Good evening, everyone. To those of you I haven’t met yet, I’m Cantor Emily Simkin from Temple Emanu-El of Edison. I’m humbled by the opportunity to offer words of gratitude and blessing during this holiday season of joy and abundance. Before me I see a diverse group of individuals that have joined together this evening to form a rich mosaic of interfaith community. We’ve come together out of mutual respect in celebration of our differences as well as our shared humanity.
Togetherness at a time of great polarization is a sacred moment not to be taken for granted. We juxtapose the idyllic vision of this evening with our own family gatherings that will take place on Thursday. Some of us will spend hours preparing our homes and lovingly crafting intricate feasts, while others will travel far and wide to relatives in the name of time-honored Thanksgiving tradition. We cram around the bountiful table; the vegan aunt, someone’s new boyfriend, the grandparent with strongly held political views, the brother-in-law who takes the football game too seriously, the younger cousins determined to have you try out the latest social media trend…
There’s a reason why every sitcom has a Thanksgiving special episode. It’s the stuff of comedic gold. Saturday Night Live parodies our clumsy and chaotic gatherings every year because the inevitable clash of personalities, beliefs, and ideals is a timeless trope. Psychologists and family system experts agree that each family in their own way is somewhat dysfunctional. We attempt to set aside our differences and connect. Even when our disagreements are painful, we are ultimately family.
Our Thanksgiving gatherings can be seen as a microcosm of our country’s struggle to function harmoniously. Vastly different people gather around the same table. We are each a
patchwork of experiences sown together to form a unique identity. Each person pulls up their chair from a different place, offering another perspective. Despite our differences, we all come to the dinner table hungry.
The first year of the seminary program I was ordained from was in Jerusalem. I spent a year in that beautiful, complex, and deeply troubled country. I studied, grew spiritually, and sat in the conflict that permeates the air there. One evening I was taking a taxi back from the Old City to my apartment. My driver was an Arab Palestinian man traditionally dressed with his head wrapped in a keffiyeh. We exchanged pleasantries until we pulled up to a red light next to another taxi. He lowered his window. “Mah nishma, Habibi?- How are you, my friend?”, he called out to the driver next to him with a Jewish star pendent on his dashboard. The Jewish Israeli and the Arab Palestinian joked and asked each other how their wives and kids were in a mix of Arabic and Hebrew. When the light turned green, my eyes met my drivers’ in his rearview mirror. He read my mind as I thought to myself: these two men are friends? He looked back and said to me, “At the end of the day, we all just want to get home.”
I can’t help but think about what our world could look like if we all possessed a similar mindset- at the end of the day, we all just want to get home. These words still echo throughout my consciousness when my grace is tested. While I don’t claim to hold answers around the Middle Eastern conflict, or know how to build a bridge between the political left and right in our own country, I believe that healing begins with empathy.
The earth beneath our feet here in this very place was once occupied by the Munsee Lenape tribe. They were originally one of three subgroups among the Lenape nation that lived around the Delaware River. Beginning in the year 1669, the Munsee Lenape people began to be pushed out of the area after being defeated in battle by colonists and being forced to move due to a fraudulent treaty. The Munsee Lenape people have all but disappeared from this land into our history books. They were a people with a vibrant culture, a rich history and a beautiful symbiotic relationship with nature. The Jewish text, Pirkei Avot (the Ethics of our Fathers) quotes the sage Ben Zoma, “Who is wise? One who learns from everyone.” What could have been if we had learned from one another? What if comradery and compassion had replaced apathy? Where would we be as a society if a recognition of shared humanity took precedence over greed and power? While we’ll never know the answers to these questions, we are certainly worse for not coexisting. We can never know the full extent of the pain they felt. This land we prosper on today bears a scar beyond healing.
This Thanksgiving, let us reframe the holiday as a call to action. Let us work to create a seat at the table for everyone. Let us raise the voices of the silenced by bringing them into the conversation. May we unite around a shared need for connection, community, and belonging. May we know that there’s enough to go around the table for everyone. May we never lose sight of the divine spark in every person by recalling that we are all siblings under one God. May you and yours share a holiday season of abundant blessing, good fortune and above all, love… to which we say, Amen.
This sermon was presented at the MEAICA Interfaith Thanksgiving at the First Presbyterian Church of Metuchen.
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