Wishing y'all a wonderful Thanksgiving and wanted to share a little D'var Torah (Lecture) below about it! Many of you may know that I am also an Orthodox Jew, and a Rabbi in Phoenix, Arizona. (And a full time father it seems.) Wanted to share some of my thoughts on Thanksgiving!
When we think about the word “Jew,” it’s easy to forget that it has an etymological history that is directly tied to the word “thankfulness.”
The word Yehudi, which means Jewish in Hebrew, comes from Leah. In Genesis 29:32, Leah names her son Yehuda — or Judah — meaning “praise God.”
Thanksgiving has always been a holiday Jews are very comfortable with. While it may seem like the reason behind the love is that Thanksgiving is secular, as opposed to other widely celebrated holidays that are explicitly religious in nature, the deep reason is probably etymological. Jews are linguistically rooted in gratitude, and the word for Jew in Hebrew — Yehudi — is directly tied to the word for thankfulness or hodaya.
We are so used to the formation “praise the Lord” — which is, of course, popular in Christian communities as well — that we might not think about the Hebrew roots of it, how praise is actually gratitude, and how gratitude is Leah’s gift to us, memorialized forever in the name Yehuda and in the term Yehudi—Jewish.
Also, there are many theories about why the Pilgrims chose to celebrate Thanksgiving when
they did.
One is that it was modeled after the holiday of Sukkot, which is also a fall harvest festival. However, there is another theory about why the Pilgrims decided to celebrate Thanksgiving: they wanted to remember how their ancestors lived in sukkot for 40 years in the desert.
The Torah also refers to Sukkot as “chag ha’asif,” or “the
Festival of the Ingathering.” At this time of year in Israel, the harvest was ending and the final fruits and crops were gathered and stored.
Sukkot is also known as “z’man simchateinu”—the time of our rejoicing—as our ancestors gave thanks for the conclusion of the harvest and the bounty of the land.
While we cannot be certain about what motivated those
Pilgrim settlers to initiate a feast of thanksgiving, it is likely that they consciously drew on a model well-known to them through the Bible.
There are a lot of things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. We're thankful for the fact that you're reading this right now, because it means you've survived yet another year, and are reading my emails. And we're especially grateful that we get to do so without having any
awkward conversations about politics or religion!
But seriously—it's a wonderful time of year to take a moment and reflect on what really matters in life.
The main theme of the holiday of Thanksgiving comes from the name itself, reminding us of the importance of giving thanks.
Saying “thank you” is a primary Jewish value. When a Jew sits down to eat, he or she says: “Blessed are you God, for bringing bread from the earth.” To say a blessing over bread affirms that God played a role in creating the universe where the sun rises each day and the rain falls and the growth of food is possible.
The rabbis taught that we are to say 100 blessings a day. This teaching reminds us
that no matter how difficult life can be, we all have many blessings such as simply being alive, our health, our loved ones, and friends.
Happy Thanksgiving!!!
Pesach Lattin
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