Erev Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving, perhaps because it is so different from Judaism's standard, classical, biblical holidays.

All our pilgrimage holidays, for example, happen away from home, toward home, longing for home. They teach us how to create a sense of place, of pride, of belonging in the midst of wandering and dislocation. They teach us how to be centered in mobility; how to weave stories into platforms of place; how to celebrate "here" when that is all we have. What they don't speak of, given our long history of exile and exclusion, is the celebration of home. Understandably.

Passover is about leaving a home of horrors, shedding a past and journeying to a better tomorrow while in the midst of a volatile, meandering road to Home.

Sukkot is about accepting the security of in-betweenness. Neither in Egypt nor Israel, at home or on the road, we nonetheless are bidden to set up a hut to serve as our place of surety in this most unsure world. (Oddly, even the most misanthropic among us turns into a gracious host this holiday, for the liturgy recited before each dinner has us invite our ancestors, among others who might be present, as our honored guests.)

Shavuot, in the Bible, was the holiday marking the homecoming of Israel, yet somewhere in the presence of the long years of exile, it morphed into a celebration of Covenant instead, marking the law-giving in the wilderness of Sinai.

The High Holidays, too, are moments of spirit, not place. Purim and Hanukkah are about survival through wit and force.

We are ready, though, especially 63 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, to have a day that celebrates home. Yes, of course, we have the weekly Shabbat, a day of renewal and family, when the world shrinks down to habitable size and home looms large in the celebration. But perhaps because it comes every week, it does not have the lustre or homebound command of a once-a-year celebration like Thanksgiving.

Like many ethnic Americans, my family has added our particular, Jewish twist: we celebrate the night before, erev Thanksgiving. Everyone comes home Wednesday and that evening we have a boisterous brouhaha dinner with four generations, and a singularly unique combination of guests.

The centerpiece is a sculpted Tofurkey (yup, marinaded tofu molded into a turkey shape) but the real fun is being all together once again.

Thanksgiving is our one shared non-denominational American home holiday. We are not expected to fly to Cancun or the Bahamas on Thanksgiving. Airline commercials are not luring us to exotic places. This holiday's travel is not about adventure but about getting home.

The backlash about Black Friday creep - with stores opening at midnight or even 9:00 pm on Thanksgiving Thursday - reveals that many Americans believe home is where people ought to be and America's commerce can rest for one shared day.

For me, I love the festive, food-filled, flush of family. And then it only hurts a little when they are off on Thursday to their "other" family and friends.


(written beside the warming oven, in between batches of my Bubbe Ema - grandmother's - cookies prepared for the holiday)

The shared nature of nature

In the mid-19th century, Calvert Vaux created the iconic images of the American urban landscape, including the grounds at the White House, the Smithsonian Institute and (with his newly hired young recruit, Frederick Law Olmsted) Central Park. Though Vaux started in landscape design, he later moved into designing buildings and homes that would occupy these landscapes.

A populist of sorts, he believed that access to natural beauty was a right shared by all. And that natural beauty should not be marred by ugly architecture or blocked by aggressive private ownership.

In his classic book entitled Villas and cottages: a series of designs prepared for execution in the US, 1857, Vaux makes available to the general public (at least those of a certain means) drawings for what he believes are attractive houses that can appropriately grace various natural settings and landscapes. (He believed, no doubt, that the house should be made to suit the setting and not the setting manhandled to suit the house.)

In this book, he quotes N P Willis of Idlewild, a defender of the public's access to the grandeur of nature and the limits of private ownership of public goods:

To fence out a genial eye from any corner of the earth which nature has lovingly touched with her pencil, which never repeats itself – to shut up a glen or a waterfall for one man’s exclusive knowing or enjoying – to lock up trees and glades, shady paths and haunts among rivulets, would be an embezzlement by one man of God’s gift to all. A capitalist might as well curtain off a star, or have the monopoly of an hour. Doors may lock, but outdoors is a freehold to feet and eyes. (p. 250)


One wonders what Willis and Vaux would say about how we can restore the blessings and shed the excesses of capitalism today.

Do something about fracking

I recently purchased and viewed Gasland. It is a documentary exploring the hazards that come in the wake of hydraulic fracturing (aka, fracking) to loose natural gas from pockets within shale formations around the country.

One of those formations is Marcellus Shale. It covers nine states, including most of West Virginia, half of Ohio and Pennsylvania, large chunks of New York, Kentucky, Tennessee and just nipping the very western tips of Maryland and Virginia and northern Alabama. It is huge, the biggest shale region in the United States.

And it is in the cross-hairs of the big gas companies.

The problem is that extracting this gas through fracking causes alarming and irreparable destruction to the land, water, air, animals, land values, crops and, of course, people. Oh, and it might be the cause of earthquakes that are beginning to damage dams and upset other fragile natural and built infrastructures.

Exactly what damage and how much damage it does, we do not know, in large measure because, courtesy of then-V.P. Dick Cheney, fracking was made exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Superfund Act, the Resource Conversation and Recovery Act (hazardous waste act), and the Environmental Policy Act. Which not only means the drilling companies needn't comply with these protections but that no one has the authority to monitor them.

We do not know what, exactly, the gas companies are pumping into the earth to release the pockets of natural gas or how such drilling is affecting the environment and the lives around the thousands and thousands of wells. But we do know this:

• Drinking water and ground water in areas where fracking is taking place are becoming contaminated. (The EPA recently reported that fracking contaminants were found in a Wyoming aquifer.)
• 80,000 pounds of chemicals, most of which are toxic, are injected into each well under high pressure and remain in the ground migrating who-knows-where
• Poisonous gases are emitted into the air through the fracking process
• Millions of gallons of water are used to flush out the gas
• Thousands of miles of roads with only one short-lived destination and one purpose have to be built to get the water, chemicals, building materials, people, etc to and from the well pad sites.
• Land values are declining where fracking is occurring.
• Banks are beginning to disallow their mortgagees from signing on with gas companies for fear that it will compromise the resale value of the house.
  

Perhaps not everything awful that is being said about fracking is true. But we don't know because the industry has drawn a shroud of secrecy around its operations. Two things I believe are true:

• when big business hides behind the skirts of non-disclosure, claims exemption from the major environmental laws that have been on the books since the days of Richard Nixon, and demands that the people it leases land from must sign non-disclosure (gagging) clauses, something is very wrong.

• if our enemies were threatening or compromising our water supply and destroying our ecosystems the way Big Gas is, we would call them terrorists.

We can do something. The Frac Act (to repeal exemption and require disclosure) was introduced in both the House and the Senate. HR 2766 and S1215. (OpenCongress is a great way to find out what is going on in Congress and tracking bills of interest.)

Senator Cardin and Congressman Sarbanes are both co-sponsors of these bills. Check on the status of your representatives. If they are co-sponsoring or supporting these bills, thank them. If they are not, tell them why they should.

To become even more involved, check out and consider joining any of the anti-fracking efforts in our region, including jewsagainsthydrofracking on Facebook.

This is that scary and that important.

Fall

The season of the long nights has returned, when the days seem to run out of steam before we do. The sun is up for only 10+ hours now. That is five hours less than the high at the summer solstice. We are losing light at an average of 2 minutes a day.

As if that isn't enough, the sun once again sets one stolen-hour earlier. The hands of our clocks had stealthily snatched the light from the morning and tacked it onto the evening. The perfect pinch, though we get caught every year. It was time to give it back.

Still, the time-change hardly changes anything. We moderns, addicted to the drug of artificial light, set our days by GMT.

And yet, the older I get, the more I feel the flow of nature's time. I am becoming like the birds: drape the cloth of darkness over my cage and I am ready to quiet down, settle in, cozy up on the couch with a cup of tea and call it a day.

Night is not just a dark version of daylight, and it cannot fully be chased away with glowing globes. Folks with Seasonal Affective Disorder have to fight to maintain their summer-level perkiness in this abundance of darkness. Throughout human history, time has been a character, an agent, a place, an opportunity, a call, a fear.

It is the messenger of love and a multiplier of loneliness, a midwife to birth and death, to feasting and celebration, to sorrow and loss. It had its own demons - Lilith being one, that seducer of men and snatcher of babies.

In the Bible, the Tanakh, it is where dreams appear and lovers tryst: where Jacob met the angel and Ruth met Boaz.

I spent this season's first long night preparing the nest, cooking, laying in stocks for the winter: applesauce from a bushel of apples, an armful of calzone for a month of Shabbat meals, a batchful of cookies (hint: don't get creative and tamper with a generation's-old family recipe).

I washed the floor and did our laundry listening to earth-songs on Pandora.

And now it is morning - with fall's sun blazing fully in the big sky, no longer fighting with the summer foliage.

Yesterday, sitting in silence at the Gunpowder Friends Meeting and seeing the wind blow up and shuffle all the leaves, one member of the service was moved to say: I am thankful for eyes that can see this shower of gold outside our window.

Small moments of grand pleasure. We need them more than ever.


(Photo image: Flagstaff Dark Sky - what our ancestors saw)