简体中文
In these days of anxiety and alienation, Thanksgiving offers the warm embrace of inclusiveness. Particularly for many people with families and faiths rooted in other lands, no other holiday, not even the Fourth of July, has so great a capacity to make them feel American.
A child of Orthodox Jewish immigrants could feel his apartness on other festivals celebrated by the larger society. Christmas, Easter, Halloween — all are distinctly Christian observances, no matter how temporal and commercialized they have become. They are inevitable reminders for some Americans that they are different.
Thanksgiving’s origins are also Christian. But it has evolved into something both secular and spiritual, a day devoted to family and amity. Perhaps that explains its unwavering appeal for believers and nonbelievers alike (even if many Native Americans understandably choose not to partake). Thanksgiving is at heart more than parades, or football or even country; there’s no flag-waving or chest-thumping. It is about shared bounty and shared humanity.
That’s why the writer Saadia Faruqi, a Pakistan-born Muslim, welcomes the day. “For a Pakistani-American, Thanksgiving is as wholesome and normal a holiday as one can get,” she said in a 2015 essay. “It is a time to be grateful, to spend time with family, and to have a little bit of fun.” Though she never developed a taste for turkey, Ms. Faruqi wrote, the Thanksgiving table would most definitely be set — with tandoori chicken, daal and naan.
No turkey, either, for Saumya Arya Haas, a writer who is Hindu. But there would be the familiar trimmings, she wrote a few years ago for Huffington Post. And, for sure, chai. “My family experience of being Hindu is deeply rooted in inclusiveness, social equity and community service. Chai-party values, if you like,” Ms. Haas said. She continued: “There’s pumpkin pie on the table and chai on the stove. This is America, after all. We create our own truth, if there even is a truth at all. We are all poor in something. We share with those who have less. Everyone brings something. We are imperfect, real, enriched.”
Writing last month on the website of the International Buddhist Society, David Westdorp said he had adopted Buddhist ways of living in recent years. And so, appropriately, he offered suggestions for a meatless Thanksgiving meal. Mr. Westdorp noted correctly that it is not a day traditionally known for exchanging gifts. “The ‘presents/presence’ you can give to people,” he said, “is extending loving kindness” — preferably, he added, “in the Buddhist Metta tradition without any clinging or expectation of reciprocation.”
Lincoln may well have anticipated all those convictions — Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Christian — when in 1863 he proclaimed the last Thursday in November to be “a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” It was formally changed in 1941 to the fourth Thursday in November.
Lincoln knew his Bible, and was surely familiar with a passage from Exodus all too often ignored in our present era of hard feelings: “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Lincoln mentioned God but no particular faith in his proclamation. We may presume that all were thus declared welcome to sit at the American table.
(NEW YORK TIMES)
