On the Friday after the fourth Thursday of every year – for, oh, about the past 35 years – I have bellowed the following song with my good friend Joel over a festive table laden with turkey, cranberry sauce, and candied yams:
“Over the river and through the woods,
To grandmother’s house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh,
Through the white and drifted snow!
Over the river and through the woods,
To have a first-rate play;
Oh, hear the bells ring, ‘Ting-a-ling-ling!’
Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day!”
We sing this even though, when we look out through the window, we see only the rolling desert hills of Judea – no river, no woods, no sleigh, and no drifted snow. We also hear no bells ting-a-ling-linging.
We sing this even though it is not even Thanksgiving Day. Rather, it is Friday night, and – for convenience’s sake – we have mashed the Thanksgiving celebration onto the Shabbat meal.
Still, we sing, my Thanksgiving buddy and I, from the top of our lungs as our wives and children look on, bemused as two adult men prove year after year that – excuse the cliché – you can take the boy out of America, but you can’t take America out of the boy.
Why do we do it? God only knows. Nostalgia. Tradition. Because it’s a great song. Because we’re bored. Because, like the horse in Robert Frost’s seasonally appropriate poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the kids “must think it queer,” and we want to annoy them. Who knows why? But we do it – always have, always will. Year after year after year.
'It's what we did'
Explaining this Thanksgiving tradition to the kids – the songs, the food, the whole performance – was easy enough. “It’s what we did when we were your age,” we’d say.
We then used the occasion to belt out and introduce them to the other American classics sung on Thanksgiving: “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “Erie Canal,” and “Colorado” (“If I Had a Wagon”).
The kids had to understand it, I thought, as I carved the turkey and then sliced the pumpkin pie. They’re children of Americans – somehow this all had to have seeped into their DNA: Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims, the corn, the Native Americans, the Detroit Lions – all of it, the whole cornucopia. And in the end, they did get it and even looked forward to it.
But the husband and wives of our children? That was another story. They thought the whole thing just plain odd. There were three customs our kids had to warn their spouses about before bringing them into the family: The first: The Wife blesses the challah on Friday night. The second: We often eat tacos for Shabbat lunch. And the third: Thanksgiving.
The first time my Moroccan daughter-in-law joined us for Thanksgiving, I explained that it was like the pre-wedding henna ceremony – only in reverse.
For what is the henna ceremony if not a Moroccan tradition transplanted to Israel – something the Moroccans did “because that’s what we do,” and then brought it along for the ride when they moved here. A folk tradition they did in Morocco, liked, and carried over to Israel.
So, too, is Thanksgiving. I like to call it the American henna. At least that’s how I explained it.
“You feel weird hearing us sing American songs on Thanksgiving?” I asked my daughter-in-law. “Think how we felt with all the undulating, palm painting, and fez-wearing at your henna.”
“Yeah, but the henna is only once,” she said. “This I have to sit through every year.”
She had a point.
Explaining Thanksgiving as the American immigrant equivalent of Mimouna might have been the better example. But still, how painful – really – is it to sit through a Shabbat meal made especially lavish by the Thanksgiving trimmings, with zmirot for one brief night written not by Rabbi Yisrael Najara of “Ya Ribon” renown, but by Lydia Maria Child of “Over the River and Through the Woods” fame?
Why persist?
But why, indeed, do we persist with this tradition? Why do The Wife and I and our friends continue to mark Thanksgiving so many years after we left America, and on the wrong day to boot? What’s the purpose?
Years ago, it was – to a certain degree – to please my father-in-law, who always seemed to kvell when he asked over the phone what we were doing on Thanksgiving and we answered, “Eating turkey.”
His enthusiasm had nothing to do with Pilgrims or Native Americans – his roots were in Poland – but because deep down, he harbored the hope that we might one day return to America.
The fact that we still celebrated Thanksgiving was to him an encouraging sign that a small American ember – our own internal Statue of Liberty torch – still glowed within us, not completely doused by the Zionist fervor that led us from America’s shores. Perhaps, he hoped, upon hearing that we continued to mark the day, we would someday return to those shores.
More recently, we do it just because. Just because we always have. Just because it’s fun. Just because it is who we are.
And, you know what? It makes the kids – or at least their kids – completely Israeli.
How so? Just ask the band Hatikva 6, which last week dropped the song “Full-on Israeli” with these lyrics:
“If you ask me where my mother is from / First of all, she is a Tel Avivian / From a Jerusalem family that made aliyah in 1890 / She makes the best Algerian couscous in the land / All while speaking fluent French.
“If you ask where my father is from / First of all, he is from Kfar Saba / His shirt from Milan, his jeans from the Arim Mall / His mother and father made aliyah from Warsaw / He is a Mediterranean mix.
“So what does that make me: half-half – quarter-quarter / Why am I still not complete? / What part determines? / If you ask me what I really am?/ A full-on Israeli – totally, completely, absolutely.”
Thanksgiving and all.