It has been noted that the day of Hanukkah takes place on November 28, which also happens to be Thanksgiving Day. Not far from us, in Norwood, a marketing professional named Dana Gitell coined and trademarked a word to describe this conjunction: Thanksgivukkah.
“Thanksgivukkah” will have a short shelf life, because these two holidays aren’t going to be connected again for a very long time. And that is unfortunate, because they actually have much more in common than does the other popular celebration with which Hanukkah is more often paired: Christmas.
Christmas is one of the two most important Christian holidays; Hanukkah is a more peripheral part of the Jewish calendar. Christmas marks the birth of the founder of a major religion; Hanukkah marks one victory over op-pressors in the long history of Jewish opposition to oppression.
On the other hand, Thanksgiving and Hanukkah share an ancestor: Sukkot. Sukkot is our harvest festival, a festi-val of thanksgiving for God’s bounty. When the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving for the harvest they felt blessed enough to reap, they modeled it on the Biblical holiday of Sukkot. During the war against the Greeks, the Maccabees were unable to celebrate Sukkot at its proper time, because they were fighting a battle. When they retook the Temple and purified it, they proclaimed Hanukkah as an eight-day festival in order to make up for having missed the eight-day festival of Sukkot. Both holidays, therefore, actually celebrate thanks-giving.
As Thanksgiving has come down to us, it is also a celebration of religious freedom. Whatever the actual Pilgrims may have thought, we have for years praised them for leaving England so that they could worship God as they chose. It is in that spirit that Norman Rockwell, in a set of artwork marking President Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (one of which was “freedom of religion”), could include a painting of a Thanksgiving dinner. Similar-ly, we have for years in America marked Hanukkah as a celebration of our freedom to live our lives as Jews, de-spite the pressure of our overlords to compel us to worship Greek gods.
So, there are Hanukkah and Thanksgiving, celebrations of religious freedom, of giving thanks, and of the miracle of food for us. May we share them with those we love, and may we be sure to provide food to all those who are in need.