I am home and I am quieted, yet awakened, by the falling leaves of my New England town’s trees. Looking through my bedroom window, I see the creamy-orange carpet of leaves that now cover the entirety of my backyard: “Autumn,” they say. Tonight is Thanksgiving dinner, and my parents have invited over fifteen people to sardine themselves into our narrow living room-turned dining room. We’ll gather around the long picnic tables with knitted sweaters, old friends, savory food, and conflicting thoughts.
Every year, Thanksgiving rolls around and our country is yet again confronted by the facts of its history. We are confronted by the immense gratitude we feel for our Founding Fathers who formed an incredibly progressive democracy for us to inherit. We are confronted the sleepy feelings of post-feast bliss. And we are confronted by the current political problems and the irony of the North Dakota Pipeline controversy.
This holiday represents a variety of national memories, both beautiful and ugly, but perhaps it can be elevated this year through a unifying perspective. Perhaps this year, Thanksgiving can reveal the commonalities between people, rather than the dark, shadowed gaps that lay between us.
Transcendentalist writer, Henry David Thoreau, writes in his 1862 essay, Autumnal Tints, that “we have only to elevate our view a little to see the whole forest as a garden.” It’s been almost 155 years since this article was first published in The Atlantic magazine, yet this sentiment still rings true. We need not hide ourselves or our country’s blemishes in order to reveal the persisting worth it offers. Rather, we must create an elevated view of our own world—or, in this case, country—to realize that this thing we see as mundane, brown, unchanging, and mysterious, can be pruned and watered, given sunlight and time to become the elegant resting place of fruits and flowers.
Thanksgiving is a time of renewal, no longer simply a holiday of looking back on the past year and offering an overdue “thank-you.” Instead, Thanksgiving becomes an evening of secularized atonement, for, in order to offer gratitude to someone or something, one must first recognize who deserves the thanks, for what, and just how much we need each other. Taking it a step further, to surrender to our need for others, we must acknowledge our weakness and our fragility as individuals, thereby transforming this holiday into an extremely honest, communal acceptance of our innate imperfections as humans.
Coming from a Jewish perspective, this all sounds quite familiar. Just a few weeks ago many of us were standing in our synagogues, meditating on our choices throughout the previous year, revealing to ourselves in all honesty that some of those choices had been misled or even intentionally malicious. One could ask, coming from this background, why it is necessary to once again do this “teshuvah,” this act of repentance, when we so diligently did this, and so recently. However, the word “teshuvah” comes from the Hebrew root which means “return.”
Many people interpret this to mean that Yom Kippur should be spent working towards a return to God. However, by this point in the new year, many resolutions have been marginalized for the sake of prioritization, or even because the burden was too heavy when added to daily tasks. Reading it this way, Thanksgiving is a double-edged sword of “returning.” As we give thanks to those who have been important in our lives, we also thank those who have given us the awareness of our own dependence on each other. In this sense, Thanksgiving is our mid-year opportunity to check in with ourselves and to return to our goals for the year, to realize the weight of those goals and the true ability to achieve them, but with the knowledge that it is with the help of others that we can see the “whole forest as a garden.”