Friends – Image: the Indians and the Pilgrims sitting down to a scrumptious turkey dinner that they laboriously produced together. Cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie. Black hats, white frocks, feathered headresses and deerskin moccasins all under the same roof. Whose image is this? Do the descendants of the "Indians" remember Thanksgiving the same way that the descendants of the "Pilgrims" do? Exactly who are their respective "descendants" these days, anyway? Isn't Thanksgiving more of a celebration of colonialist domination, of glorifying the "Divine Right" the Europeans claimed over the land's "native" inhabitants, of re-affirming the entire franchise of "might-makes-right" territorialism, rather than a commemoration of the sharing, tolerant, cooperative relationships forged between two friendly, benevolent sets of neighbors?
These questions, of course, only beg more questions: What purpose do our collective "metanarratives," the stories that delineate our common ideals, serve in the first place? Need they necessarily be sourced in the reality of history, or can our common ideas of history become malleable to facilitate their perpetuation? Are they collective psychological formulations that personify our need to reiterate a shared goal to ourselves regardless of their lack of correspondence to the real history they claim to represent, or do they transcend that need altogether? Shouldn't our ultimate ideal simply be to live in the reality of this moment itself?
Isn't the Thanksgiving ideal, amidst the many tragic realities of "acquisition" and "territorialism" perpetuated under its auspices, essentially a symbol for the common human desire to feel safe, to share ourselves with others, to receive from them and to be loved and accepted by them? This week's parsha presents us with a reality that, unusually, seems to reflect the same ideal; the Jewish people's relationship to its land as a fundamental outgrowth of its intimate relationships between its men and women. According to the Talmud, we learn that "the state of marriage is established through the transfer of value" through the same word, "lakachat (to take)," used in two different contexts: "If a man takes a wife… (Deutoronomy 24:1)," and in this week's parsha, when Abraham entreats the Hittites to sell him the Cave of Machpela in Hebron, "I give you the money for the field - take it from me (Genesis 23:13)!"
R. Matis Weinberg, in his book Frameworks, elaborates on this idea: "By linking the acquisition of fields with marriage, the Torah brings us to see the unique sense of belonging applied to the earth and to woman, which is entirely different than being owned. A car or a toaster oven can be "owned." But the word "own" has no bearing on the unique relationship between human and the field that must outlive him, forever. The word "own" has no place in the special relationship between man and woman. Belonging has the different meaning of "suitability" and "association" which comes closer to the connotations of the words "take" and "take" used to link marriage and earth (100)."
So does the Jewish ideal of "ownership" necessarily preclude the exploitation and territorialism of those less "suitable" or "associable" to the common goals of the Jewish people? I don't have an answer right now, friends - I just know that I want to believe that this is so. We can't allow Jewish "nationalism," even in its ideal form wherein the Jewish people and the Land of Israel inherently "belong" and are "married-to" one another, to disallow us from filling our Shabbes table with guests who are "different" from ourselves. I bless and urge myself and everyone this week and this Shabbes to re-learn our own history and our own sense of Jewish ideals to the extent that we can truly account for any of the discrepancies that we as individuals, as a nation and as servants of the Most High to whom we eminently belong have created between our ideals and our reality - with love, faith, and a hankering for hot turkey shmaltz.
Jerry Silverman
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Jerry Silverman is a former student of Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He is working in new media, designing and managing media projects. He lives in Riverdale, NY with his wife Sarah and their two children. |