Pilgrimage and Homecoming

If there is one song that embodies the festival of Thanksgiving, it is Lydia Maria Child’s “Over the River and Through the Wood.” “Over the river, and through the wood, to Grandfather’s (or Grandmother’s) house we go, [Journeying through] the white and drifted snow…Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day.” I hummed the melody as Debbie and I drove with the kids under the Hudson and through the New Jersey Turnpike towards my in-laws this past week. I couldn’t help but think how constant the American sensibility has remained since that song was written well over a hundred a fifty years ago – excepting of course, the minivan and DVD player. Like millions of other Americans – on trains, planes and automobiles, I made a pilgrimage, a journey from point A to point B. But these travels were not to far-flung destinations, to new places and unfamiliar faces. The “frontier” over Thanksgiving was home, to grandmother’s house. Whether it is our biological families, the families we marry into, or the folk who take us in or we take in for an evening, the American ideal asks us to come home – to return to the familiar, food, company and conversation. It is obvious when you think about it, but in that song, in our Thanksgiving travels home, sits the double helix of American self-understanding – pilgrimage and homecoming. American journeys do not ask us to create a new identity. Rather, our journeys seek to return us to our true selves, to reclaim our birthright, be surrounded by the familiar – in other words to come home, literally and metaphorically, physically and spiritually.

Think about the story of the first Thanksgiving some 200 years before that song was written. Why did the Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock in 1620? As we learned from the class plays of our school days, the Puritans were a separatist clan, identifying most closely with a broad tradition known as Calvinism. In other words, the Puritans were very “frum” Protestants. They were deeply pious and suspicious of any national church – even the Protestant one, and for that matter, of anything that came between them, God and Scripture. So they left England, seeking to create a separatist community in Holland. When that didn’t work out, these separatists sailed off to America for their version of “Survivor,” but wearing far more modest attire, and, lacking GPS, mistakenly landing 64 days later at Plymouth Rock. The journey was not a revolution; all they wanted was to practice their faith – to create a religious home in peace and freedom.

But less important than this or that historical fact is what the story of Thanksgiving and for that matter, the song about grandmother’s house, has come to represent for us – what it says about our sensibility today. The story of the Puritans is the story of how a people had to travel great distances in order to be themselves. Jews love the story of Thanksgiving because if you were to cut and paste Israel for Puritan and Egypt for Europe, you basically have the Biblical narrative. As I have mentioned before, it is not for nothing that these earliest arrivals to North America understood themselves to be God’s New Israel. The poignancy of the Exodus story is that Children of Israel were not so much arriving at a “new” frontier as they were making claim to a land promised to them long before. They sought to live in a place where their full identity and Divine blessings from God could be realized. And from the Biblical Exodus to the Puritan pilgrimage, to Simon and Garfunkel’s “gone to look for America” and Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” the journey is the same – all of us pilgrims with an eye to homecoming.

Think about it. There are so many examples I could give you from popular culture. Young Max, who has to go to Where the Wild Things Are in order to wake up in his own bed; Dorothy who goes off to see the Wizard, only in to realize there is no place like home. What was E.T. all about if not the hope to return home? For that matter, pretty much every single Disney movie I have ever seen – from "The Lion King" to "Shrek" to "Peter Pan," to "Harry Potter" (I know, not Disney or American), right up to the new one I saw yesterday with my kids – has the same story line: the return journey of a prodigal child or lion or wizard or ogre. The happy endings happen when after the long journey, the central character is finally able to return with newfound wisdom and confidence – physically, and, in most cases, with a new existential identity. The stories that vary from the theme are actually drawing on the same elements: Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye – tales about young men and their inability or unwillingness to make the journey back home. In its fulfillment or otherwise, this is the paradox of any biblically-based identity, American or Jewish: a pioneering spirit that journeys far afield with the sole purpose of coming home.

Which is what makes the Joseph story so engaging. Go, Go, Go Joseph – the Joseph story captures our imagination because it is based on this self-same literary trope of a grand journey that we know will end by taking us back to the beginning. The tale of a young man cast out of his house and sent, albeit against his will, to a faraway land. Joseph began his life living apart in his own home, a sore thumb among his brothers. Every year, I am struck by the exchange between Joseph and a mysterious man in the fields when Joseph is sent out by his father. “What are you looking for?” the man asks. “I am looking for my brothers,” Joseph answers, “can you tell me where they are pasturing?” (Exodus 37:15-16). One cannot help but read this dialogue in light of Cain’s abdication of fraternal responsibility earlier in Genesis. While Cain’s retort to God “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) showed his true stripes, Joseph’s “I am looking for my brothers” signals his longing for family that has eluded him these first seventeen years of his life. The redemptive trajectory of Joseph’s story is that it is as he moves further and further away from his home of origin – to Potifar’s house, into jail with the butler and baker, and up to the court of Pharaoh – that Joseph actually becomes his own man. Only at the end of the story, two weeks from now, when Joseph is finally comfortable in his own skin, does he do what he has wanted to do all along, reveal his true self to his brothers. You would not be wrong to read the Joseph story as a tale about the brothers’ repenting for the misdeeds of their youth. But that is only part of the story. The real drama is Joseph himself and how far afield he must go in order to return to where and what he wanted to be all along. Admittedly his father and his brothers come to him and not the other way around, but the point is the same. The Joseph story is the story of leaving home in order to come home, becoming something else only so we can one day be ourselves – which is why Joseph captures our hearts year in and year out.

I think Thanksgiving is a fascinating time to explore identity. College students return and experience their homes for the first time after having lived away. I recall a complex and often painful reshuffling of friends that occurs those first few years as one figures out which parts of your identity, which people, are and are not part of the next chapter of your life. Young parents, like myself, go to visit grandparents – creating a kaleidoscope of generations and in-laws brought together for a mercifully limited window of time. We go back to our parents with children in tow, children who oddly view us as we view our own parents. This sentiment was brought home to me in that same car ride, when my daughter asked me, “Daddy, were you ever cool?” Empty nesters welcome home men and women who are creating their own identities and their own families – a joyous homecoming, but I imagine a complex process in which a parent realizes the differences between the home that gave birth to a child and the home which that child, now an adult, has given birth to. No matter where we fit in this song of Thanksgiving, all of us must grapple on some level with the notion of pilgrimage and homecoming. As for Joseph, who we are and who we seek to be is inevitably a reflection of our ability to both move away and return, to let go and welcome back. Pilgrimage and homecoming: these are the cords that tether us to our past and future. These are the boundaries that define who we are.

One of my favorite Hasidic tales is told in the name the Hasidic master Reb Bunem about Reb Itzik son of Yekel. After many years of great poverty which had never shaken his faith in God, he dreamed that someone bade him look for a treasure in Prague, under the bridge which leads to the king’s palace. When the dream recurred a third time, Rabbi Itzik prepared for the journey and set out for Prague. But the bridge was guarded day and night and he did not dare to start digging. Nevertheless he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it until evening. Finally, the captain of the guards, who had been watching him, asked in a kindly way whether he was looking for something or waiting for somebody. Rabbi Itzik told him of the dream which had brought him here from a faraway country. The captain laughed: "And so to please the dream, you – poor fellow – wore out your shoes to come here! As for having faith in crazy dreams, I once had a dream to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in the room of a Jew. Itzik, son of Yekel, that was the name! Itzik, son of Yekel! Now just imagine what it would be like, if I went to every house in Cracow, where one half the Jews are named Itzik and the other Yekel!" The soldier laughed aloud and walked away. Rabbi Itzik bowed, traveled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built a House of Prayer. (Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Later Masters. pp. 245-246.)

Sometimes, like Joseph, we have to travel a long way away, just to find what had been sitting under our noses all along. From Adam and Eve onwards, all human beings ultimately seek one and the same thing – to return to the garden of home. And yet, we also know that in order to grow, in order to be received at home and find what awaits us, we also have to leave. This is the story of our people as Americans, as Jews, as families and as individuals. May we, on this holiday weekend, all have the fortitude of spirit to make the journeys that await us all, and may we welcome all those travelers who seek to come back home.