Giving Thanks

For twenty-seven of the past thirty years, I have cooked a traditional Thanksgiving meal for someone; twenty-two of those years for my family in Rhode Island. But even after I moved to South Carolina I continued to cook turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie introducing some of my new Southern friends to a traditional holiday side dish, French-Canadian meat stuffing. This recipe, with a few variations also comprises the filling for tortieres, the French-Canadian Christmas Eve meat pies.

 

My first turkey was cooked for my then soon-to-be-husband. We had just moved into our first apartment and he was changing the lock on the door (from the outside). As the turkey cooked, I sat in our new living room watching “Start the Revolution Without Me,” starring Donald Sutherland and Gene Wilder. I laughed and laughed, not paying any attention to the hammering and banging going on outside the apartment. After a long while, I heard a noise at the living room window. I got up and looked outside and there he was, tossing rocks at the window and shouting to me to open the door! Turned out that the banging wasn’t normal installing-a-new-lock banging but, I’ve-locked-myself-out-and-want-to-come-in banging!

 

The most difficult Thanksgiving was the one immediately following my father’s death. His absence created a huge space, but no one talked about him. It was as if everyone thought that if we didn’t speak of him, we wouldn’t be in pain. Human beings can be so foolishly wrong. There we were, without the man who had always been there; the one whom to us, had been larger than life; the one we loved more than any other and we were pretending as if he had never existed. At some point, I realized that the only way to ease some of the pain of that day was to talk about him.  I lit a candle and put it in the window. My son asked what I was doing. I told him that I was lighting a candle for Pepere. As we sat down to dinner and ate, I invited my father into the room. “Remember when he……?” And then it began. All the memories spilled out from all of us and we were, I think, better that day because of them.

 

It has been my custom the past few years to make a list of those things for which I am grateful. A bit cliché, I know. But here they are…those things in my life for which I whisper a tentative “thank you” to whomever or whatever is listening:

 

• For a family who loves me in spite of myself
• For a home that feels like home.
• For winters without snow.
• For living a mere three minute's drive from the Atlantic Ocean.
• For having more fun at my work than anyone has a right to (except for the grading papers part).
• For music that enriches my life beyond measure.
• For music stores that have sidewalk sales and sell old vinyls for 25 cents.
• For poetry and good books that contain sentences so perfect I read them over and over again.
• For planes that fly to NY and bring me to my children.
• For stars so beautiful, I want to learn the constellations.
• For lazy Saturday mornings accompanied by coffee and last Sunday’s NY Times crossword puzzle.
• For good meals and good conversation shared with friends.
• For yummy bottles of wine.
• For singer-guitarists who call me up to the mic to sing Joni tunes with them.
• For cowboy boots bought at 60% off at a shoe store in SoHo.
• For golden angel snow globes that play “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” when I crank them up.
• For a gorgeous four-poster, hand-carved, mahogany rice bed with clean white sheets into which I slip at days’ end.
• For life, which brings one damn gift  after another….

 

response

This entry is a response to the comment that was made below, which was in turn a response to my most recent blog entry:

I don't know who you are. I may know you, but I don't know who you are based on your screen name. It really doesn't matter. I don't know whether to thank you, or to apologize. I would thank you for reading Wiesel and for allowing it to touch you so profoundly. I would apologize for being the catalyst that led you to read Night and for inviting you into such a dark and evil place and time.

Years ago I was having dinner with my best friend. I was so excited about teaching the evil and suffering course. She told me that for years she has been trying to figure out why I had such a fascination with the topic and why I insisted on teaching this particular course. Then she said, "Finally I have figured it out." I said, "You have? Then please tell me." She said, "You are committed to teaching that course because you have tremendous faith." I said, "Who? ME?" She said, "Yes. You have tremendous faith in your students; that when they encounter suffering, they will be moved to compassion. And that when they are confronted with evil, they will recognize it and will not tolerate it." And because she knows me better than any other person in the world, of course she was right. And my faith in humanity is affirmed again and again by people like you and by my students, who consistently and repeatedly prove my other friend wrong; the one who said that compassion and altruism were rare traits in human beings. He was just wrong.

So That It Will Never Happen Again

There is a section of my evil and suffering course that never fails to touch me. I have been teaching this course for 7 years and whenever we get to the section on Post-Holocaust theology I get sucked in; I get sucked in to the horror, the disbelief and the evil. By “sucked in,” I don’t mean tantalized or tempted like one who strains one’s neck to gawk at a traffic accident one is passing on the highway. Though when reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, one gets a sense that one is reading something that one should not, like a voyeur peeking in on secret things one has no right to. The honesty is so raw, so brutal; I want to whisper to him, “Elie, you didn’t have to tell us that. You didn’t have to confess.” No, when I say, “sucked in,” I mean swallowed, spiraled downward, sunk-in-the-chest sorrowful. There is a part of me that is drawn to Holocaust literature; poetry and memoir, history and theology. I am drawn to the pain like a moth to a flame and I think I know why. I think I know why. I want it to touch me. I want to offer to Elie Wiesel my pledge that I will never forget; that I will always remember and by entering into it, in the only way I can, I find a way to bring a passion into the classroom that will hopefully spark in my students an appreciation for the power of memory that Wiesel has been writing about for 50 years. And perhaps, they will join me in my pledge to Wiesel never to forget. And so the memory will live on. This is no grand gesture. It is a small thing. But it’s my thing.

 

But I enter into it not only for my students. It is not just a professional strategy. I attempt to enter into it also because there is a part of me that forgets the magnitude of cruelty. On a daily basis I walk around in the world believing that people seek the good for others; that human beings are compassionate and kind and truthful. And then I read Night. And I am reminded not only of the suffering endured, but of the cruelty inflicted. As I read there is a tension in me that understands the reality of the page and yet cries out, “How could this happen? How could this happen? And how could the world watch and do nothing?” I expressed this to a friend once; my disbelief at the unfathomable depth of the capacity for human beings to enact evil and he said to me, “Why are you so surprised at that? What is more extraordinary is that human beings can actually be altruistic.”  His statement was stunning to me. The idea had never occurred to me that it could be the other way around; that cruelty might be the norm and benevolence the rarity. It is a startling statement and though I can entertain the thought academically, I cannot accept it categorically.

 

When my students read Night they are required to write a two page response to it. Some of them allow their horror and anguish to spill out onto their own pages and their heartbreak is evident. Others are rendered speechless and tell me that for them to attempt to even comment on Wiesel’s memoir seems to them impossible, if not obscene. And yet, they try. Others read it and though they may have been deeply moved, they do not express it in their own writing. They write about the book as they would any other and their papers read like dry book reports one might write about Moby Dick or Jane Eyre. And some stubbornly hang on to their theodicies and attempt to offer a “reason” for it. In their attempts to defend God in the face of God’s silence and absence at Auschwitz and thereby justify the evil, I become impatient. I write things in the margin in the heat of the moment. Within the hour I must return to their papers with White-Out and take back my scathing comments and biting sarcasm. But over and over again I read the same statement; that Wiesel wrote it “so that it will never happen again.” So that it will never happen again.

 

But it is happening again. It is happening now. Genocide is occurring in the Sudan as I write this and the world is silent again. And perhaps we can delude ourselves into thinking that 60 years ago the world did not act because it did not know, but not now. We read about this modern genocide every day on the Internet, in the New York Times and in Newsweek. We cannot plead ignorance. What shall we plead then, when future generations charge us with apathy, or cruelty, or immeasurable sins of omission? Shall our defense be that apathy and silence in the face of evil are in fact simply the norm for human beings? That we were simply displaying our true natures? Shall we protest the accusations by confirming that for the privileged and powerful to rush to the defense of the weak and vulnerable (when there is no self-interest involved) is an act that is just too extraordinary to be expected? Or will we read the memoir of a man or woman from Darfur who survived the horror, and pledge to remember “so that it will never happen again?”