God brings blessings of thanksgiving

In the year 1620, our nation's pilgrim forbears escaped the tyranny of England and sought a new life in a new world by crossing the mighty Atlantic in a ship called the Mayflower.

Arriving at Plymouth, Massachusetts, at the advent of winter, they would have died had it not been for the gracious help of native Americans, who showed them how to survive in their new land.

The following year, that same Plymouth colony celebrated its first harvest with a feast where they gave thanks to God for the bounty of this land, for the kindness of the natives, and for God's providential protection.

And that is the reason that we, too, gather at this season year after year to give thanks to God for the many gifts this great land continues to bestow upon us all.

This account has become the great American story that we're all going to recount in one form or another around our dinner tables on Thanksgiving Day.

Together, we deem this story to be our collective origin -- no matter where our ancestors really were in 1620 -- because our national character and the deepest truths that you and I hold so dear are rather succinctly contained therein.

The major themes of this Thanksgiving narrative -- the pilgrim's escape from tyranny, their perilous ocean crossing, their arrival in a promised land, and God's gift of providential protection -- are very familiar; they are the central biblical themes of our Judeo-Christian faiths and traditions.

But the Thanksgiving story is also a distinct story of community -- one of native Americans and new Americans coming together to survive and thrive by sharing, caring and doing whatever they could for the health and welfare of one another.

The message for us at this Thanksgiving season almost 400 years later is that life and its many blessings are God's greatest gifts to us all. Our lives, it teaches, are neither about constant material acquisition and consumption, nor are our personal worths and identities tied to the clothes we wear, the gadgets we own, the vehicles we drive or the things we possess.

Instead, this season is about the simplest of blessings that we tend often to just take for granted: our lives, our families, our friends and the many others in life we serve, as well as about the liberties and freedoms with which this land of unprecedented human freedoms endows us all.

Thanksgiving, then, reminds us that in the very best of times -- when it so easy to become full of ourselves and ourselves alone -- it is really God who has brought all of these blessings into our lives on the shores of this most unique and blessed of lands.

You, too, I believe, will find the themes of our Thanksgiving season expressed rather succinctly in these ancient words of Jewish prayer:

"How greatly we are blessed!

How good is our portion!

How pleasant our lot!

How beautiful our heritage!"

Rabbi Larry Schlesinger serves Temple Beth Israel in Macon.

This story was originally published November 20, 2015 at 10:21 PM with the headline "God brings blessings of thanksgiving ."