Is Thanksgiving the American Sukkot?
I’m no prophet, and had I been in Moses’s place when God commanded him to celebrate a “Feast of Booths,” I would have responded that I wasn’t a carny. Living in a booth, at least by modern standards, seems more like “Adventureland” than the commemoration of a desert sojourn.
But in my search for the significance of Sukkot, its traditions and the reasons behind them struck me as similar to those of another major holiday for gratitude, something non-Jewish, yet with feasting–minus the huts: Thanksgiving.
Many scholars believe that the Pilgrims, as English religious refugees, modeled their Thanksgiving holiday after Sukkot. Originally, Thanksgiving may have been a three-day celebration and closer in time to Sukkot. Realizing that both occur around the harvest season, I put on my investigative kippah to take a look at the two festivals.
Origins
Sukkot comes from a direct divine commandment to celebrate and be happy while dwelling in temporary huts. The Bible specifies that this feast, a departure from the solemnity of Yom Kippur, is to take place five days after the Day of Atonement. Sukkot follows a common motif in the Bible–to rejoice after repentance, to enjoy oneself after suffering.
Personally, I’ve always stuck to the traditional attendance at Yom Kippur services. My family took even that loosely. When the Orthodox families walked to synagogue on the High Holidays, my great-grandmother would crow about the perfect parking spot she got in front of the shul. She even got a speeding ticket coming home from synagogue once.
The Israelites, though, did their time and celebrated God’s bringing them out of the literal wasteland–the desert–into a literal land of plenty, Canaan. Now we erect booths recalling what they experienced and decorate them with the fruits of the harvest, also occurring at that time of year and showing that we are at once vulnerable yet also secure with our plentiful crop.
Was there any similar injunction with the Pilgrims? The Atlantic Ocean and the deserts of the Middle East do not have much in common, but both figure as the desolate areas through which refugees escaped, and from which both emerged into a land rich with resources.
Similarities and Differences
Everybody loves good food; the Israelites and the Pilgrims were no exception. Thanksgiving fare–turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing and pumpkin pie–is supposed to come from the dinner shared by the Native Americans and white settlers in 1621. Turkeys, native to the New World, became staples of the colonists’ diets.
The Israelites would also use the bounty of their newfound resources to give thanks for the land’s fertility. Whereas God had sent the Israelites manna in the desert, in the land of Israel they could afford to use extra crops to celebrate. The first day of Sukkot, a day of rest, would–according to Leviticus–require the Israelites to “take choice fruit from the trees, and palm fronds, leafy branches and poplars” to adorn their booths.
Unlike those of the Israelites, my first Sukkot at age five involved more placating the little ones with candy while the rabbi prayed and less camping out in huts. My family didn’t even go so far as to build its own sukkah or use the one in the synagogue, but continued with the secular year.
We celebrated Thanksgiving, however, with an annual pilgrimage to my grandparents’ house where cousins, aunts, and uncles–minus Pilgrim buckle shoes–shoveled down pie and turkey. There was no sukkah-hopping here, but there was a migration from my grandparents’ house to my aunt’s place for dinner and the consumption of her trademark pie.
Sukkot and Thanksgiving both emphasize being with family; I kept true to that part of the holiday season with the memories I hold dear of November dinners with relatives. I can still remember unraveling the mystery of how my aunt made her Ritz Cracker stuffing.
“Can you finally give us the recipe?” my sister asked once again.
Smiling, my aunt just pointed to the side of the box. To our surprise, her famous stuffing, which we thought had been her own creation, was nothing exclusive, but available for all the world to make.
