This beautiful autumn morning is a great reminder that very soon, we will come together with loved ones and friends, and with Americans of every faith, culture and ethnic background, to share once again in our annual reaffirmation of our country's spiritual foundations. And, above all the popular trappings of Thanksgiving Day in contemporary culture…the football games, the department store sales…even the Macy’s Parade and the turkey dinners, it is still the Pilgrim Story, and the mythic legend of the First Thanksgiving, that comprise the major symbolism of this beloved holiday. This story, like so much of our history, is largely forgotten – and often misunderstood by too many of us. And yet, it is a magnificent and inspiring epic - of faith and courage, in the face of tremendous odds, and incredible suffering - that most of us are only dimly aware of. For all too many of us, the Pilgrims have become merely a cartoon caricature… a childhood memory of school pageants, or even worse, a commercialized ploy of advertisers dressed up in absurd costumes to push holiday discounts on furniture and cars. Even if we may vaguely recall childhood tales and songs of the difficult journey on the Mayflower and the First Thanksgiving - most Americans today have forgotten the harassment, the violent persecution, the imprisonment, and uprooting that the Pilgrim fathers and mothers endured in England before they finally resolved to flee the homeland they loved for exile in Holland, and later to set out on the dangerous journey across the ocean to settle in the unknown wilderness of the New World. Few are aware of the terrible disease, starvation and death they suffered during that first winter of 1620 in Plymouth, when fully half of their number died. Nor do we fully comprehend the profound meaning of all of their privation and sacrifice - all for a spiritual ideal - that insisted upon the freedom of the individual conscience from all forms of tyranny .

This powerful, inspiring story has always been among the major spiritual influences of my own life, and studying the history of the Pilgrims has long been one of my deepest personal interests. And lest anyone think it somewhat strange that a rabbi be so preoccupied with the Pilgrims of all people, let me explain that there is good reason for this consuming passion on my part. As I have pursued my love of American history through the years, I have naturally been drawn to the religious dimensions of our national heritage, and of course have been particularly fascinated with the deep Jewish influences and connections in America’s epic. My major discovery in my own exploration of the Pilgrim story, has been that all Americans have a personal tie to the history of our Pilgrim forbears, which encompass links to each of our major religious traditions. This morning, as we prepare to celebrate this beloved festival, I’d like to share some observations on the particular Jewish and Episcopalian dimensions to this formative chapter in our national chronicle, as we reflect on our shared roots in this tradition.

Firstly, there is a very important – if all too little known - Jewish dimension of the Pilgrim story that is obviously of special interest to me personally. While the first Jewish settlers in the colonies did not arrive until 1654, more than two decades after the landing of the Mayflower, that influence, while indirect, was nevertheless profound. Actually, there were no Jews in England at all during the Pilgrim period. The ancient medieval Jewish community had been expelled from the British Isles during the turmoil and fanaticism of the Crusades in 1290 - not to be readmitted until 1655, long after the Mayflower sailed. And it can be argued that, in the absence of Jews as objects of bigotry and persecution in 17th century England, the small radical dissenting Pilgrim sect filled the void nicely. Because of their distinctive faith, which was considered heresy by the Church of England and treason by the Crown, they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned and tortured - enduring the same kind of torments that Jews always had been subject to. When, in 1608, they fled to Holland, long a haven for religious dissenters and minorities, the Pilgrim exiles had their first personal contacts with Jews, and even held services in an Amsterdam synagogue before establishing their own church in Leyden. One of their leading ministers, Henry Ainsworth, studied Jewish Biblical interpretation with the prominent Dutch rabbis. Significantly, like many of the more radical English Reformers, the Pilgrims were deeply grounded in the tradition of the Hebrew Bible. As they studied the Scriptures, they came to see themselves as the “People of Israel”, and saw, in their own experience of oppression and marginalization, a reflection of Jewish history. They believed that they, too, were slaves, fleeing Pharaoh - King James I - crossing the Red Sea, toward the Promised Land of the New World. So great an emphasis was placed on the Hebrew Scriptures that the Pilgrim leaders, Elder William Brewster and Governor William Bradford, became devoted students the Hebrew language, so that they could read the Bible in its original tongue. Attempting to reclaim a simple, “pure” form of Christianity as close as possible to the early Church of Jesus’ time, the Pilgrims sought a model in the traditions of Jewish observance and worship. Most of the legal codes of the Plymouth Colony, as well as its early form of democratic government, were directly based on legislation from the Five Books of Moses, as were many of the Pilgrim's religious practices. For example, their meticulous observance of Sunday rest and worship was patterned directly on the Jewish Sabbath. For their places of worship, they coined the phrase “Meeting House”, a direct translation of the Hebrew word for ‘synagogue’, rather than the term ‘church’. The primary preaching role of their ministers, who were actually called ‘teachers’, was consciously modeled after the role of the rabbi, rather than the sacramental function of the Catholic or Anglican priesthoods. And, since every aspect of their worship was based on Biblical warrant, it is clear that even the inspiration for that first Thanksgiving celebration, in the fall of 1621, was the Jewish harvest Festival of Booths - Succot - as ordained in the Torah, in the Book of Leviticus.

Now the Episcopal perspective on the Pilgrim story is, ironically, far more complicated and somewhat ambivalent. To understand this, we must place the Plymouth congregation within the broader context of the English Reformation. Perhaps the major misconception is that the Pilgrims and the Puritans were the same group - which they most definitely were not! There were major differences in temperament and thought between the tiny Pilgrim Colony of Plymouth and the much larger and more powerful Puritan settlement of Massachusetts Bay - which was established ten years later to the north, in Boston. Quite aside from the theological distinctions between the Pilgrim’s separation from the Church of England, as opposed to the Puritan desire to further reform the Anglican Establishment from within, most of the negative images of rigidity, superstition, and intolerance that we associate with the New England Puritans, simply didn't apply to the Plymouth Pilgrims. While perhaps not always the most enlightened or liberal minds by modern standards, and subject to many of the passions and prejudices of their own time and culture, the Pilgrim “Separatists” as they were called, were considered the most radical leftists in 17th century English religious life! A distinctive broadmindedness for their times and circumstances was inspired in the Pilgrims by their remarkable pastor, John Robinson – regarded as a major figure in the emergence of a progressive, humanistic voice in the Protestant Reformation. He instilled in them their vigorous commitment to individual freedom of conscience, and their openness to new ideas and understandings of truth. Moreover, after they settled in America, the Plymouth Colony was an oasis of pluralism in the otherwise rigid intolerance of Old Massachusetts. The original Mayflower passengers and the community they established at Plymouth, included both members of the Pilgrim Church, as well as Anglicans, all of whom had full rights and privileges of citizenship under the terms of the Mayflower Compact – the first democratic constitution of modern times. Plymouth stood in stark contrast to Boston's exclusive theocracy, which required membership in the Puritan churches as a prerequisite for civil liberties. Plymouth never executed dissenters as Boston did, and the Pilgrims were appalled at the infamous Witchcraft Trials in Salem.

Moreover, in one of the most misunderstood aspects of Pilgrim history, the relationship between the original generation of Mayflower settlers and the Native Americans they lived among, was uniquely marked – for the most part – by a mutual respect and trust. The treaties and cooperation they shared were honored until later generations of New England colonists broke and betrayed them. It is so unfortunate that the Mayflower Pilgrims have often been the symbolic focus of otherwise justified protest against the injustices endured by Native Americans. Of all the early American colonists and pioneers, Plymouth had the most honorable record of respect and positive co-existence with the indigenous peoples – indeed symbolized by that shared feast at the First Thanksgiving.

Eventually, a number of major traditions of American Protestantism would emerge from the Pilgrim church at Plymouth. Congregationalists and Unitarian-Universalists, Baptists and Presbyterians - the full spectrum of American Protestantism - all have direct roots in the Pilgrim community. Now there is an ironic twist here, in that the Separatist Pilgrim church itself was a conscious – and often polemical rejection of Anglican polity and liturgy. Nevertheless there were a number of faithful Church of England members among the original Mayflower generation – including leaders of the community no less distinguished than Myles Standish. Interestingly enough, many of the Pilgrim’s direct descendants, including those who most cherished their family heritage, later became members of the Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century! This was particularly true here in Massachusetts, during the period when the dynamic growth under the leadership of Phillips Brooks offered a vigorous alternative to the increasing conservatism and rigidity of Boston Congregationalism on one hand – and the cold rationalism of mid-century Unitarian churches on the other. And, moving along in that continuum, it somehow seems fitting that this very parish, Emmanuel, embodies a synthesis of these two streams – having remained faithful to the Anglican tradition, but also, characteristically, reflecting that stubborn Pilgrim spirit of independence and challenge to authority !

Perhaps most significantly, all of these strands of our two respective faith traditions merged together, at the birth of the United States itself. The American Revolution was the inevitable legacy of the fiercely independent Pilgrim spirit, and was deeply inspired and grounded in the Hebrew Biblical values of freedom and liberty. The Declaration of Independence’s concept of equality was firmly rooted in the Torah’s original teaching that each human being was created in the Divine image. The words of Leviticus 23 became the rallying cry of Independence: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.” And so many of the leading Founders who consciously appealed to these Biblical foundations – George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson chief among them - were born as Anglicans, and later were members of the newly established Protestant Episcopal Church – which drawing on the ideals of the Revolution’s Pilgrim heritage, broke from the Church of England, and affirmed such distinctly American values as the separation of church and state.

And so we see that both Jews and Episcopalians - and Americans of many different religious traditions, can claim historic ties to the Pilgrim legacy. And yet, our shared heritage goes even deeper than these links to our religious traditions. In the end, all of us, of whatever faith, race or ethnic background, share yet another dimension of common kinship with that small courageous band. Contrary to the pretenses of some of their family descendents, the Pilgrims themselves were lowly, humble people, from remote country villages – poor and powerless. They were disenfranchised outsiders in England, despised and persecuted. And they uprooted themselves from their homes for a spiritual ideal…seeking freedom of mind and heart, for themselves and their families. They left tiny, impoverished towns in the English countryside, that were very much like the Irish and Italian hamlets, the Russian and Polish ghettoes and shtetls, the rural African and Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern villages, that most of our families came from….searching for the same new world of liberty and opportunity. This is the Pilgrim legacy that all of us can lay claim to! The hard and dangerous journey that led to Plymouth Rock, in a very real sense began with that earlier migration from Egyptian slavery toward Mount Sinai… and led onward toward Ellis Island, and every other landing place that later generations of pilgrims arrived at on these shores…

The journey continues… for each of us, in our own lives - and for all the people of our country. The Pilgrims were the first to sense that America had a unique destiny in human history… as Governor Bradford wrote, “just as one small candle may light a thousand others, and loose none of it’s own light, so too will we - but few in number - become a beacon for all people !” Today, as we approach Thanksgiving Day, 2009, we stand at a critical crossroad in our nation’s life. The challenges of freedom and justice, our yearning for security and peace, are dreams still unrealized, even after the four centuries since the Mayflower found its way to a safe harbor. We too, may well have some dangerous seas and painful trials ahead of us, before we can gather with all our neighbors of the human family in a global celebration of thanksgiving. But the example of our Pilgrim roots can continue to inspire and guide us, as we reaffirm the noblest ideals they stood for at their best – freedom of conscience…independence of spirit… and the continuing quest for justice and peace. Amen