{"id":99918,"date":"2022-11-25T17:05:04","date_gmt":"2022-11-25T15:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=99918"},"modified":"2022-11-21T12:15:50","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T10:15:50","slug":"25-05-77","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=99918","title":{"rendered":"Giving Thanks in Synagogue"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Giving Thanks in Synagogue<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nJENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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In the late 19th century, when Thanksgiving was a new holiday, American Jews created religious services to mark the day. They didn\u2019t last<\/strong><\/span>.<\/h4>\n

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\nGerman Jewish refugees at a sermon at the Fort Washington Synagogue, New York, 1938GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

With all the hoopla that attends the annual celebration of Thanksgiving, you\u2019d think the holiday had been around forever. American Jews of the late 19th century certainly thought so, or acted as if they did, publicly maintaining that a day dedicated to taking stock of and thanking the Almighty for one\u2019s blessings was \u201cno Yankee notion,\u201d but an ancient Israelite one. \u201cLike a good many things, [it] is derived from Hebrew laws,\u201d claimed \u201cSopher,\u201d a Jewish resident of the nation\u2019s capital in 1886.<\/span><\/p>\n

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By insisting on Thanksgiving Day\u2019s biblical antecedents, American Jews papered over its novelty as an artifact of the post-Civil War era, an exercise in national reconciliation. At the same time, they made a point of aligning Jewish history with American history, intimating that the two went together like turkey and cranberry sauce.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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History wasn\u2019t the only thing that endeared Thanksgiving to America\u2019s Jews. Contemporary events had much to do with it, too. When comparing their blessed lot with that of their co-religionists in the Old World\u2014\u201cFor freedom to worship Thy name; For manhood delivered from shame,\u201d as a Thanksgiving hymn composed by poet S. Solis Cohen in the 1870s would have it\u2014they had every reason to be grateful. \u201cNone ought to love this country more than Israelites,\u201d the\u00a0American Israelite<\/em> declared a few years later.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Little wonder, then, that American Israelites embraced the November holiday, prompting the\u00a0American Hebrew<\/em> in an unusually lighthearted frame of mind to observe that the toothsome smells of a bird roasting in the oven was another one of those things that \u201ctends to make us love our country for the excellent turkeys it produces on our tables.\u201d Even those reared on duck or goose took to turkey and its trimmings with relish, making sure that the less privileged among them\u2014the residents of old age homes and orphan asylums\u2014might also enjoy a \u201cgrand dinner.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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No festivity, of course, was complete without a\u00a0soup\u00e7on<\/em>\u00a0of grumbling. Some American Jews at the grassroots looked askance at their co-religionists\u2019 fulsome reception of Thanksgiving. Labeling it an example of \u201cchuckas hagoyim,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>the emulation of gentile ways, they chalked up its popularity to assimilation, to the collective desire to fit in, and worried lest it betokened a withering away of Jewish identity. If only the holiday\u2019s Jewish champions would fulfill their Jewish ritual obligations with as much enthusiasm, critics sniffed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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American Jews observed \u201cnational turkey day\u201d in the same manner as their Christian neighbors, \u201cpicking the bone with as much gusto,\u201d with one telling exception: Where the latter attended church services\u2014making good on both the spirit and the letter of presidential proclamations that not only invoked the \u201cenduring mercy of Almighty God,\u201d but also recommended that Americans \u201cwithdraw themselves from secular cares and labors\u201d by attending a religious service\u2014latter-day Israelites sat it out and stayed put in the parlor. For most Christians of the late 19th century, related the\u00a0New York Observer and Chronicle,\u00a0<\/em>the \u201chome vies with the church in giving thanks,\u201d or, as one of its church-going readers put it more colloquially, \u201cFirst I pray, then I stuff.\u201d Most Jews just \u201cstuffed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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American Jewry\u2019s religious leaders were none too pleased with this state of affairs, which resulted in \u201cbeggarly\u201d attendance at Thanksgiving Day synagogue services. They made known their disappointment publicly, wondering why they bothered to organize a one-hour gathering at either 11 a.m. or at 3 p.m.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Still, they kept at it. In an attempt to beef up the number of those in the pews, several synagogues joined forces, hoping that a \u201cunited service\u201d would result in a respectable yield. In 1879, for instance, Philadelphia\u2019s Mikveh Israel, Beth-El Emeth, and Beth Israel joined forces; a year later, a number of New York synagogues followed suit. But these \u201cexperiments\u201d also fell short, drawing only 100 souls in a space capable of seating several times that number.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When pressed to account for their absence, some American Jews pointed to the well-documented fact that they were not known to attend synagogue services throughout the year. Why, then, would anyone expect them to make an exception for an improvised service on a chilly day in November? Others attributed their \u201cmeager\u201d participation to the holiday\u2019s \u201cspread-eagle style of oratory,\u201d which had worn thin.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Still other stay-at-home American Jews brought more principled objections to bear, worried lest the conflation of Thanksgiving with worship mar the equally hallowed separation of church and state. From their perspective, Thanksgiving was meant as a \u201cpurely American institution, not a sectarian one,\u201d to be celebrated around a dining room table, not within the confines of the sanctuary.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cA piece of sentimentalism, very pretty in its own way,\u201d Thanksgiving, the\u00a0American Israelite<\/em> cautioned in 1878, should not be deployed as a religious occasion lest people come away with the notion that America was a Christian nation. Far better to believe that the \u201cgood God would infinitely prefer to be served in other and more practical ways.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At a time when growing numbers of Americans thought otherwise, filling the air with statements like those made by the Rev. P.S. Henson\u2014a Baptist preacher who insisted that the United States was \u201ca distinctly Christian nation, barricaded and buttressed by Christian principles\u201d\u2014holding a synagogue service on Thanksgiving soon became a communal priority, tantamount to a rebuttal. During the closing decades of the 19th century, the English-language Jewish press, for its part, made sure to highlight America\u2019s religious diversity by tabulating the number of synagogues that offered a Thanksgiving Day service and, in what soon emerged as a ritual all its own, publishing either the entirety of or an extract from notable Thanksgiving Day sermons.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Synagogues from coast to coast, in turn, redoubled their efforts by inviting sympathetic local Christian \u201cdivines\u201d to address their congregants on Thanksgiving Day, hoping their presence in the pulpit might demonstrate that Jews and Christians were \u201cmore alike than we are different.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Well-intended demonstrations of brotherhood, these performances often backfired when an anxious Christian clergyman put a foot wrong (or in his mouth) by calling a Jewish house of worship a church or, worse still, by making much of Jesus having been a Jew. Spare us this \u201cclap-trap,\u201d counseled the\u00a0American Hebrew<\/em> in 1880, discounting its impact on the Jewish body politic. Such \u201cgush,\u201d echoed the paper\u2019s Philadelphia correspondent who styled himself \u201cPhil A. Delphus.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Though in a minority, America\u2019s Jews were not alone. They had company in the nation\u2019s freethinkers and secularists who also objected to Thanksgiving\u2019s \u201creligious tinge.\u201d An example of what we today might call religious nationalism, the holiday\u2019s identification of good citizenship with divine intervention stuck in their craw. \u201cWe have no objection to pumpkin pie,\u201d declared one of their number, an avowed atheist, \u201cbut protest against its being seasoned with theology.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To which, over time, a growing chorus of Americans said, \u201cAmen.\u201d Little by little, the holiday\u2019s association with religion grew fainter and fainter, its place taken by football games and festive parades.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Now that\u2019s something to chew on when sitting down to this year\u2019s holiday repast.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Jenna Weissman Joselit<\/a><\/strong>, the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies & Professor of History at the George Washington University, is currently at work on a biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Giving Thanks in Synagogue JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT In the late 19th century, when Thanksgiving was a new holiday, American Jews created religious services to mark the day. They didn\u2019t last. . German Jewish refugees at a sermon at the Fort Washington Synagogue, New York, 1938GETTY IMAGES With all the hoopla that attends the annual celebration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99918"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99918"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99938,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99918\/revisions\/99938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}