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As an American Jew, I have always loved the American Thanksgiving holiday; in many ways, the practice of Thanksgiving has always seemed very consistent with Jewish values. Gratitude, after all, is a central teaching of Judaism, just as it is in all other religions. We are instructed by Jewish law to say “thank you” to God 100 times day, for gifts large and small, to recite 100 prayers of gratitude every single day, to cultivate a sense of gratitude in our lives. And the act of sitting around the Thanksgiving table, to retell the America sacred myth of the Pilgrims and Native Americans giving thanks for their first harvest, which was inspired by their reading of the Hebrew Bible, has also always felt to me to be a kind of American Passover Seder that can unite us as Americans beyond many boundaries.
This year, however, coming to Thanksgiving presents us with some serious emotional challenges. The world is not right, and we are not right. This past month has shaken us to our core. The events in the Holy Land, starting on October 7, have horrified us, brought us tremendous grief, and reminded us how brutal human beings can be. There has been so much loss, terrible violence, fear, and death. Here, for many of us, it has been hard to find peace within, and hard to sleep. Some Jews have said they do not feel safe walking around Brookline, and I have heard similar fears expressed by some Brookline Muslims. This is not the way things should be at Thanksgiving.
So, we might wonder this Thanksgiving: How can we give thanks? How can we sit around our tables, with plates filled with good food, knowing of all the suffering, and feeling our grief and the pain of people we care about, in places of the world that are both near and far to us, and which are so close to our hearts? How can we come to Thanksgiving and speak of the fullness of our hearts, the fullness of abundance, when the world is so shattered, when there is so much division in our world, when there is so much anger and violence that people are directing at each other, when there is so much darkness?
What kind of Thanksgiving can there be in this moment? How can we sit around our tables Thursday night?
I look to Jewish teachings for wisdom. In the traditional Jewish prayerbook, each night, when the sky grows dark and evening comes, every single night of the year (including this coming Thursday night), Jews recite a prayer for the evening, called “Ma’ariv Aravim,” and it has some remarkable lines in it:
“God, You create day and night, You roll light away from darkness, and darkness from light, And you cause day to pass, and You bring on the night.”
And the rabbis looked at the words, and they asked: “If this is a nighttime prayer, why does it talk so much about daytime and light? We understand why the prayer praises God for creating the darkness and bringing the night, but why does this prayer keep referring to daytime, too? Morning is going to arrive in just a few hours – shouldn’t that be the time to talk about morning?”
The answer that the Talmud provides is this: that, truly, there is no place or time in which nighttime exists when daytime, too, does not simultaneously exist. Here in Boston, night may be falling, but in some place, somewhere, a place that might be beyond my awareness, it is certainly daytime there. My own experience is of nighttime – I see the sun setting, I feel the air growing cold, darkness shrouds everything that I can see – but my own experience is not the totality of everything! There is another reality that other people are living beyond me, and it is called “day.”
In that sense, the prayer takes a “both / and” approach to nighttime – thanking God for both the night, and the day, all at once.
I am invited to consider my reality, and say thank you for it, and also to bring into my that awareness which is beyond my reality, and to say thank you for it, too. The deepest gratitude is both for that which I have, and that which I do not have, but which is real to someone else. For both that which I know, and that which I do not know, but which someone else would know, because they are by definition different from me. For my night, and for their day. Even though these two things seem to be opposite, they are held together, they are seen and considered in my mind simultaneously.
“Both / and.” That’s a deep religious view of gratitude. To see the inter-connectedness of everything, even when one person sees black (night) and another person sees white (day), and to hold them in my mind and my heart together.
So, this year I am wondering: can we make this a Thanksgiving of “Both / And”?
A Thanksgiving for both that which we have and of which we are aware, and that is beyond our grasp, beyond our awareness?
A Thanksgiving for both what I have, and for what you have?
A Thanksgiving for both my identity, and for your identity? For both my narrative and your narrative?
A Thanksgiving of gratitude for both my friends and family, the people I love and know and hold and hug -- and for the people who are so different from me, the people sitting at other Thanksgiving tables, who perhaps speak different languages, have different colored skin from my own, practice different religious traditions, who have their own stories and their own ways of living their lives?
A Thanksgiving about both my abundance, and about your abundance,
which also has space for us to acknowledge both my suffering and pain and grief, and your suffering and pain and grief?
A Thanksgiving that holds together all the complexity of our world, all the humans whose claims and truths, on the surface, might seem to negate one another, but which actually exist side by side, one with the other, just like night exists simultaneous with day?
Can we, this year, hold in our hearts that Jewish exists with Muslim, that Christian exists with Unitarian, that Asian exists with African, exists with white exists with black, with brown, with male and female and trans, and could we all see God’s great Creation all one and integrated and whole and diverse and varied all at once, so that we could give thanks in our hearts, not just for ourselves and what we are, but for all of God’s Universe, in all its spectacular unbelievable sparkling and multiple differentiated Oneness? Could we do that?
Could this be that Thanksgiving? Please God, let us have a Thanksgiving of “Both / And” this year, now, here, in this church, at our synagogues and our mosques, in our homes, and at our tables, in our town, and in our hearts. Please God let it be so. Let this be the year of Both / And.
Amen.
Our whole staff at Sinai Brookline joins me in wishing you a happy Thanksgiving holiday.
B'shalom,
Rabbi Andy Vogel
Thanksgiving 2023 / 5784
וּמַעֲבִיר יוֹם וּמֵבִיא לָֽיְלָה
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