What Does It Mean When Chanukah and Thanksgiving Overlap?

A case against celebrating Thanksgiving at all, built on why exile was never meant to feel like home.

Q. What’s the meaning of this year’s rare overlap of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving?

The issue of Jews celebrating Thanksgiving is problematic. Our presence in exile is a punishment and no reason to party (“because of our sins we were exiled”). The Meshech Chochma warned well before the Holocaust, those who feel that Berlin is their Jerusalem, a terrible storm will eventually uproot them and remind them not to feel “too German” or “too American”. Moslems and Christians can be Americans, for they are religions and not nationalities. Contrarily, even an atheist is still Jewish, for Israel/Judaism is also our nationality, not just our religion. America may consider Jews as “one of them” from their point of view, but that clearly doesn’t change Judaism’s objective and eternal definition of our identity. Moshe was not buried in Israel as a punishment for identifying himself as an Egyptian instead of Israeli (Dvarim Rabba 82, 8), even though he truly grew up in Egypt and never was in Israel, because all Jews wherever they are, should always identify themselves as Hebrews from the Land of Israel. Accordingly, most poskim (aside from R. Soloveitchik) feel like R. Moshe Feinstein (Or.Ch. v, 20), R. Hutner, R. Menashe Klein that one shouldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving at all, for America is not our home, and her holidays are not ours.

Just as there’s no significance that Xmas often overlaps with Chanuka, even more so with the rarity of Th.G., except for the significance that, like the Jonathan Pollard case, it’s an opportunity to help Jews clarify their real identity, their real homeland, and their real holidays, when tremendous “thanksgiving” to G-d is truly necessary and obligatory, for example, Israel Independence Day- when G-d expressly gave the Jewish nation our real and permanent homeland.