On December 12, 1621, Edward Winslow wrote a letter in which he described the first Thanksgiving that had taken place a little earlier. In a style reminiscent of how Orthodox Jews pepper their sentences with ?baruch Hashem? (Blessed be G-d), he wrote: “Our corn [i.e. wheat] did prove well, and G-d be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn….And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of G-d, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”
In spite of this overt linking of G-d and bountiful plenty, some schools are teaching their students that our nation’s first Thanksgiving was a secular rather than a religious event. It was not until 1863 that President Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving to be an annual American holiday with these words to which no loyal and religious Jew could have any possible objection:
“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience….”
Lincoln’s words still ring with biblical fervor, yet many Americans turn the joyful solemnity of Thanksgiving into a childish sort of Turkey Day. Many of us Jews should perhaps share the blame when America’s secular culture infantilizes religion. The holiday of Chanukah offers an example of how we err.
Most American Jews are content to experience Chanukah through ancient tales our children are told at Hebrew school or through a brief candle-lighting ceremony. If we are particularly traditional we might devote one evening of the eight day festival to eating oil-drenched potato latkes and playing spin-the-dreidel with our children. Too many of us are more likely to believe that Santa slides down the chimney than we would accept that Chanukah observance involves intellectually challenging information of contemporary relevance. Consider just one small part of the Chanukah story as an example.
In about 165 B.C.E., the Hasmoneans, led by Judah Macabee, rebelled against their Syrian-Greek oppressors who had ransacked the Jerusalem temple. They prepared to rededicate the temple and light the menorah again and found one small jar of olive oil with its seal still intact. The Talmud indicates that this small jar of oil, sufficient to burn for one day only, miraculously kept the menorah burning for eight full days.
Jewish tradition asks the following question: If there was enough oil for one day but it burned for eight, only the last seven days involved a miracle. For the oil to burn during the first day was perfectly natural. Therefore why is Chanukah an eight-day festival? Properly, it ought to last only for seven days to commemorate the seven-day miracle.
One answer is that the first day of the holiday highlights the real miracle – namely that oil burns at all in the first place. In other words, we are instructed to see the miracle even in everyday phenomena such as the availability of fuel for our energy needs.
Part of that everyday phenomena is the blessing of bounty. It is not an accident that during the original Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims expressed gratitude to G-d for doing away with hunger and shortage. Neither is it an accident that secularism in America today preaches a doctrine of shortage and obsesses with almost fundamentalist irrationality on the need for conservation. This, in spite of the fact that every historical parallel from Thomas Malthus’s notorious 1798 “Essay on Population” all the way to the examples below, ridicule this gloomy sacrament of secularism.
America used to depend on whale oil for lighting. During the early 19th century, pundits warned that since whales were being harvested at an ever increasing rate, America would soon go dark. They recommended turning out all lights no later than ten o?clock in order to conserve what whale oil was left. They were right about running out of whale oil, but they were wrong about America going dark. In 1859, a railroad conductor named Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. America remained lit by lanterns that burned paraffin instead of whale oil.
Until the early 18th century, colonial homes were heated mostly by burning wood. Forests were vanishing and the rapidly growing colonies were running out of fire wood. Eliminate immigration and ration firewood, was the call of the day. They were right about running out of firewood but it didn’t matter because we soon found and began burning a far superior fuel called coal.
William Jevons, an economics professor at University College, London, became famous on account of a paper he published in 1865 titled “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal Mines.” He predicted that British prosperity would end within fifty years when the nation ran out of coal and recommended an industrial slowdown in order to conserve what coal was left. We are just about into 2004 and Britain is still mining and burning coal although most of its energy needs are safely and bountifully supplied by nuclear power.
During the 1980’s, fax machines became ubiquitous and vast numbers of Americans installed additional phone lines to accommodate these handy devices. Again the talking heads issued dire warnings about the price of copper. There was insufficient copper in the world to run two phone lines to every home. What would happen if people wanted three lines? Surely the price of copper would rise to reflect the shortage and industrial development would be fatally
curtailed.
They were right about there not being enough copper. They were wrong about its price. The miracle of G-d-given human ingenuity made copper all but redundant. We began sending data through impossibly thin glass filaments. Glass is made from sand and we are in no danger of running out of that particular commodity. It only seemed that we lacked sufficient copper, whale oil, or wood. In reality, our G-d-given ingenuity allowed each to be made obsolete by technical advance just as it was to become scarce.
The Chanukah miracle is that the lamp kept on burning despite an apparent shortage of fuel; a metaphor, surely, for all apparent shortages that can be overcome with faith. Thanksgiving and Chanukah, depending on the year, fall within days or weeks of each other. This proximity affords us ample opportunity to reflect on the fact that a cardinal theme of Chanukah, as expressed in the festival?s liturgy, is that of Thanksgiving.
“…and they established these eight days of Chanukah to give thanks and to praise Your great Name.”
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