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ORBIT
Page 4
FROM THE RABBI by Rabbi Steven Conn
November 28 th is still weeks away, but the excitement over Thanksgivukah
has already reached a fever pitch. News outlets in the United States and Israel
have run numerous feature stories. Steven Colbert devoted several minutes on
his Comedy Central Show to a tongue in cheek rant against Thanksgivukah. And
the Boston publicist who came up with the idea has already trademarked the name. Thanksgivukah
is everywhere: on tee-shirts and greeting cards, cooking shows and food festivals, and on the official
Boston city calendar. You can even buy a menurkey—a turkey shaped Chanukiah. Only in America!
Thanskgivukah, of course, refers to the rare coincidence in the United States this year of the
first day of Chanukah and Thanksgiving. The two holidays have overlapped only once before, in
1880. And due to the quirks of the Jewish calendar, the next Thanksgivukah won’t occur for 79,000
years— unless rabbis agree to adjust the Jewish calendar to bring it back in line with the seasons
before then. Thanksgivukah, then, presents us with a once in a lifetime opportunity to celebrate these
two holidays together. Thanksgivukah also presents marketers with a once in a lifetime opportunity to
sell a whole new line of merchandise to all of us who are caught up in the excitement.
Frankly, I am not running out to buy a menurkey for this year’s celebration. And I will try to resist
the temptation to send out greeting cards that say “Thanksgivukah 2013: Nun, Gobble, Hay, Shin.”
Still, I am grateful that we are talking about “Thanksgivukah” this year and not “Christmakah.” For lots
of reasons, Christmas and Chanukah just don’t go together; no matter how much some people try to
force the issue. Christmas is a major Christian festival. Chanukah is a relatively minor Jewish holiday.
Christmas celebrates the miraculous birth of Jesus, whose followers created a religion that sought to
supersede Judaism. Chanukah, on the other hand, celebrates the survival of Judaism in the face of
threats from inside and out. The theme of Christmas is “peace on earth, good will toward men.” The
theme of Chanukah is the military victory of the few and faithful Jews over the numerous and powerful
Syrian Greeks. Christmas and Chanukah, then, are entirely different holidays whose core messages
conflict at many points. Putting Christmas and Chanukah together might be useful on a practical level
for some people, but the result is a kind of Franken-holiday that lacks cohesion and trivializes two
great religions.
Thanksgiving and Chanukah, on the other hand, complement each other quite well. And why
not? They both have the same origin. The Pilgrims modeled the first Thanksgiving on the Bibilical
harvest holiday of Sukkot. The Maccabees also used Sukkot as the model for the celebration of
Chanukah. Most of us know the Talmudic story of the menorah in the Temple that burned for eight
days. But this story first appears in Jewish literature hundreds of years after the first Chanukah
celebration. Long before that, historians explained that the Maccabees chose to celebrate Chanukah
for eight days because the last holiday that should have been celebrated in the Temple was Sukkot.
Because the Temple was defiled, however, Sukkot was not observed. Chanukah was created, in
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