving holiday until an editor of a magazine called Godey’s Lady’s Book came across Edward Winslow’s writings about the feast in the 1840s and focused her attention on the brief sentence about the colonist’s hunt for wild turkeys that fall: “And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc."



Also, we always talk about the "first Thanksgiving." Was there a "second Thanksgiving?" Not as such. There is no contemporary record of the pilgrims holding any more harvest celebrations after 1621. In July of 1623, the pilgrims did hold what they called a "Thanksgiving.” This was simply a religious day of prayer and fasting that had nothing to do with the fall harvest. As time passed these two events became connected and by the late 1600s many individual colonies and settlements, began holding “Thanksgiving feasts” during the autumn months. For many years the Thanksgiving holiday was only observed in New England. It wasn't until 1863 that Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday. This was during they Civil War and Lincoln hoped the new holiday would unify the bitterly divided country. I'm not sure it had the desired effect, but the  Thanksgiving holiday has continued ever since.



What are we left with? No celebration of the quest for religious freedom? No example of peaceful co
oexistence and assistance between the native population and the immigrants? No image of these two groups gathered around a dinner table laden with turkey and all the fixings? No beginning of a time-honored tradition? Unfortunately not. We must remove the rose-colored glasses of childhood and recognize that history is much messier than we would like to believe and the lessons are not that simple and straightforward.

So, what is the true meaning of Thanksgiving? This may sound redundant, but it is to give thanks. That first feast was a celebration of survival, of a bountiful harvest and hope for the future. These are things we can relate to. At our Thanksgiving table we recite the Hebrew prayer called the Shecheyanu which says, "Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this season." In other words, thank you for allowing us to survive another year so we can all be here to share this celebration. We then say the Motzi, our equivalent of saying Grace, thanking God for the food we are about to eat. And lastly before we eat we go around the table and each person says what they are thankful for this year. Then we dig in.

My message on this third Thursday of November is simple. Wherever you are, whomever you are with, whatever you are doing today; take a moment to be grateful. To appreciate what you have. To realize the blessings bestowed on us every day and to not take them for granted. We have survived another orbit around the sun, we have enough food to sustain our bodies and there is always hope for the future. Happy Thanksgiving.

What Now?

I know I'm probably going to offend a lot of people with this. My only comforts are that I will probably offend equal numbers of people at each end of the political spectrum and that my true friends will take this is the spirit it is meant. That being said, here goes.





What we have right now vis a vis the immigration problem in the United States is a cluster f**k. There is no other way to describe it. They say that a person with an addiction problem doesn't usually decide to get help until they have reached rock bottom. I am hoping that this is rock bottom for the way our nation in dealing with immigration and now there will be motivation to get into recovery.
Before I go any further, let me be very clear about one thing. What is being done to these children being brought across the border is unconscionable, unconstitutional and un-American. I was going to say that it is wrong to put children in any kind of detention for any reason, but having served on a grand jury and seen the kind of crimes committed by some juveniles, I cannot make that blanket a statement. However, even those relatively rare cases are only done after a judicial process. My FB feed has been inundated with comparisons to Nazi Germany.  I was also struck by a post from George Takei in which he commented that when he was sent to an internment camp during World War II at least he was with his parents. These historical precedents are troubling, but essentially irrelevant. Even if such a thing had never happened before, we should still know that it is wrong. Quick measures need to be taken to rectify the great wrong done to the children separated from their parents recently, but that does not answer the long term problem nor should it be an excuse to ignore the real problems involved in illegal immigration.




That being said, nothing else is black and white.  We cannot and should not stop immigration. As has been said so many times that is is becoming a little trite, we are a nation of immigrants. I myself am a second generation American. My grandparents left Eastern Europe to escape pogroms at the turn of the 20th Century. Yes, they came legally. However others were not so lucky. In 1939, shortly after the war began, a German ocean liner called the  St. Louis that was full of Jewish refugees seeking asylum was turned away from the port of Miami. Many of those aboard died in German concentration camps upon their return. In 1942, a ship called the SS Drottingholm was bringing Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to New York seeking asylum. One passenger (ONE!!!) turned out to be a German spy. This became the excuse to refuse thousands of visas to Jews trying legally to come here. With hindsight, we look back in horror at what was done in our name and how many people lost their lives because of it.




https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/

This is not a rationale for just opening the borders and letting anyone who wants to walk in. Are there people trying to enter the U.S. who have or will commit crimes?  Yes. Are there terrorists, drug dealers, gang members and so on hidden among the refugees? Of course. Just as I'm sure there was more than one German spy trying to sneak in as a refugee and that there were a few Japanese-Americans who were trying to help the enemy. But again, using another trite truism, exceptions do not make the rule. Isn't also true that many of those coming across are not refugees at all but "just" wanting to come to the States for economic reasons. Yes, and what's wrong with that? America is the Land of Opportunity. We should be proud that people want to be a part of it. There is a reason why the Statue of Liberty is one of our most beloved symbols.




But wait, does that mean that everyone who wants to gets a free pass into the United States? Of course not. We are a nation of laws. For our society to function, those laws need to be respected. There are legal ways to enter this country. That system is broken and needs to be fixed. We also have a system (imperfect, I know) to deal with those who break the law. This is where we come back to the cluster f**k. We don't have a coherent immigration policy. What we have is a bunch of people screaming half-truths at each other and hiding being canards and false facts. There is a nugget of truth in the claims made by both (many) sides in this debate. But there is also a lot of fear, hatred and ignorance fueling irrational statements and actions. And our representatives are either too afraid of the consequences of taking anything but an absolutist stance for fear of losing support from their base or so confused by the conflicting feedback they are getting from their constituents to take any useful action.


In the short term, this disaster created by the Trump Administration's ill thought out and badly implemented Zero Tolerance policy must be fixed. I think Texas Senator Ted Cruz's Protect Kids and Parents Act would be a good start. Essentially it would double the number of immigration judges, provide funding for more shelters that would keep families together and provide for an expedited process of 14 days for the review of asylum requests. This is not an immigration policy. It is and emergency treatment for an acute symptom, not a cure for the disease.I do not have a cure for the disease. I have some ideas, just like the rest of you. We wouldn't all agree with each others ideas. But until we have a reasoned, rational conversation nothing will improve. I suspect nothing much can be expected from our elected representatives until after the mid-term elections. Recent events have turned up the heat. Each party will be throwing red meat to it's base to motivate people to go to the polls. For the near future, scoring points will be more important than finding solutions. It will not be pretty.





We have been struggling with this for a long time. And mostly failing.  Legal or illegal, immigration has been both a strength and a curse. Practically every group that has made it to this country and had some success has wanted to close the door behind them. We are a nation built on an idea, not a race, religion, or ethnicity. America is not white, black, brown; European, Asian, African or South American. It does not just belong to one group of people. Despite this, there has always been a fear of the other. Groups of people who are now solidly considered "one of us" like the Irish were once routinely rejected. Asian Americans today are facing a problem experienced last century by the Jews - they are too successful. Universities are again establishing a ceiling on the number of admissions of these high achievers because it would create and "imbalance." Hispanics and Muslims are just the latest groups to be caught in this quagmire.




Maybe I am naive, but I still hold out hope that reasonable people can have reasonable conversations and come up with reasonable solutions. Compromise and bipartisanship are now considered dirty words, but there is no other way forward. There is no simple answer. Unilateral, rigid and ideologically pure proposals will not suffice. It is time for the hard work to be done.