Gonna Take a Miracle, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

November 30, 2013 Martha Thomases 6 Comments

It is a phenomenon that occurs hardly ever, but this year, to annoy me, Hanukkah overlaps with Thanksgiving.  Someone told me, “It will be 60,000 years before this happens again.  Or maybe it’s 600, I forget.”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” I said.  “We’ll be dead.”

And so, in this holiday spirit, here are some thoughts on the subject.

Thanksgiving is a holiday I enjoy a great deal, and Hanukkah is a minor celebration that has been blown up to overcompensate for Jewish kids who don’t get Christmas.  It’s an odd mash-up, but there are some similarities, and they are worth celebrating.

Both holidays celebrate religious freedom, in that the colonists at the first Thanksgiving were escaping the religious tyranny in Europe, and the Maccabees wanted to keep the Temple free of the Romans.  So we celebrate ways to be true to ourselves in a world that includes others.

One of the things that the Maccabees were fighting over was the fact that the Gentiles had outlawed circumcision.  They Gentiles did this, not for health reasons (as one might today) but specifically to target the Jews.  So, when I light the menorah, I am grateful that my people have a tradition of demanding my right to control my own body.

We tend to gloss over the fact that the first Thanksgiving, as described in the modern myth, was the first example of American multiculturalism.  The Native Americans kindly invited the undocumented immigrants to their table, to share their bounty (since the Pilgrims had no bounty of their own).

Here’s an example of diverse views coming to the table.  A prominent American conservative, someone who has poured millions of his own dollars into right wing causes, is now campaigning to raise the minimum wage.  His reasons are interesting to me:  he’s doing this because he believes it will shrink the size of government.  In other words, if people who work full-time are paid a living wage, they won’t need food stamps or welfare or Medicaid or other government support, and that will shrink the entitlement programs.  If you read the whole article at the link, they discuss the reasons that other supporters of a higher minimum wage have for disagreeing with him.  I would probably side with the unions and progressives on this, but I think it’s an interesting discussion to have.  And there is hardly any screeching or name-calling involved.

So whatever you’re doing this weekend, I hope you have people you love nearby.  And I hope you can light a candle or two against the darkness.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases is ashamed at how much she covets the jewelry in the Tiffany ads this time of year.