Do Jews Do Thanksgiving?

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

Nov 29-30, 2024 • 29 Mar Cheshvan 5785 • Toldos (Gen 25-28).

Please print this email and bring some hodu to the dinner table.

Do you know how many days til Hannukah? 

Find curated Channukah books and gifts on BestJewishBooks.com (or uncurated on Amazon). 

Question for your Thanksgiving table –

Thanksgiving is rooted in European colonialism. 

That's why many of his statues have been torn down. 

So now that Columbus has become so controversial, how come nobody is talking about that today? How come we don't hear of anyone refusing to "do Thanksgiving" in protest?

Tradition?

Well, the tradition of the present Table Talk email is to pull out, dust off and rejewvenate our annual Hodu message.

Here are a few questions to stump everyone at the table:

Try this one first: Why turkey?

Serious question: Why do Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving?

(Why does it seem like a religious duty, like matzah on Pesach.)

If anyone answers, "They ate turkey so we have to eat turkey," that would be incorrect.

In fact, they would be wrong on 2 counts.

First of all, would it really be so bad to have a Thanksgiving pizza? Or Thanksgiving hamburgers? Or a red beans and rice Thanksgiving? How about a Chinese Thanksgiving? Curry Thanksgiving, anyone? Do vegetarians do Thanksgiving? 

(I know I'm not the first to ask this question, but it seems far from resolved.)

Second, they probably didn't eat much turkey.

At that original Thanksgiving in 1621, they apparently ate mostly venison.

I know, shocking, right?

Let's go back in time.

Imagine you're on the boat with Columbus.

(Maybe you're even a Jewish refugee from the Spanish Inquisition.)

PS - If you'd like to know about the Jews who sailed with Columbus, send me an email.

Of course, you and your geographically-challenged buddies think you're in Asia.

It's a strange world! Strange people, fauna and flora.

And you see this funky chicken.

The Wampanoag Indians call it neyhom.

What do you, O Spanish sailor, call it?

Remember, it looks vaguely like a chicken and you think you're in India, so naturally you call it "Indian chicken."

Are you with me so far?

French explorers agree that it looks like a chicken and they call poulet d'Inde (Indian chicken), later shortened to dinde (pronounced "dand").

English settlers think it looks more like a Turkey pheasant than a chicken, so they call the bird turkey.

Jewish explorers side with the French and call it tarnegol hodu — "Hindu chicken" — later shortened to hodu.

What's interesting for us is that the Hebrew word HODU also just happens to mean "give thanks" (in the imperative mood for all the grammarphiles out there).

So back to our main question for your table: What food should you eat on Hodu Day?

(Hodu, of course.)

Now try asking somebody Jewish at the table this stumper:

You're Jewish, right? Can you explain what "Jewish" means?

Forget the religious or cultural meaning; we want to know the etymology of "Jewish".

It means something like, "a state of being thankful". 

Ergo, if you're living up to the name "Jewish" then you are....

....living in a state of being thankful.

Let that sink in before asking the next question: How often?

(Once a year? Once a month? Once a week? Once a day?)

That could be a lot of hodu to stuff yourself with.

Final question for the table: How do you do hodu?

Happy Hodu-Day, and

(which may be the same as saying...)

Shabbat Shalom

PS - the links above - including the image - are all very cool, check them out!

Cross-posted on Times of Israel.

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Yes, We Have a Banana!

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

Nov 22-23, 2024 • 22 Mar Cheshvan 5785 • Chayei Sarah (Gen 23-25).

First question for your table: If you had a billion dollars, is there any chance that you'd pay six million for a banana and piece of duct tape under the guise of "art"?

That is exactly what happened this week when billionaire Justin Sun won the "Comedian" at auction.

To answer this burning question, it may be a little hard to imagine having a billion dollars, so let's reduce it proportionately - it would be like someone with a million-dollar net worth spending a mere $6,000 on the banana. 

Would you?

What if it were a mere $600? Would you consider that a bargain too good to pass up?

Currency in any form is an excellent measure of value. I can tell you exactly what you value – just show me your credit card statement. But sometimes just like we sometimes eat impulsively and speak impulsively, we spend impulsively and the purchase doesn't represent our true values. 

Question for your table: How can a person avoid such impulsive actions that they may later regret?


Shabbat Shalom 

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Should I Care Who Wins?

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

Nov 9-10, 2024 • 8 Mar Cheshvan 5785 • Lech-lecha (Gen 12-17).

People like to say that competition is good because it pushes people to excel.

The thing about competition is that it creates losers.

Not only that, but there are usually more losers than winners. That's a lot of hard feelings. Is it worth it? 

I cannot recall specifically being aware of "strongman competitions". 

I'm sure that I've heard about them... but it's one of those things that I don't generally pay attention to.

You could try asking this at your table - Can you name one such competition or one champion?

There are many, including: World's Strongest Man, Arnold Strongman Classic, Europe's Strongest Man, Strongman Champions League, World's Ultimate Strongman, World's Strongest Viking, World Muscle Power Classic, Fortissimus, Pure Strength, Rogue Invitational, Shaw Classic, Giants Live, IFSA World Championships, Strongman Super Series and World Strongman Challenge

I'm sure it's entertaining to watch men lifting cars and bending steel bars but it's frankly not something I've ever tuned in. 

But for some reason the death this week of Britain's most famous strongman captured my imagination. This is a guy who at his peak could literally tear phone books in half and bend steel bars.

But what caught my attention was the following detail in his biography:

He supported himself and his young family by working as a police officer. One afternoon, he was sent to arrest a man for not paying a fine. He knocked on his door. When the man opened it, Capes saw dozens of budgerigars — a type of parakeet — chirping about in cages.

“Could I have a look at your birds?” Capes said.

They brought back memories of his childhood, when he tended to injured birds and animals. The man invited him inside and served him a cup of tea. They had a lovely chat about the tiny, chatty budgies. Capes even held some of them in his giant hands.

Alas, after an hour, Capes reminded the man that he was there to arrest him.

“He came quietly and afterwards we kept in touch,” Capes told The Sunday People, a London newspaper, in 1998. “Two weeks later he gave me my first ever pair of breeding budgies.”

Capes began breeding them with the same enthusiasm with which he trained for strongman competitions. He competed in budgerigar shows throughout Europe, winning a world championship in 1995. He was named president of the Budgerigar Society in 2008 and frequently judged competitions.

“There’s something about their color and beauty that fascinates me,” Capes told The Sunday People. “They bring out my gentler side.”

I love that he didn't merely experience the beautiful birds in the zoo like most of us might do.

As in his first career as a strongman, he took his God-given talents and pushed himself towards his potential. He channelled all of that amazing physical power into his art, which was an interaction with the profound beauty of nature, and in so doing, left the world a better place than he found it.

Two questions for your table: Do you think that his success has anything to do with the fact that he grew up in a time before the advent of so many modern distractions and addictions? And as asked above, is competition worth it, given that it creates losers?


Shabbat Shalom 

PS - This week's Table Talk also appears online at http://rabbiseinfeld.blogspot.com.

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Who Was That Unmasked Man?

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

Nov 1-2, 2024 • 1 Mar Cheshvan 5785 • Noach (Gen 6-11).
In memory of Jeremy Dossetter (Yermiyahu Matan) z''l, whose 7th yahrzeit was observed this week.

I recently had the opportunity to spend six hours in the City Department of Planning.

The first five hours were merely waiting for our turn at the Zoning Commission meeting.

What a blessing to have a laptop (and plenty to do with it)!

During one of my writing breaks, I wandered around the lobby there on the 5th floor and happened upon a pile of stapled copies, obviously left for the public to read and/or take. The cover sheet:

MEMORIES OF A 50-YEAR CAREER
Frank J. Murphy's Journey Through the Transportation Profession
From 1974 to 2024

It is a monumental record that can only be fully appreciated if you are holding it in your hands. It would be very difficult for a mere mortal like me to fairly represent the contents of this hundred-page autobiography. Mr. Murphy has been blessed with either a photographic memory or the self-discipline to keep a meticulous journal for fifty years.

But here are a few impressions:

• There may not be a single road, crosswalk, traffic light, or stop sign in the City of Baltimore that doesn't have Frank J. Murphy's fingerprints on it.

• There is no bravado - merely a happy account of his journey both horizontally and vertically through a civil engineering career: gratitude for landing in a career that he could continuously find challenging and meaningful for fifty years.

• He's multi-dimensional - the packet included a photo from the office holiday party showing him playing electric bass.

While I stood there perusing the tome, my immersion in his fifty-year transportation journey was interrupted when a door nearby suddenly opened.

A man carrying a small briefcase silently and rather swiftly exited, walking past me toward the elevators, some fifty feet away (a foot for every year of FJM's career?)...

While awaiting the lift, the man looked back towards me. Was this indeed he? The legendary Frank J. Murphy himself? The photo on the document was a younger man with a goatee and the man by the elevator was older and clean-shaven. But still....

Our eyes met. I put on my best inquisitive expression and pointed to the autobiography, trying to ask across the fifty-foot divide, "Is this indeed you?"

He made no motion of his head, but if I'm not mistaken, his eyes were smiling. And then as suddenly as he had appeared, he stepped into the elevator and was gone.

Most of us can live in a city for an entire lifetime and never have a clue who actually designed and facilitated all of that flow of traffic. Even when something you don't like appears and you'd like to know whom to blame, it's always just "The City."

But if we're honest, we should admit that most of the time, things do work, and we never have a personal connection to anyone who actually created that functional design.

Question for your table: At what point does a mere civil servant become a hero?

Shabbat Shalom 

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The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI.org) is to foster a paradigm shift in spiritual education to enable every human being to access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.