Puritans and Israelites: turkeys of the same feather?
JUST AS I'M BENDING OVER the helpless Thanksgiving turkey, poised to saw off a
pulka (drumstick) for my youngest son, I get this uncomfortable feeling that
something's ceremonially amiss.
Hey, we're preparing to eat this golden escapee from our oven and we haven't asked
the Four Questions. Nor have we recited the Ten Plagues or, for that matter, sipped
our first glass of wine. Now wait a minute. It's Thanksgiving, not Pesach. So why,
then, are these two commemorations entwined in the cramped mind of this aged
patriarch?
Passover and Thanksgiving, Israelites and Puritans, it's a natural confusion. Think
about it, their quest and deliverance -- both, impossible dreams -- came true. And
both were fleeing religious persecution, seeking to build "Zion."
(Indeed, the exact terminology for the "new world" used by the wayfarers who
straggled out of the Mayflower onto a frosty, Northeastern shore was "New Zion.")
Unlike earlier migrations of nations, neither was seeking material prosperity.
Condos and Lincoln Continentals and a high protein diet were not emblazoned on
their pennants. But still, the craftsmen, civil servants and businessmen who crowded
the hold of the Mayflower must have wondered about food and drink in the
wilderness that awaited them. Corn, say the historians, saved them. They ate
cornbread like the Israelites ate matzo.
The Pilgrims were middle class folks. They were doing fine in England. It was their souls that
were pinched, not their bellies. Neither did they, nor the Israelites, worship multiculturalism --- diversity to
these folks was a dirty word. Both the Pilgrims and the Israelites waged relentless
war against the native, pagan landowners.
The Puritans perceived the "native Americans" as restless nomads who wouldn't
know a quitclaim from a buckskin hanky. The vagabond Jews didn't worry about
legal quibbles, either. The Master of the Universe gave them their Land, didn't He?
And can you doubt that the Pilgrim Fathers -- who read their kids to sleep at night
with a chapter from the Torah -- weren't gripped by the spirit of those earlier
Jewish vagabonds?
Many a moonlit night they must have peered from the Mayflower deck at the wastes
that surrounded them and saw the sands of Sinai instead of seeing the heaving
waters.
Both wanderers ultimately found their homes, of course. And now, so many years
later, many American Jews celebrate both events.
Judaism has so many movements already, perhaps we might start one more: An effort to rename the Turkey Day meal the "Thanksgiving
seder."
Jewish World Review Nov. 26 1998 / 7 Kislev, 5759
By Ted Roberts
JWR's Ted Roberts is a nationally syndicated writer living in
Huntsville, AL.