FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)Most American Jews don’t think twice about celebrating Thanksgiving. However, commemorating any non-Jewish holiday raises questions for some Jews about laws forbidding Jews to imitate non-Jewish customs and traditions.
According to a talmudic interpretation of Leviticus 18:3, Jews are forbidden from celebrating: gentile customs rooted in idolatry; and “foolish customs” in the non-Jewish community.
Non-Orthodox rabbis do not see a conflict with the celebration, seeing it as entirely a secular holiday.
For the Orthodox, most lenient was Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik who found it far-reaching that one should consider Thanksgiving a gentile religious holiday, and said since turkey did not lack a tradition of kashrut, eating it on Thanksgiving was not a problem. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein said Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday and Jews can celebrate it, but cautioned against taking the holiday on as an obligation (i.e.: “We must celebrate Thanksgiving”). Conversely, Rabbi Yitzchak Hunter wrote that a celebration becomes a “holiday” through annual observance and therefore, one should not commemorate the day.