Different people will thank different entities, people, or the nation for different things. And, in a nation where 90% believe in God, most will offer thanks to God.

Yet part of the power of Thanksgiving, which helps make it a distinctively American religious holiday, is that people from very different backgrounds can all sit around the same table, participate in rituals (if any) or not, and, of course, enjoy the same meal.

There will be people who are simply suffused by a sense of free-floating gratitude -- for life, for family, for whatever. However they express it: Welcome.

Three observations about Thanksgiving and the Jewish community. First, the holiday spoke comfortably to Jewish religious and cultural sensibilities. The God being thanked was in general the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. The narrative of the Pilgrims, who sensed that they were the New Israelites replaying the Exodus (fleeing religious persecution, traveling across a watery wilderness to a Promised Land, entering into a covenant with God – the Mayflower Compact) and creating a nation based on God’s law as recorded in their Old Testament, resonated deeply with Jewish history and ideas.

The ritual of sitting at a holiday family meal at home fit comfortably with Jewish practices of such meals during the High Holidays and, of course, the Passover Seder, whose narrative was so closely connected with the Thanksgiving story. The two key songs associated with Thanksgiving--We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing and Bless this house O Lord we pray-- had none of the Christological content so connected with other widespread celebrations like Christmas and Easter that cause a sense of awkwardness and, at times, exclusion to Jews. (It is perhaps interesting that these two songs do not express gratitude to God; they are, instead, songs of supplication.)

Second, it is the occasion on which more Interfaith services annually take place than any time else save national tragedies (9/11, the Kennedy assassination). It was for many Jews, the first time they set foot in churches of other religions. To have their synagogues part of this communal mix, hosting the service periodically, and above all to see their rabbi on the altar/bima, honored by the community, co-leading the service, affirmed in profound ways the acceptance of Jews in America.

Finally, it captures the best of what Robert Bellah calls America’s civil religion, linking together American history and mythology with an amorphous belief in God, thereby including Jews comfortably within its orbit.

Jews passionately believe in America as the nation that has given it more rights, more freedoms, more opportunities than we have known anywhere else in our history. So, each year, there is much for us to be genuinely and deeply thankful for as a community as well as individuals.