In many ways our family trip last week to attend our niece’s Bat Mitzvah in Philadelphia was like a traditional Thanksgiving excursion complete with the three Fs – Family, Food, and Faux Pas. As both Ashirah and I are from the Tri-State area, our family was in large supply. With near sixty degree weather with little precipitation, we were able to safely see everyone outside with masks. The food my sister and brother-in-law had prepared for us to eat in an outdoor tent was scrumptious. Leaving only the faux pas side, which I was more than happy to create. In successive order, I got our minivan stuck in the mud, had the car battery die on us, and had my youngest son’s hand catch in our car door – a triple whammy of unneeded suffering. Luckly, in all three cases, it all worked out okay and we were able to make it back home relatively unscathed.
Jacob, too, embarks on a journey to see family to start this week’s Torah portion, Vayetzei. Fleeing for his life from his brother Esua and hoping to reunite with relatives he had never met before, his journey was fraught from the start. Worse he was caught the first night in the middle of nowhere, forced to camp without shelter on a seemingly random mountain. Sleeping fitfully, with only rocks to serve as a pillow, he has a transformative vision that is one of the most powerful in all of Torah – a ladder stretching from the sky to the earth with angels descending and ascending. “Surely God was in this place, I did not know it,” he says when he wakes.
The lesson of both my families’ journey and Jacob’s are that the most profound moments happen when we least expect them. Thanksgiving has never been about the perfectly cooked turkey, but about the beautiful imperfections that make it hard for us to gather in the first place. Certainly, the pandemic has made normal gatherings all but impossible. Hopefully, like Jacob, we will find God in the most unexpected of places.
Bonus – My View Column in the Buffalo News from a few years ago, “A Special Blessing for Thanksgiving”
Bonus Bonus “The power of faith during a pandemic“
Happy Thanksgiving and Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex