The address we need to hear
As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving in our angry and divided country, let us travel back 150 years to the Thanksgiving of 1868, a time when the country was far angrier and more divided.
Just three years had passed since the end of the Civil War, and resentments still smoldered. The Pulaski Riot in Tennessee and the Camilla Massacre in Georgia were fresh in the nation’s memory. In the victorious North, meanwhile, anti-immigrant sentiment was rising.
That’s what makes the Thanksgiving address of a certain Dr. Marcus Jastrow, rabbi of Philadelphia’s Congregation Rodeph Shalom, so extraordinary. His stirring message still resonates, and if we take it seriously we will be the better for it.
Jastrow took as his text the 100th Psalm, which he interpreted as a call for national unity: “The principle of freedom and equality to all, the principle on which American institutions are based, calls upon every American to obliterate all differences, both political as well as religious, at the moment of celebrating a national idea.”
Nativism was rampant throughout the land, and John W. Geary, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania, was attempting to capitalize on it. Geary had recently issued the traditional Thanksgiving proclamation, but in distinctively Christian terms. He was a supporter of the National Reform Association, whose central goal was the addition of what was called the “Christian amendment” to the preamble of the U.S. Constitution.
To this platform Jastrow offered a sharp riposte. He reminded the congregation that the task of the governor as an elected official was to protect the rights “not of a majority, not of a party, not of a sect, but of all citizens, all portions of the people.”
Jastrow was speaking of religion, but imagine that he spoke instead of ideology or partisanship.
“Before God, the Creator of us all, there is no difference between man and man, and so it ought to be among mankind. You have no right to establish a discrimination between the children of the same Father—you have no right to assign the country to one faith or one sect, for it is God that made us; it is He that made this nation and enabled it to erect its government of freedom.”
One need not be a religious believer (or for that matter approve of the use of “man” in such a context) to see the point: The nation should never be allowed to become the exclusive preserve of those of a single religion, ideology, or party.
As we gather around the table with family and friends a century and a half after Jastrow’s wise words, let’s try to remember that we’re a nation of everybody.
Happy Thanksgiving.