Thanksgiving 2020: The Children of the Children of Israel

As far as I know, there are only two countries in the world that were founded on the idea of hope.

America and Israel.

And what was the nature of this hope?

The hope of achieving religious freedom, and freedom from the tyranny of centralized government.

The Children of Israel, fleeing Egyptian slavery and religious persecution, settled the land of Israel over 3,000 years ago, thereby fulfilling G-d’s eternal covenant with the Jewish people.

The Pilgrims saw themselves as the children of the children of Israel, escaping a British Pharaoh and crossing a liquid desert.

In fact, so complete was the Pilgrim identification with the Jewish narrative that they seriously considered making Hebrew the national language.

Israel and America are religious and national twins.

At Casa Avrech, when we gather for our Thanksgiving meal, we go round the table, each of us listing our reasons for being  thankful.

The kids laugh because I always say the same thing:

“I’m grateful Karen married me.”

Well, I’m still grateful that Karen married me. I’m grateful that our daughters are lovely and generous young women. I’m grateful that our sons-in-law are kind and loving husbands. I’m grateful that our six grandchildren, Maayan Ariel, Lielle Meital, Livia Yarden,  Ariel Chaim, Pinchas Tzvi, and Charlotte Birdie are bright and happy children.

I’m grateful that the memories of our twenty-two years with our late son Ariel zt”l are filled with joy and pride in his piety, modesty and goodness.

I’m grateful that America makes this wonderful life possible.

I’m grateful that Donald Trump was President.  The Supreme Court has been rescued from the judicial activists. President Trump rolled back Obama’s anti-business regulations. The American economy was humming along rather impressively with almost full employment—until the Chinese Communists unleashed the Covid virus on an unsuspecting world.

Keeping a campaign promise—most unusual—President Trump moved the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israel’s eternal capital. President Trump made it official U.S. policy that recognizes the right of Jews to live in Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights. President Trump also cut funding to the IslamoNazis who call themselves Palestinians, a faux nationality dreamed up by the KGB in the mid-sixties.

Most impressive, President Trump engineered the peace treaty between Israel and the Sunni Gulf states. This is, quite simply, monumental. The wretched policies of the past 60 years were sent to the miles-high garbage heap of State Department diplomacy.

President Trump is also the first American President with Orthodox Jews in his closest circle of advisors: his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner. Their children attend Yeshivas.  And this drives secular American Jews out of their minds because their true religion is not Judaism but Socialism/Marxism/Earth Alarmism/Transgenderism/whatever ism is fashionable at the moment.

A Biden administration will, no doubt, try and return to the failed diplomatic scripts of the past. They are, one and all, creatures of lazy intellectual habit, unimaginative members of the Washington blob—the overeducated, overbred, overindulged elites—whose failed policies are sacred dogma.

Once upon a time—before anti-American leftism became all the fashion in tinsel town—Hollywood loved America and the Judeo-Christian values that are her precious inheritance.

Thanksgiving was celebrated by all the studios with still photos featuring their contract stars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We wish all our friends and relatives a happy and meaningful Thanksgiving.

God bless America.