The Feast

November 27, 2009
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

     In this week's portion, Jacob returns to Abraham's homeland, falls in love with Rachel, is tricked after seven years into marrying Rachel's older sister Leah, agrees to serve Laban for seven more years so he can also marry his beloved Rachel. When he has a dream that it is time for him to return to Canaan, he waits until Laban is away from home, packs up his two wives and all his children, takes his own servants, and leads his flock away from Laban's household. Laban returns home to find Jacob and his two daughters gone, along with much cattle and his household gods, so he and his sons ride after Jacob to bring them back.

     But Laban has a dream that gives him second thoughts. He sees that Jacob is protected by his God and it is dangerous to cross a god. When he arrives at Jacob's camp on the Heights, he accuses Jacob of theft. To Laban's way of thinking, Jacob and everything that Jacob owns belongs to him -- all of it came to Jacob while he was serving Laban, so it belongs to Laban. But Jacob sees it differently. He has not taken flocks belonging to Laban, only animals Laban agreed would belong to Jacob. His wives too belong to him since he labored fourteen years for them; and his children and servants are also his. Jacob and Laban are both right; and they both know it.

     But surely Laban's precious household gods do not belong to Jacob. Jacob knows he did not steal them, so he allows Laban to search his camp. But Rachel tricks her father, hiding the household idols under her cushion and sitting on her cushion while her father searches her tent. Laban's household gods are nowhere to be found. Laban will have to do without them.

     Laban says to Jacob, You did not have to leave secretly, like a thief in the night. If you had declared you were ready to go, I would have made a great feast and sent you away in peace. Of course, they both know that is untrue. Laban would undoubtedly have found some new trick to make Jacob stay. But here, in Jacob's camp, the two great tricksters of the Bible come to an understanding. They set up a pile of stones and call it a boundary-marker. Laban agrees to stay on his side of the boundary; and Jacob agrees to stay on his side.

     Then they share a great feast on the Heights to seal the deal. What a perfect Torah portion for the weekend of Thanksgiving. From the beginning of time, feasts have been dramatic symbols marking important moments in the lives of societies and religions. Even when their origins are nearly forgotten, feasts enable people in crisis or transition to recall their origins, identities, and destinies.

     A feast takes us out of our immediate moment in time and plunges us into a special kind of religious moment, a sacred time that extends backward in history and forward into the future. A feast connects us with our past and with our future. Professor Mircea Eliade of the University of Chicago, a great historian of religious myth, also notes that "sacred time" is "the eternal present of the mythical" makes it possible for ordinary folk to endure the other days, the many days of "ordinary time."

     Feasts are also bound up with their opposite: fasts. Fasting is ordinarily observed when there is a paucity in the food supply. Feasting is usually a sign that there has been an increase in the food supply. Fasting inspires feelings of discouragement and remorse. Feasting brings on feelings of encouragement or joy. Feasts often mark moments of seasonal renewal which religious folk interpret in terms of individual spiritual renewal or social renewal.

     Ritual feasts like the one that marks the covenant between Jacob and Laban are innately religious, calling on God to affirm a moment. But even nationalistic feasts like Thanksgiving are deeply religious in background and character. Thus, Americans generally believe that Thanksgiving is modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Wampanoag Indians, held to mark a covenant of friendship that would last for many years. But add to that the Thanksgiving Day football games, beginning with Yale versus Princeton in 1876, and the feast becomes a full "festival."

     The connection between feast and festival was  further deepened in the late 1800s with parades of costumed revelers, in 1920 by the staging of a parade sponsored by the Gimbel's department store of Philadelphia, and since 1924 by the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City with its huge balloons that first appeared in 1927.

     Thanksgiving, associated with Pilgrims and Native Americans, with revelry and parades, with sport and food, symbolizes intercultural peace, America's opportunity for newcomers, blessing and plenitude, and the sanctity of home and family. And it remains a religious occasion. It does not leave God out. As William Jennings Bryant said, "On Thanksgiving Day we acknowledge our dependence." And this is equally as important as symbolizing our independence on July 4.

     Whether the feast is Thanksgiving or the celebration of a covenant between two men, God is at the head of the table. The American author Rebecca Harding Davis wrote,

We are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread. The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.... Shall we [not] think of the day as a chance to come nearer to our Host, and to find out something of [God] who has fed us so long?

     And let us say: Amen.