This holiday brings all U.S. religions together

By Rabbi Ben Kamin

Rabbi Ben Kamin
Rabbi Ben Kamin

OCEANSIDE, California — These are the days of division and fear. Let there be the relief of Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is a day when heaven yields some relief from our earthly concerns, when Americans of all faiths sit at one spiritual table with many of the same trimmings and family customs. Thanksgiving liberates us from specific theological claims and allows us to contemplate the common creed of gratitude. In a way, it’s the only pure holiday.

We celebrate Thanksgiving as a uniquely inclusive American moment of community faith. It is an untainted day, a blessed coda just prior to the commercial frenzy of Christmas and Hanukkah.

We are all seated at the table with one God.

Almost every other day of the year is tinged with religious constraints and spiritual divisiveness. This holiday mitigates the fundamentalism that seeps into too much of the great American faiths, creating a sense of exclusion that divides our children and obviates the exemplary spirit of togetherness shown by Native Americans to the new pilgrims back in 1621.

If this day offers warm bread for empty bellies and cold turkey from religious coercion, then our children are well served and our country is morally redirected.

Young people think a lot about God, and they tend to view religion with some skepticism. Perhaps they are more convinced of adult hypocrisy in this category than in almost any other. Dealing with fears that were unimaginable when we were in high school a generation or two ago, these kids are generally unimpressed with any obsessive claims that one religion may hold against another.

On Thanksgiving, we should talk to our children about the meaning of spiritual wholeness. They hear a lot from religious zealots in school, on television and across the Internet. They certainly view the carnage of religiously-driven carnage on their aggregate media. Thanksgiving is one of those rare days when we actually gather as families, and it is worth noting that every American family fortunate enough to have a table and some bread is pretty much saying the same prayers.

This is the shared Thanksgiving epiphany—the gospel of gratitude.

Thanksgiving allows all the religions to share inclusive spiritual nourishment. Soon enough, some of our children will return to college, the homeless will return to lonely desperation, and many of us will regress to the mercantile madness of the December holidays. Jewish parents will fret again about the proliferation of Christmas symbols and images while both Jews and Christians will forget to infuse the subsequent holidays with the ethical symmetry that Thanksgiving gives us for now.

Jews: remember what you feel today when you light the Hanukkah lights in a few days. Christians: recall today’s spiritual equity when you light the candles of the Advent wreath. At Thanksgiving, there are no politics in religion. There is only one table set for God.

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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer based in Oceanside, California.  He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com.  Any comments in the space below should include the writer’s full name and city and state of residence, or city and country for non-U.S. residents.