Dear Friends:
Next Thursday, November 28, is Thanksgiving. Our office will be closed and both minyan and Adult Education will be canceled. (For the first several years of my rabbinate at Kehilat Shalom, I did leave in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner to rush to the shul for evening minyan, and inevitably was the only person present, so I eventually got the Ritual Committee’s agreement to cancel it for that day.)
You may be interested to know that within Orthodox Judaism, the question of whether it is permitted to observe or celebrate Thanksgiving is somewhat controversial. I want to make it clear that my exploration of the topic (below) is purely academic and my own belief and practice is that celebrating Thanksgiving is completely permissible and encouraged. There are, however, some halachic authorities in the Haredi (‘ultra-Orthodox”) community who forbid or discourage it.
What could possibly be wrong with Thanksgiving? In Leviticus 18:3 we are commanded not to copy the practices of the land of Egypt which we had left nor the land of Canaan to which we were going, and not to follow their laws. Halacha has codified this verse to mean that we are forbidden to imitate non-Jewish practices (“hukkat ha-goy”) and this concept has been used by Haredi halachic authorities to forbid everything from having the bimah at the front of the synagogue to sermons in the vernacular to wearing the same style of clothing as our non-Jewish neighbors. So if we conclude that Thanksgiving is rooted in non-Jewish religious practice, it would be forbidden for Jews to observe it.
There have been American Jewish halachic decisors who have ruled against the observance of Thanksgiving. The most prominent was Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner, the long-term head of Yeshiva Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn. He said that the observance of an annual holiday based in the Christian calendar was closely associated with idol worship and thus prohibited.
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was probably the greatest halachic authority in the history of the American Jewish community. He said that Thanksgiving was a secular holiday (similar to July 4th) and it was permitted to observe it but in order to avoid transgressing the prohibition of “bal tosif” (adding mitzvot not commanded in the Torah) it was a good idea to skip it every once in a while. His concern seems to be that by observing Thanksgiving every year we were creating the impression that it was a religious obligation to do so. Rabbi Feinstein popularized the term מדינה של חסד, medina shel chesed, for the United States. Medina shel Chesed literally means “country of lovingkindness” As Rabbi Allen Schwartz of the Upper West Sides Orthodox congregation Ohav Zedek writes:
From the time of our first exile, over 2,500 years ago, we have never been as welcomed as a people as we have been in this country. Banishments, exiles, inquisitions expulsions pogroms and worse, followed us wherever we went. In this country, we never faced the ignominies that were heaped upon us in other lands. No doubt, we faced difficulties like many other groups and ethnicities, but we were given opportunity and we grasped it.
On the more Modern Orthodox end of the spectrum, Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik emphasized that out of gratitude for the freedoms we enjoy as Americans, we affirmatively should observe Thanksgiving. Rabbi Soloveichik was the head of the rabbinical school at Yeshiva University in New York but he lived in Boston. His weekly advanced Talmud class was always on Thursday and while he taught on Thanksgiving, he would always cut his class short so that he could get to Laguardia Airport and catch the air shuttle back to Boston for his family’s Thanksgiving meal. It should also be noted that the oldest congregation in the United States, Shearith Israel (“The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue”) in New York has had a special Thanksgiving morning service since the first Thanksgiving proclaimed in 1789 by George Washington. They even recite an abbreviated Hallel (Psalms of Thanksgiving) during that service.
Within some elements of the Haredi community there still remains a certain ambivalence about Thanksgiving. When Keleigh and I lived in Baltimore we lived in a mostly-Orthodox neighborhood and had a lot of Orthodox friends including some on the more Haredi end of the Orthodox spectrum. We learned that one of the bright dividing lines between Haredi and modern Orthodox schools was Thanksgiving. The Modern Orthodox schools, like most of American society, were closed on Thanksgiving and the day after. The Haredi schools were open but only for half a day. Both Modern Orthodox and Haredi schools had dual curriculums with general studies for half a day and Jewish studies for the other half. The Haredi schools had their Jewish studies on Thanksgiving (and Christmas) and expected the Jewish studies teachers to teach on that day. The general studies teachers were not necessarily Jewish and, if Jewish, not necessarily observant and they were not expected to teach on that day.
Rabbi Feinstein’s reminder that we live in a medina shel chesed is more important than ever. Chesed is indivisible and history has taught us that if a country tolerates persecution of any religious or ethnic minority or the LGBT community, persecution of Jews inevitably follows.
As a reminder, I am having drop-in hours on Thursday afternoons from 2 to 4 at the shul. For my drop-in hours, you do not need to make an appointment -- that would negate the whole point of drop-in hours -- but I’d urge you to check and make sure I am there regardless as sometimes there are unavoidable pastoral or other emergencies which might take me away from the building.
As always, if I can do anything for you or you need to talk, please contact me at rabbi@kehilatshalom.org or 301-977-0768 rather than through the synagogue office. I am happy to meet you at the synagogue by appointment; if you want to speak with me it’s best to make an appointment rather than assuming I will be there when you stop by.
Additionally, if you know of a Kehilat Shalom congregant or another member of our Jewish community who could use a phone call, please let me know.
L’shalom,
Rabbi Charles L. Arian
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