It’s not just the festive meal that gives Thanksgiving a Jewish flavor.

For many Jews, Thanksgiving is the ideal Jewish holiday.

It’s a day for families to come together to celebrate a big, festive meal … without having spent hours in synagogue. But there are other, more serious reasons to think of this annual American holiday as having a distinctly Jewish quality.

Each year on Thanksgiving, we Americans remind ourselves of our bounty and blessings, often including a prayer of gratefulness.

For the engaged Jew, gratitude is the core of the daily ritual of each of the morning, afternoon and evening services. We begin our days, on awakening, by praising our Creator for the gift of life itself by reciting Modeh Ani, the 12-word prayer expressing thankfulness for having our soul returned to us after a night of sleep.

The series of more than a dozen short Shacharit blessings that follow thank God “who has not made me a slave … who clothes the naked … sets captives free … raises those who are bowed down … gives strength to the weary,” etc. And gratitude flows into optimism throughout our prayers, reflected most dramatically in the essential Jewish belief in the coming of the Messiah, the notion that history, for all of its setbacks and tragedies, ultimately leads to the perfection of the world.

Each morning service includes Psalm 30, with King David insisting, “At night there may be weeping, but in the morning there is joy.”

That essential concept of looking to the future with hopefulness is especially important for us to remember at a time of darkness in the world – literally, with the onset of winter – and with a long list of troubles on our minds, from lingering Covid to horrific war in Ukraine to growing anti-Semitism and deep societal rifts at home, and more.

Sometimes our prayers are answered, and sometimes the onus is on us to fulfill them.

Consider: This past Shabbat, in anticipation of the new Jewish month – Kislev, which this year arrives the night of Thanksgiving – we recited as part of the Blessing for the New Month, a passage in which I find a kind of wistful irony. It reads: “May God who performed miracles for our ancestors and redeemed them for slavery to freedom, redeem us soon, and gather in our dispersed people from the four quarters of the earth, so that all Israel may be united in friendship, and let us say, Amen.”

What strikes me as remarkable is that the first and seemingly most challenging part of the prayer – calling for all Jews to live in freedom, has essentially been fulfilled in our lifetime. Truly a miracle. But the second element, “that all Israel be united in friendship,” still eludes us, and indeed, seems further from reality today than even a few decades ago.

This Thanksgiving, which coincides with Rosh Chodesh, even as we recognize all that we should be grateful for and sometimes take for granted, our challenge is to ourselves – to do whatever we can going forward to help make a more united Jewish people a reality by this time next year.

Happy Thanksgiving, Chodesh Tov and Shabbat Shalom.

Between The Lines

Thanksgiving Is A Jewish Holiday