WESTCHESTER ECUMENICAL THANKSGIVING 2010

Good evening. Shalom. Salaam Aleikum.

Friends, you know this story, this freedom story. It begins

with a water-crossing.

On November 9th, 1620, after two arduous months at sea,

the Mayflower sighted the scrubby coastline of what we call
Cape Cod. Outfitted in austere black and white, stovepipe
hats and shoes with buckles, freedom-seeking Puritans
established Plymouth Plantation. Meager of skill and meager
of tools, the Pilgrims cobbled together cabins, cold and leaky.
A punishing winter stymied all attempts at agriculture.
Disease swept the colony. Of the 102 Mayflower passengers,
only half survived the first winter.

But a “friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists,”

a classic textbook explains. “He showed them how to plant
corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A soldier,
Capt. Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend
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themselves against unfriendly Indians” (America: Its People and
Its Values, as cited in Charles C. Mann, “Native Intelligence,”
Smithsonian Magazine, online edition, December 2005).

Squanto taught the Pilgrims to fertilize the soil by burying

fish heads alongside the maize seeds. The colonists grew so
much corn that it became the cause for the first
Thanksgiving, a three-day harvest feast held the next fall, in
company with local Indians with whom the Pilgrims were
living in peace. They played Indian games like football. They
hunted wild fowl like turkey and made the roasted bird the
centerpiece of the Thanksgiving table. They baked pumpkins
into pies.

Thus was the American Thanksgiving born.

That, anyway, is the story we tell--inaccurately, according to

historians like Simon Worrall and Charles Mann from whose
eye-opening articles in Smithsonian Magazine I have drawn
liberally in presenting the following, less familiar picture:

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The Mayflower passengers were not Puritans and the name
“Pilgrims” would not be applied to them until the late 18th
century. They were Separatists. Unlike the Puritans whose
name derived from their wish to purify established doctrine
and ceremony of the Church of England, the more radical
Separatists “split off from the mother church to form
independent congregations, from whose ranks would come
the Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and other
Protestant denominations” (Simon Worrall, “Pilgrims
Progress, Smithsonian Magazine, online edition, November
2006).

A band of Separatists had escaped England for the

Netherlands in 1607, and only after thirteen years and much
trial and error did the Mayflower successfully set sail. Even
after sighting land “the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid
weeks scouting Cape Cod for a good place to land, during
which time many colonists became sick and died” (Mann).

They did not wear black and white or stovepipe hats or shoes
with buckles. “They dressed in earth tones—the green,
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brown and russet corduroy typical of the English
countryside” (Worrall). Following English custom, they did
not bathe, and were hirsute and smelly, especially next to the
smooth-skinned, fastidiously clean Indians who greeted them
with an admixture of suspicion and disgust.

The colonists failed at agriculture because they were not,

principally, farmers. In fact they had neglected to bring any
cows, sheep, mules, or horses. (They may have brought pigs.)
Equipped with flimsy rods and lines, they had intended to
make a livelihood by exporting salted fish back to England.
In fact it may have been they who taught Squanto the
technique of fertilizing the soil with fish heads and not the
other way around.

His name was not Squanto. It was Tisquantum, and even that
was not likely a name given at birth. Tisquantum means
“spiritual rage.” When he introduced himself to the
colonists, “[I]t was as if,” one historian has put it, “he had
stuck out his hand and said, ‘Hello, I’m the Wrath of
God’” (Mann).
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Tisquantum’s reasons for assisting a community of Europeans
cannot be ascribed to pure altruism. He was sent by
Massasoit, the sachem or Indian chief of the Wampanoag
tribal confederation, to the Indian settlement of Patuxet,
where the colonists established Plymouth.

Tisquantum knew Patuxet. It was his home.

Almost seven years earlier, in this very place, a man named

Thomas Hunt, the lieutenant of Captain John Smith of
Pocahantas fame, had massacred Indians, taking Tisquantum
hostage at gunpoint with eighteen other Patuxet villagers,
forcing them into the hold of his ship and kidnapping them
to Spain where he planned to sell his cargo as slaves. Saved
by Spanish priests who intended to convert him, Tisquantum
escaped to London where he was taken in by an Englishman
who taught him our language. More than five years after his
kidnapping, Tisquantum successfully booked passage on a
vessel bound for New England.

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When he finally arrived home, what he saw astonished him.
Southern Maine to Narragansett Bay had become one great
ghost town, a “cemetery 200 miles long and 40 miles
deep” (Ibid) with skeletons littering the countryside. His
hometown “Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a
single person remained” (Ibid). He finally encountered a
handful of ragged survivors who sent for Massasoit. The
chieftain explained that a pestilence had raged for three
years, killing up to ninety percent of the people in coastal
New England. Historians now believe that the epidemic was
viral hepatitis spread by the spoiled food of European
settlers. Massasoit had once presided over as many as 20,000
tribal members; now his entire confederation could not
muster even 1,000 (Ibid).
(
It is in this historical circumstance that we should
contextualize Squanto’s “friendly residency” among the
Plymouth colonists and the so-called first Thanksgiving.
Both Massasoit and Tisquantum had their motives. The
former hoped to use the colonists as allies against the
Narragansett Indians, sworn enemies of the Wampanoag
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confederation, and Tisquantum, with his fluent English,
made the logical go-between. For his part, Tisquantum
hoped to reconstitute his home community of Patuxet which,
you will recall, was situated at Plymouth. By relocating the
major Wampanoag settlement, Tisquantum hoped to strip
the rulership from Massasoit. To this end, during his year in
Plymouth, Tisquantum covertly fomented mistrust of
Massasoit among fellow Wampanoag and simultaneously
tried tricking the colonists into attacking Massasoit.

Meanwhile, “[b]y fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough

that they held a feast of thanksgiving,” modeled after
European harvest festivals. Apparently “Massasoit showed
up ‘with some ninety men,’ most of them with weapons. The
Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing
their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace.
Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food and
complained about the Narragansett.” And that, says
historian Charles Mann, was the first Thanksgiving (Ibid).
There was lots of corn. There was no turkey. The pumpkin
they did eat was boiled. The holiday was not repeated next
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year; only later was it revived, and, and despite Washington’s
proclamation of the holiday in 1789, it was not
institutionalized by Congress until the presidency of
Abraham Lincoln.

They may, however, have played football, so at least one

present-day tradition gets it right.

The bitterly ironic epilogue to this story, as Mann reports it,

is that while Tisquantum was busy sowing maize seeds side-
by-side with the settlers, Massasoit was unwittingly sowing
the seeds of his people’s destruction. By concluding a first-
ever Indian treaty permitting a permanent settlement in New
England, Massasoit made possible waves of European
immigration courtesy of the beachhead in Plymouth. Over
“the next decade tens of thousands of Europeans came to
Massachusetts. Massasoit shepherded his people through the
wave of settlement, and the pact he signed with Plymouth
lasted for more than 50 years. Only in 1675 did one of his
sons, angered by the colonists’ laws, launch what was perhaps
an inevitable attack. Indians from dozens of groups joined in.
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The conflict, brutal and sad, tore through New
England” (Ibid).

It was not only European growth and guns that did in the
natives; the settlers’ germs took the heaviest toll. Lacking
any natural immunity against European-bred diseases like
smallpox, Indians died in ferocious epidemics.

“Why didn’t they teach me this in school?”

That was my first reaction to encountering this material and

perhaps it was yours too. Our Thanksgiving narrative is not
really history but rather what Rev. Kalajainen described in
last year’s Thanksgiving sermon as “a composite of fact and
imagination and good storytelling.”

It is, in other words, a Myth, capital “M,” which means a

Master Story. No mere fairy tale, a Myth is the Story that a
People tells about itself to explain its origins, understand its
place in the world, and express its innermost values.

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We need our Myths. We also need to destroy our Myths.

Friends, you know this story, this freedom story. It begins

with a water-crossing.

“We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, but God freed us with

a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” For centuries we
languished under the taskmaster’s whip; then, armed with
holy power, we were redeemed: God’s signs and wonders in
Moses’s hand, God’s words in Aaron’s mouth, God’s spirit in
Miriam’s music. Spared the bloody final plague, we fled
under the cover of night, more than a million
strong--600,000 men of fighting age alone, the Bible
reports--marching to the water’s edge. Moses raised his staff;
the Sea parted. We crossed to safety while the waters closed
in over Pharaoh’s pursuing chariots.

This Myth, this Master Story, has inspired countless

generations. In it, early Christians found a spiritual
antecedent for the saving power of Christ: as God had
delivered a nation from bondage with the blood of the first-
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born, so too would the blood of the only-begotten one
deliver the faithful from their bondage to sin. The African-
American community adopted the Bible’s Exodus narrative
to express its innermost longing for a hero who would deliver
them. “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land/Tell ol’
Pharaoh/Let my people go!”

The Myth has elemental power. The indomitable pull of

human freedom; the will to cast off all that shackles the
human spirit; the inexorable judgment of human tyrants:
these themes inspire us to this day.

That we were slaves undergirds the Torah’s most frequently

repeated precept: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for
you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 23:9, etc.) In
Judaism, empathy and ethics arise out of the experience of
slavery.

The only problem is, it is not likely that we were ever slaves
to Pharaoh in Egypt.

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According to historians and archaeologists there is no
evidence that the Exodus ever took place. Whatever did
happen did not happen the way the Bible says it happened.

Skepticism about the Biblical account is nothing new; in the

halls of academia, scholars have subjected Scripture to
historical-critical scrutiny for the better part of two hundred
years, and the science of Biblical archaeology has grown over
the last century into a celebrated discipline drawing upon
billions of investment dollars in Israel alone.

Rabbi David Wolpe articulated all these points, more or less,

to his congregation in Los Angeles on the morning of
Passover almost ten years ago, to considerable uproar.
Reflecting years later on the ensuing brouhaha, Wolpe said:
(
Endlessly reiterated is the mantra ‘absence of evidence
does not mean evidence of absence.’ In other words, the
fact that we have never found a single shred of evidence
[of an Israelite encampment] in the Sinai does not mean
the Israelites were not there.
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 This is nominally true. We have found Sinai evidence of
other people who predated the Israelites, and while it is
improbable that 600,000 men crossed the desert 2,500
years ago without leaving a shard of pottery or a Hebrew
carving, it is not impossible….

However, the archeological conclusions are not based

primarily on the absence of Sinai evidence. Rather,
they are based upon the study of settlement patterns
in Israel itself. Surveys of ancient settlements--
pottery remains and so forth--make it clear that there
simply was no great influx of people around the time
of the Exodus.… Therefore, not the wandering, but
the arrival alerts us to the fact that the biblical Exodus
is not a literal depiction. In Israel at that time, there
was no sudden change in the kind or the volume of
pottery being made.… There was no population
explosion. Most archeologists conclude that the
Israelites lived largely in Canaan over generations,

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 instead of leaving and then immigrating back to
Canaan (As cited on Beliefnet.com, emphasis mine).

Additionally, no Egyptian documentation exists that speaks

of an Israelite enslavement or mass departure--and the
Egyptians kept meticulous records of which many have been
excavated.

So where does the Myth, the Master Story, come from?

Some have conjectured that a very small band of refugees of
Egyptian slavery, perhaps Israelites, eventually made their
way to their homeland and their story found its way into the
national narrative of their Canaanite brethren.

My personal conjecture is that the story was composed by

and for Jewish people living under a documented example of
displacement and subjugation, in the Babylonian Exile of the
6th century BCE--in which case the narrative of a long-since-
passed Egyptian slavery functioned as an allegory for a
present-day condition, giving hope that God’s judgment
would depose the tyrannical Nebuchadnezzar and allow
God’s faithful to cross the Jordan to freedom.

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As with the Thanksgiving story, one appropriate reaction is,
“Why didn’t they teach me this in school?”

The answer is because we need our Myths. They embody

what we as a nation, a religion, a civilization most cherish.
The truths they convey are eternal truths. As Wolpe
memorably puts it: “Knowing the Exodus is not a literal
historical accounting does not ultimately change our
connection to each other or to God. Faith should not rest on
splitting seas. At the Passover Seder we declare: ‘In each
generation, each individual should see himself as if he (or she)
went forth from Egypt.’ The message does not depend upon
whether 3 or 3 million individuals left” (Ibid).

To analogize: haven’t you ever read a story that changed your

life? That gave you sudden insight into the human condition,
the world, the Divine? For me, those life-changing stories
include Shakespeare’s Hamlet which says as much or more as
any work of literature about what it means for a human to be
or not to be. “Fiction” usually outclasses “non-fiction” when it
comes to conveying essential Truths.

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Or consider Henry Thoreau’s Walden. Would it change your
impression of the rugged outdoorsman at the center of the
autobiographical narrative to learn that during his period of
so-called seclusion by the titular pond, Thoreau regularly
accepted care packages delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
mother?

We read and re-read great stories because, historical or not,

great literature has the power to change our lives and change
the world.

Put most concisely: Our Master Stories, our great Myths, are
true, as Rabbi Larry Kushner likes to say, “not because they
happened so much as because they happen” (paraphrased)--
because the Master Stories continue to inspire, teach, and
lead the way for people of faith who seek a connection to
God’s presence in history and God’s ongoing engagement in
our lives.

At the same time, a healthy mistrust of Myths would serve us

well--as would an eagerness to tear down a false edifice.
Learning the truth should not frighten a person whose faith

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is firm, whose faith transcends the literal and draws strength
from the wellspring of the symbolic.

Moreover, we need to differentiate between “Eternal Truth”

or “Ethical Truth” and historical fact. “A tradition cannot
make an historical claim and then refuse to have it evaluated
by history,” Wolpe reminds us. “It is not an historical claim
that God created us and cares for us. That a certain number
of people walked across a particular desert at a particular
time in the past, after being enslaved and liberated, is an
historical claim, and one cannot then cry ‘unfair’ when
historians evaluate it” (Ibid).

All the more should we confront with unflinching directness

those who would misappropriate the Myth for unethical ends
or political gain. Conflating “Master Story” with History, too
many people mired in their Biblical literalism would use a
reductionist Myth of Israelite manifest destiny--of mass
Exodus and mass conquest of Canaan--to justify the
enlargement of borders and the dispossession or
marginalization of non-Jewish residents who also call the
Holy Land home. Rather than deriving from our Master
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Story the quintessential message, “You shall not oppress the
stranger… for you know the heart of the stranger,” they rely
on utopian Biblical borders to lay claim to disputed territory
-- even if it means that more than a few may end up
designated Outsider, Sojourner, Stranger.

And too many people would use a reductionist Thanksgiving

Myth of Indian-Pilgrim cooperation and celebration to gloss
over the real history between European settlers and Native
Americans: a history of raids and cross-raids, of guns and
germs, furs and fishing, of internecine squabbles, of
displacement, disenfranchisement and even genocide.

This is not just a twenty-first century problem. The early

generations of Plymouth settlers did not hesitate to explain
the obsolescence of the Natives as proof-positive of God’s
providence, a vindication of European “civilization” over
Native American “savagery,” a justification of their worldview,
their official Myth, capital M.

We need our Myths and we need to destroy them.

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Faith does not demand that we abdicate Reason or suppress
critical thinking. The world needs more people of Reason
who also orient themselves toward Faith, toward elevating
the life of the spirit. A modern religion that embraces both
Faith and Reason gives us powerful tools to address the
challenges of our time.

A modern religion that embraces both Faith and Reason

gives us everything we could ever need in order to locate
God’s presence in this glorious and confusing Universe, and
to access our God-given faculties to address a shabby little
world desperately in need of human hope and human help.

May your Thanksgiving radiate, around your table and into

the world, the light of Harmony, Peace, and, above all, Truth.

One Myth, however, you have my permission to leave be.

No matter what, tell the chef that the turkey was delicious.

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