View From a Height

Happy Thanksgiving!

There's a principle in Judaism that we don't celebrate holidays with origins in other religions.

Fortunately, Thanksgiving makes the cut. (For those of you interested in a Halachic discussion of the matter, it can be found here.)

Make no mistake, it's a seriously religious holiday. But it's one that deliberately doesn't restrict itself to any one religion.

Look at Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation. (Go ahead. I have time.) It's clearly a religious document. Blessings, like rights, flow from God, not from the government. But Washington is careful not to specify which God he's talking about. The next year, in his famous Reply to the Newport Congregation, he wrote:

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Lincoln's Thanksgiving was proclaimed in a moment of dark crisis, but has the same flavor.

Equality, not tolerance. We do have social toleration; most Americans are Christian. We do not have official toleration, since neither the government nor the state is Christian.

Christmas is different. Christmas is one of the defining holidays of another religion. People lump them together because both days feature football and cold weather, but they're entirely different days. I kinda like Christmas: the lights, the music are guilty pleasures.

Now, I've never had Christmas forced down my throat. Once, in school, I did have to avoid having it forced back out. The fourth-grade music class devoted a session to Christmas carols, and excused me to the library for the hour. I accepted it then, but it really wasn't right. (Although my parents also considered sending me to a Catholic high school for the academics, confident that my Judaism would survive.)

One other time, I worked in a secure environment. We were concerned that the bad guys might "listen" to our conversations by bouncing laser beams off the windows and reconstructing our words. Talking vibrates the windows, and the laser beam acts like an ear. So we played music over an intercom to add interference. The gals at the front desk ran the CD player, and from the Monday after Thanksgiving to New Year's, it was wall-to-wall Bing Crosby, Chipmunks, and Perry Como, but for some reason, not Stan Freberg.

Europe dealt with the problem of churches and states mutually corrupting each other by secularizing. America took a healthier route - it's just nonsectarian.

No holiday better exemplifies the sort of acceptance that could only have happened in America. It is home, in the way that Europe could never be, and never tried to be. That alone is ample reason to give thanks.